Double Duplicity and a Flare Star: Science in ASSA 2025

Sun 5th
14:00-14:30

Double Duplicity and a Flare Star: Science in ASSA 2025

Andrew Wendelborn; David Benn; Paul Montague; Paul Martinaitis; Blair Lade and others TBD

ASSA (Astronomical Society of South Australia)

We will give an overview of current science activities in ASSA, particularly in occultations, variable stars and radio astronomy.

From our newly revived Occultations Group, we will discuss the observational techniques that we use in our group, and in particular we will analyse two double star discoveries, one with two distinct shadows of an asteroid, the other with six separate occultation observations of a tight double.

On the variable star observing (VSO) front, the rise of easily accessibly tooling enabled Jake Lancaster to detect, in his own archived dataset, a flare star that rapidly brightened by several magnitudes and then diminished over a few hours. The Bob Nelson Eclipsing Binary O-C database, now managed by Robert Jenkins in South Australia, continues to grow. In 2025, 6710 new observations were added to the database on 1215 star systems; 200 of which are systems that had no previous data. Andrew Murphy and David Benn have been using Seestar for VSO and Andrew has practical insights to share. David Benn continues to enhance the multi-platform VStar tool.

I took up astronomy as a retirement vocation about four years ago. I'm mostly interested in visual astronomy, especially navigating with maps of the heavens, as I've been fascinated by maps since childhood. But the lure of citizen science has proved irresistible, and I am increasingly involved with occultations and other aspects of astronomy.