Dale E. Mais ("What can the Modern Day Amateur do in Spectroscopy" Main Tent, Friday 11:00 a.m.; "Mira Variable Stars: Spectroscopic and Photometric Monitoring of this broad class of Long Term Variable and Highly Evolved Stars" Small Tent, Saturday 2:30 p.m.) is an endocrinology researcher working for a Bio-Tech company in the San Diego area. While his biology and chemistry degrees serve him well in his professional life, it is his chemistry background, which he is enjoying as applied to spectroscopy. He has an observatory, located twelve miles from Mount Palomar, equipped with a Celestron 14, a 5.1-inch AstroPhysics and several CCD cameras. His primary interest is spectroscopy and its application toward understanding the composition and other physical parameters of astronomical objects.
The Self-Guided Spectrometer (SGS) by SBIG appeared on the market about a year and a half ago aimed at a sub-group of amateurs. The SGS allows spectra to be obtained with only modest aperture instruments of stars down to 10-12 magnitude. The resolution and sensitivity of the instrument is such that Dale has been able to identify the unstable element technetium in certain S and C type stars.
On Friday, Dale will go into detail on the use of the SGS, its calibration and some of the kinds of measurements that can be made with an amateur sized telescope equipped with this "off the shelf" instrument. More details can be found on his website: http://members.cts.com/cafe/m/mais/
Mira variable stars are a broad class of stars, which encompass spectroscopic classes of type M, S and C. These stars are closely related in terms of their long-term variability. It is suspected that these type stars, in particular, the M type Mira's can flare up over periods of hours to days by several tenths of a magnitude up to 1 magnitude. The spectroscopic changes, which occur during these flare episodes, remain relatively unexplored. This project was initiated in order to monitor a group of program stars in the hopes of "catching" some of these stars during one of these flare-ups and thus to be able to conduct spectral analysis of the flare-ups in real time and compare these spectra to the non-flare spectra.
In his second presentation on Friday, Dale will describe the background of these types of stars, in particular, their evolutionary history, their spectroscopic differences. In addition, the strategies and initiation of this project will be described.