Month: October 2016

Slowly, but surely the bRING installation is coming together.

“bRING”, which is a dedicated camera system for monitoring beta Pic and it’s surrounding circumstellar material;  consists of two telephoto lenses with support computers, covering the entire path of beta Pic across the Southern hemisphere.

The bRING’s design is based on the heritage gained in Leiden from the MASCARA all-sky surveys.

To get longitudinal coverage, two separate bRING cameras are being built. Currently one is built by Leiden Observatory for South Africa. The expected photometric precision is 0.5% with 5 minutes of data.

Dates: Expected to be on-sky from November 2016 to December 2017 in Sutherland, South Africa, and one in Australia.

Today, we installed the magnets for ensuring the enclosure can control remotely, before any Photometric observations are made of Beta Pic.

— Stay tuned for more updates !!

Day 2 of my visit at Leiden University in the Netherlands and I am already learning lots about the novel all-sky camera system called bRINGS.

The bRINGS all-sky instrument is dedicated for Photometric monitoring of the host star Beta Pictoris and its circumstellar material in the close environment.

Today, I started to installed several cooling fans that will be used to regulated the temperature inside the enclosure of the all-sky camera system.

With so much still to do, the hope is to finish the bRING all-sky camera system in the next few weeks to start baseline photometry of the Beta Pictoris.

–So stay tuned for more updates…