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Register a new userThe BeSS database: a fruitful professional-amateur collaboration
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Authors
C. Neiner
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BeSS is a database containing a catalogue of Be stars and their spectra, set up more than 10 years ago as a collaboration between professional and amateur astronomers. It currently contains over 177000 spectra of 2340 stars, provided by ~150 different observers. Its continuous success has already led to the use of BeSS data in more than 70 scientific papers.
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Since the CCD technique became financially reachable for amateur astronomers, they can cover topics of professional science. Mainly in the time-domain astronomy, such as variable star research, their help is invaluable. We focus on cooperation between amateur and professional astronomers in the Czech Republic, give some examples of successful projects and propose new programs that can benefit from such cooperation and bring high-quality results.
Amateur contributions to professional publications have increased exponentially over the last decades in the field of Planetary Astronomy. Here we review the different domains of the field in which collaborations between professional and amateur astronomers are effective and regularly lead to scientific publications. We discuss the instruments, detectors, softwares and methodologies typically used by amateur astronomers to collect the scientific data in the different domains of interest. Amateur contributions to the monitoring of planets and interplanetary matter, characterization of asteroids and comets, as well as the determination of the physical properties of Kuiper Belt Objects and exoplanets are discussed.
The observation of gaseous giant planets is of high scientific interest. Although they have been the targets of several spacecraft missions, there still remains a need for continuous ground-based observations. As their atmospheres present fast dynamic environments on various time scales, the availability of time at professional telescopes is neither uniform nor of sufficient duration to assess temporal changes. However, numerous amateurs with small telescopes (of 15-40 cm) and modern hardware and software equipment can monitor these changes daily (within the 360-900nm range). Amateurs are able to trace the structure and the evolution of atmospheric features, such as major planetary-scale disturbances, vortices, and storms. Their observations provide a continuous record and it is not uncommon to trigger professional observations in cases of important events, such as sudden onset of global changes, storms and celestial impacts. For example, the continuous amateur monitoring has led to the discovery of fireballs in Jupiters atmosphere, providing information not only on Jupiters gravitational influence but also on the properties and populations of the impactors. Photometric monitoring of stellar occultations by the planets can reveal spatial/temporal variability in their atmospheric structure. Therefore, co-ordination and communication between professionals and amateurs is important. We present examples of such collaborations that: (i) engage systematic multi-wavelength observations and databases, (ii) examine the variability of cloud features over timescales from days to decades, (iii) provide, by ground-based professional and amateur observations, the necessary spatial and temporal resolution of features that will be studied by the interplanetary mission Juno, (iv) investigate video observations of Jupiter to identify impacts of small objects, (v) carry out stellar-occultation campaigns.
We present a database of well determined orbital parameters of exoplanets. This database comprises spectroscopic orbital elements measured for 427 planets orbiting 363 stars from radial velocity and transit measurements as reported in the literature. We have also compiled fundamental transit parameters, stellar parameters, and the method used for the planets discovery. This Exoplanet Orbit Database includes all planets with robust, well measured orbital parameters reported in peer-reviewed articles. The database is available in a searchable, filterable, and sortable form on the Web at http://exoplanets.org through the Exoplanets Data Explorer Table, and the data can be plotted and explored through the Exoplanets Data Explorer Plotter. We use the Data Explorer to generate publication-ready plots giving three examples of the signatures of exoplanet migration and dynamical evolution: We illustrate the character of the apparent correlation between mass and period in exoplanet orbits, the selection different biases between radial velocity and transit surveys, and that the multiplanet systems show a distinct semi-major axis distribution from apparently singleton systems.
We present a new database of circumstellar OH masers at 1612, 1665, and 1667 MHz in the Milky Way galaxy. The database (version 2.4) contains 13655 observations and 2341 different stars detected in at least one transition. Detections at 1612,MHz are considered to be complete until the end of 2014 as long as they were published in refereed papers. Detections of the main lines (1665 and 1667 MHz) and non-detections in all transitions are included only if published after 1983. The database contains flux densities and velocities of the two strongest maser peaks, the expansion velocity of the shell, and the radial velocity of the star. Links are provided for about 100 stars ($<$5% of all stars with OH masers) to interferometric observations and monitoring programs of the maser emission published since their beginnings in the 1970s. Access to the database is possible over the Web (www.hs.uni-hamburg.de/maserdb), allowing cone searches for individual sources and lists of sources. A general search is possible in selected regions of the sky and by defining ranges of flux densities and/or velocities. Alternative ways to access the data are via the German Virtual Observatory and the VizieR library of astronomical catalogs.
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