Barnard's Star - imaged today (and see you next year)

[starfinder]

I was reading about Barnard's Star this week. It is in the constellation Ophiuchus (next to Scorpius) and was discovered by the American astronomer EE Barnard in 1916.

According to the books, it has the largest known proper motion of any star relative to the Sun, and moves about 10.3 arcseconds per year relative to our view of the background stars. To give some perspective of what 10.3 arcseconds is, Jupiter as seen from Earth has an apparent diameter of around 30 arcseconds. The 10.3 seconds of arc it travels annually amounts to a quarter of a degree in a human lifetime, roughly half the angular diameter of the full Moon.

So as stars go, or rather don't, Barnard's Star moves quite fast from our perspective. No wonder it is also known as "Barnard's Runaway Star".

In absolute terms, the radial velocity of Barnard's Star towards the Sun has been measured at around 142.7 km/s.

It is a low-mass red dwarf star, of spectral type M4 (i.e. the last letter in OBAFGKM). It has an apparent magnitude of 9.5.

Barnard's Star is only 5.98 light years from the Sun. It's the 4th nearest known star, after the three stars of the Alpha Centauri system (one of which is Proxima Centauri which is the nearest at 4.24 light yrs away).

More info about it here:
http://www.nightskyinfo.com/archive/barnard_star/
http://spider.seds.org/spider/Misc/barnard.html


I decided to photograph Barnard's Star today and then take another photo of it in about 6 months' time, 1 year's time, etc, to see if I could detect and perhaps even measure its motion. This of course has been done by many others countless times in the past. But why not also do so myself for the fun of it? It is also to show that some basic science can be done with amateur astronomy equipment from urban Singapore.

So, for starters, here is a photo of Barnard's Star taken this evening, with annotations of information on the surrounding stars taken from The Sky6 software (which actually has 2 stars labelled as Barnard's Star due to an error in using different catalogues - due no doubt to its proper motion).

For information, the two bright stars nearest Barnard's Star in the photo are 98 arcseconds part, as annotated. Below the main photo is the same photo further cropped (but at 100% zoom, i.e. no zoom) and without the annotations.

And see you Barnard's Star next year!

[Gary]

Nice project! Wishing you all the best! Thanks for the info and links too.

[jimmyleong]

It certainly looks bright. Well done...

[rcj]

looking forward to the result half a year later, Gavin! Treat's on me if there's motion!

[Airconvent]

Another amazing feat from Mr Bino. Thanks for sharing, Gavin....

[starfinder]

Thanks all for the comments!

Now I hope Mr Barnard's star does not let me down!


BTW, I discovered that very detailed finder star charts are downloadable from the following link:
http://www.nofs.navy.mil/nomad/
Click on "Access to the NOMAD".

It's the US Naval Observatory Merged Astrometric Dataset (NOMAD), which is a merged catalog containing data on over 1 billion stars.
It takes some time to figure out how to generate the charts, which also don't look like those we're used to in star atlases, but it does cover a lot of stars.


Addition:
I've just found another free on-line star charts resource. This one is more user friendly and the charts look more conventional:
http://www.aavso.org/vsp

It is the Variable Star Plotter of the AAVSO.

[starfinder]

Exactly one (1) year later.... I have today imaged Barnard's Star again. I've been waiting for this for a whole year!

Below is a GIF animation sequence which I've compiled from two images taken of Barnard's star exactly 1 year apart, namely on 20 July 2011 and on 20 July 2012.

I shall add further details in a subsequent post. In the meantime, enjoy the animation. Looks like I've got a treat from Remus coming soon!

Click on the following link if the picture below does not show as an animated sequence: http://i.picoodle.com/403j6ue3

The GIF animation at the above link works on a PC, but I'm not sure if it will run properly on mobile devices.

[Jeremy]

That's a really interesting result, Gavin. Well done!

Go well!
Jeremy

[weixing]

Hi,
Well done!

Barnard's Star will get a speeding ticket for this... ha ha ha

Have a nice day.

[Gary]

Good job Gavin! Thanks for the update and sharing.