This little thread is envisioned as a place where members of the PEP group can post a blutrb about themselves and their equipment
Tom
I am a retired software engineer now living in the High Desert of central Oregon. Have been fascinated by astronomy since I was a kid and after spending my life in Portland (OR) and greater Boston I now make my home is a location sufficiently free of clouds and lights (though hardly clear of either) to make observational astronomy practical. I am the present head of the PEP group.
In my career I worked on communication networks, parallel processing computers, video games, and NASA satellite projects. I spent almost ten years at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics on the Chandra mission.
So here I am at my “observatory” - a C9.25 with an unusual mount. For PEP, equatorial operation is not needed (we don’t care about field rotation). But the fork-mounted SCTs don’t allow enough space below the optical tube for the photometer to swing up to more than about 65 degrees altitude. The mount pictured is actually for a C11. Between the fork tines and the 9.25 optical tube there is just enough room for a pair of Losmandy rails. Using the rails I was able to “jack up” the optical tube far enough to let the SSP swing through the fork. Meanwhile, the Celestron electronics have been ripped out and the mount is now operated with a controller from Sidereal Technology.
Tom Calderwood (CTOA)
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Hello.
I am Ari M Siqueira.
I am a retired scientist and university professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology living in southeastern Brazil. I was first attracted to astronomy in 1985-1986, at a sky party at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, USA, in preparation for the observation of Halley’s Comet. However, I only started reading about and practising amateur astronomy after retiring in 2016, moving from DNA and protein molecules to stars and galaxies, from micrometers to light years.
During the past 2 years, I have reported about 50,000 B-V-Rc-Ic variable star photometries, mostly color-transformed, to the AAVSO database, using various AAVSOnet equipment in the USA and Australia. AAVSO Observer Code: SAMA. I have taken 10 AAVSO CHOICE courses since April 2023.
My DIY remote observatory is 7 km from my apartment, away from the city lights (19°57’ S 44°15’ W, 780 m). Concerning PEP, my gear consists of an 8-inch Meade SCT f/10 (and f/6.3) on a Sky-Watcher HEQ5 Pro. To control the mount, I have experimented with N.I.N.A. under Windows 11, but am now trying INDI-KStar/Ekos on an 8 GB Raspberry Pi 5. I’m still unsure whether Astroberry, Raspberry Pi OS, or StellarMate X will suit me best for running INDI-KStar/Ekos, controlling my mount, guiding & framing it, and locking in the targets.
My efforts in PEP with a first-generation SSP-3 lent by Tom have been hampered by a long succession of cloudy nights or low-transparency atmosphere due to high humidity. In my area, 200 days of sunshine per year were not uncommon about a decade ago, but in the last 12 months, I have had at most 10 nights of clear skies among hundreds of nights with fog, clouds, or rain. Not enough yet to gain expertise in PEP. I will keep trying and praying for clear sky evenings as the Winter and the less wet season in the Southern Hemisphere approach, hoping that this time we will not have 2 months of smoke pollution from hundreds of thousands of wild and agricultural fires covering the sky in my region.
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I come from the world of art. My schooling is music (classical) and I was for most of 40 years the General Manager of KUCO-FM, the Classical music station of Oklahoma City owned and operated by the University of Central Oklahoma.
I’ve been an amateur astronomer most of my life but really began to pursue it more seriously after my children left the nest. Our local club is the Oklahoma City Astronomy Club and we put on the Okie-Tex Star Party each fall near Black Mesa in the far northwestern Oklahoma Panhandle. I was club treasurer for 6 years and president for 5 years.
An AAVSO member since high school, I was interested in science but never confident of my visual observations. Before Optec left the photometer business I bought an SSP-3 and began using it. After neglecting it for awhile, Tom Calderwood contacted me and rekindled my interest. Like Tom, I use a Celestron 9.25 but on an IOptron CEM 60 mount. My yard is limited by houses and trees so observations are also limited unless done from our club’s dark sky site or the OTSP.
I am most excited about the precision of PEP observations and the opportunity to contribute good data to the archive.
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I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and attended college and graduate school in Iowa (Cornell College, Mt. Vernon, and Iowa State U., Ames). I have worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico for nearly 40 years. My main work is in national security, but my management has always been generous to support my involvement in astrophysics, attending conferences, and and sponsoring many students and postdocs.
My first mentors Art Cox (LANL) and Lee Anne Willson (Iowa State U.) got me interested in variable stars, and I held on to this interest, modeling many types of variables (the Sun, delta Scuti, gamma Dor, RR Lyrae, Cepheids, LBVs, Miras, and now alpha Cygni variables). I learned to do some PEP observing though with the Delta Scuti Network and the Whole Earth Telescope in the early to mid 1990s using a 36" telescope and the 82" telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas. After a few years of interacting with the AAVSO PEP team, I am convinced that PEP photometry is the only way to get the 1) long time series (years), 2) high-enough cadence (1 data pt./night), 3) high enough precision (0.01 mag?) photometry for 4) bright (< 7 mag) alpha Cyg (aperiodic or quasi-periodic) variables to answer many questions about these stars, such as their evolutionary state and reasons why they vary in brightness. There are no other observing campaigns on the ground or in space that can satisfy these requirements. These stars will become supernovae, and understanding SN progenitors is of high interest. I am sure that your observations would make a huge impact.
I should also tell you about my music interests! I play clarinet and alto and tenor saxophone in several groups: the Los Alamos Community Winds, LA Symphony Orchestra, Concordia Santa Fe, SaxAtomix, and LA Big Band.
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Names!
Folks: your login identifier by itself does not necessarily tell us who you are. Please include your name in your intro (and a picture if you can).
Tom
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