Poznań Spectroscopy Project |
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Spectra
yield great wealth of information on stellar motions, structure and
evolution of stars. Variable stars are interesting per se but also
because they constitute cosmic milestones for measurement of cosmic
distances. For many nearby stars accurate distances were/will be
obtained by trigonometric method from Hipparchos and GAIA satellites.
To measure larger distances observations of many types of variable
stars can be used. Photometric and spectroscopic studies of such
objects allow determination of their physical parameters, one of them
being the surface brightness. By comparing it to the measured flux one
can easily derive the distance to the star. One
of the important parts of the variable star method is its calibration
on nearby stars, for which accurate distances have been obtained with
the purely geometrical method. However, for large telescopes nearby
stars are often too bright and instrument time is too precious to
observe them. At the same time the available data on these bright stars
are often sparse or of low quality. Here comes a project like ours handy: we already build a modern and efficient echelle spectrograph and will use it with a small but fully automatic telescope for high quality spectroscopic observations of nearby variable stars with accurate trigonometric distances. The telescope is being constructed by our team right now. At the beginning it will be placed at Borowiec Observatory in Poland with an option to transport it to a better site in the future. The spectrograph and telescope designs are by J. Baudrand and R. Baranowski, respectively. Our teamOur group at the moment consists of
Tomasz Kwiatkowski (leader), Roman Baranowski (designer & engineer),
Alex
Schwarzenberg-Czerny (science program), Przemyslaw Bartczak (control software) and Wojciech Dimitrov (data reduction). Echelle spectrographBinary telescopeScientific program
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| Last updated 2005-08-14 by Tomasz Kwiatkowski |