I've always wanted to practice astronomy toward scientific goals - pretty pictures are over done by my peers and achievable mostly with obscenely expensive equipment. I strive to build a stable and accurate telescope system to capture images from which meaningful data can be extracted - I'm not there yet, and a new single arm massive mount is completed to support a 14" Celestron optical tube assembly and the 8 inch newtonian; see here. The Starizona Hyperstar will allow imaging at F/2, an ultrafast system indeed.
Above is a light curve of the cataclismic variable IY Ursa Majoris. I had written my own code to determine the magnitudes but I couldn't compete with Maxim DL. After removing dark frames and flat fielding the 100 images with my s/w, the relative magnitude were extracted and plotted. The results are acceptable, but there is room for improvement; use a guide star to track, UBV filters, lower CCD temperature (had frosting problems). Images are from an Audine KAF0400E, binning 2x2, 120 seconds exposure at 0 degree centigrade. The raw and reference were shifted up to better see the result.
I wrote a Perl script to collect data daily from all Canadian ClearSkyChart locations from the excellent service provided by Attilla Danko - 715 locations in all. When a good bucket full of the predictions is collected, a second Perl script reduces only the night collections to compile the best possible sites for Astronomy in Canada as I plan on moving to such a location. The collection began in August 2011, and these link are examples of the reduced data for monthly and yearly averages [yearly file includes light pollution map links] . Correlating the predicted data with satellite derived dark sky studies will yield the favoured sites, after which short trips will evaluate them. It is by no means an exhaustive study as for one, the ClearSkyChart locations are where other astronomy buffs have used telescopes from, which is most often near human settlements. The transparency and seeing were averaged only when the cloud cover was 10% or less, so as not to skew the average and provide a more accurate appraisal of the quality of clear skies. "Clear Sky Hours" ignore the phase of the moon for obvious reasons. Already 6 months of data is showing promise. The Bortle scale is shown in the yearly file - they were derived from the pixel *colour* from the North American pollution map from the "Cinzano et al" effort [not the snow corrected maps done later by Lorentz, which should be used instead] - when the Bortle scale is shown as *unknown*, it is due to the station's latitude/longitude was off the light pollution image, or resolved to a colour off from the expect scale due to geopolitical or water boundaries lines in the image. I am planning on expanding my collections for all of North America, so in the future statistics on all stations on the continent will be available - stay tuned. Much gratitude to Attila for his support.
