Many of you will have heard about the predicted, soon-to-happen nova erruption event for the star T CrB.
As a so called recurring nova, T CrB is supposed to brighten from ca mag 10 up to ca mag 2 any moment between "now" and (say) a year or so. This event happens about once every 80-or-so years, so if you miss the next one, chances are you missed your only shot at it.
Scientifically this is very interesting as it could lead to an observation of a nova in all kinds of wavelengths right at the point of erruption. The sooner it is discovered and the news is shared after the erruption, the better.
Here is the idea: While your Seestar takes pictures of the T CrB field with its standard 10s exposure cadence, a script on a computer in your home network (say, a Raspberry Pi, or any other Linux computer with a modern Linux distribution) would simultaneously load images on-the-fly , stack groups of a few of them (say 4 x 10s) and then do some quick analysis to estimate the brightness of T CrB. When a configurable threshold of brightness is crossed, an alarm is triggered to notify you, so you can inspect the images yourself and take action (e.g. notify the professional astronomers and get famous for being the first to have done so :-), or whatever).
I now have a solution like this in beta test running at my home. Latest by early April I will have something published on github that is mature enough to share with beta testers, so I'm looking for people who are willing to help test this, and of course eventually use this to help catch T CrB in the act of errupting.
Please reply to this thread if you are interested in testing/eventually using this solution.
What you will need:
- a Seestar. I'm testing this currently with my S50, but would need others to test this with S30s.
- the Seestar has to be used in "Station Mode" connecting to the same WiFi network as the Raspberry Pi where the analysis software will be running.
- your Seestar should be able to observe T CrB from your observation site
- a Raspberry Pi computer running Raspberry Pi OS "Bookworm", or comparable other Linux computer
- some understanding of Linux , bash shell scripting (and optionally Python) are welcome. You must be able to install new software on your Raspi.
Any volunteers? Questions? Ideas?
