Website updates and new Virtual Observatory exercise

[John Murrell]

Hi everyone,

 

I have updated a few of the pages on my website at www.JohnMurrell.org.uk  . In particular I have found two new Virtual Observatory exercises that illustrate the use of TopCat (Tool for Operations on Catalogues). The first example involves analysing the a data set of the stars in M45 (The Pleiades) to show the proper motions of the stars both as a sky image with velocity vectors and as an X-Y plot.  It is quite instructive to see how many stars are members of the Pleiades and how many are not.

 

As a supplementary operation it is worth sending the table of moving stars to Aladin or Cartes du Ciel to  see which stars are members and which are not. An additional thing that could be done that I have not tried is to plot a colour magnitude diagram for the two groups of stars and see if they are different.

 

I have also done some tidying Up of the Noctilucent Cloud pages – still hoping to see some this year – to date nothing L

 

Regards

 

John Murrell