On the night of Jun 20/21, 2018, from about 10:40 PM until dawn, through partially cloudy skies, I acquired a set of observations of the likely black-hole system MAXIJ1820+070, (also known as ASASSN-18ey ). High school student Sean Doran and RIT physics major Brent Neves helped out for several hours each -- thanks!
No changes to the mount tonight, but some good measurements of the remaining drift. It's smaller than it was!
The main setup was:
Notes from the night:
This optical and X-ray and radio transient is likely a black hole accreting material at a higher-than-usual rate. It has been the subject of many observers over the past few months -- see the trail of telegrams that include
The object is located at
RA = 18:20:21.9 Dec = +07:11:07.3
A chart of the field is shown below. The size of the chart is about 22 by 18 arcminutes.
I've marked the location of several comparison stars, which also appear in light curves below. Stars C, D, and E are mentioned by the Tomoe Gozen team in ATel 11426, but all three are rather red, with (B-V) ranging from 1.14 to 1.37. Star B is one of the bluest nearby bright stars, with (B-V) = 0.52.
star UCAC4 B V ---------------------------------------------------- B 486-079513 12.975 12.454 C 486-079608 13.968 12.830 D 486-079523 14.637 13.272 E 487-077858 14.637 13.272 ----------------------------------------------------
The dark current was pretty ordinary.
The sky value shows several episodes of clouds, creating big gaps in the dataset.
Here's a record of the telescope's drift. I made no adjustments to the mount.
The number of objects detected -- I required 50 objects for an image to be included in the ensemble.
I used an aperture with radius 5.0 pixels. I adjusted the focus position from 0.899 -> 0.919 as the temperature dropped, and that did improve the PSF a bit. A second adjustment to 0.941 was too far, so I moved it back to 0.919 after a short time.
I discarded images which had obvious trailed stellar images, (228 of the 738 raw images), and also removed all images with an image adjustment (zero-point) value more than 0.5 mag above the baseline (removing another 75 images).
Using aperture photometry with a radius of 5 pixels (binned 2x2, each pixel is 1.34 arcsec, so a radius of 6.7 arcsec), I measured the instrumental magnitudes of a number of reference stars and the target. Following the procedures outlined by Kent Honeycutt's article on inhomogeneous ensemble photometry, I used all stars available in each image to define a reference frame, and measured each star against this frame.
Sigma-vs-mag plots show that the floor was about 0.007 mag overall; I had to mark star "A" as variable in the ensemble, since it showed _slight_ signs of saturation. The outlier around instrumental magnitude 2.7 is MAXI J1820+070.
Here are light curves of the variable and the field stars.
I used the UCAC value for the V-band magnitude of star "B" = UCAC4 486-079513 to shift the ensemble magnitudes to the standard V-band scale -- but remember that these are UNFILTERED measurements.
Here's a closeup on the variable. I'll connect the dots to make its behavior a bit easier to see.
You can download my measurements below. A copy of the header of the file is shown to explain the format.
# Measurements of MAXIJ1820+070 made at RIT Obs, UT 2018 Jun 21, # in mediocre conditions, # by Michael Richmond, Sean Doran, and Brent Neves, # using Meade 12-inch LX200 and ATIK 11000. # Exposures 25 seconds long, no filter. # Tabulated times are midexposure (FITS header time - half exposure length) # and accurate only to +/- 1 second (??). # 'mag' is a differential magnitude based on ensemble photometry # using a circular aperture of radius 5 pix = 6.6 arcseconds. # which has been shifted so UCAC4 486-079513 has mag=12.454 # which is its V-band magnitude according to UCAC4. # # UT_day JD HJD mag uncert Jun21.11186 2458290.61186 2458290.61688 13.402 0.013 Jun21.11253 2458290.61253 2458290.61755 13.445 0.016 Jun21.11286 2458290.61286 2458290.61788 13.421 0.014
Last modified 6/21/2018 by MWR.