Greetings from Brazil !

[Tasso Napoleao]

Dear All,

Greetings from Brazil ! My name is Tasso Napoleão and I am happy to introduce a newly formed Brazilian amateur spectroscopy team. This group is coordinated by myself and by Rogerio Marcon, one of the most skillful and respected ATM / astrophotographers in our country (Please take a look at Rogerio´s website at http://www.astroimagem.com/); the group involves also about one dozen of my former students from the astronomy open courses given by the São Paulo Astronomy Club in partnership with the Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences of the University of São Paulo (IAG/USP). I forecast that several of them will also be joining ARAS in the near future.

As to myself, I am a retired chemical engineer living in São Paulo, and a long-time amateur astronomer with theoretical background from IAG/USP. Over the past decades, I have worked mainly with CCD photometry of variable stars (particularly those of the SX Phe subclass) and with automated supernovae search, being one of the four members of the BRASS team, which discovered fifteen SNe between 2004 and 2009. Both programs were carried out with a 12-in SCT and a SBIG ST-7XME camera.

Back in 2003, Marcon and myself had already made some inroads in spectroscopy, having successfully monitored some [NII] and HeI lines during that year´s Eta Carinae spectroscopic event. By late 2012, we decided to start a new program for monitoring spectroscopically a group of Southern Be stars, and since then we have been regularly following about twenty of those. After one year of a self-imposed "comissioning period", during which we had to make some adjustments in our instrumental setup, reduction and acquisition procedures and to learn from our own mistakes, we feel it is already time to start communicating with ARAS and BeSS. We are very happy to be in this forum, to learn from the several experienced observers in this group and hopefully to contribute also with our own observations.

Currently our program uses a spectrograph designed and built by Marcon (resolution about 11000 in H-Alfa, grating 2400 l/mm), coupled with a 315-mm Newtonian and an Audine camera (KAF-1602), both of which were also built by Rogerio. Image acquisition and pre-treatment are currently performed by him at Campinas (far from the heavily-polluted São Paulo skies); the fits images are then forwarded to the São Paulo team for all reduction procedures. Up to now, we have been basically using Valérie´s excellent VSpec software; for 2014, we plan to use also ISIS and IRAF.

We will start in this forum by posting spectra of V1369 Cen (Nova Cen 2013), as we believe they might be useful since this star is out of reach for most of you living in the Northern Hemisphere. Over the next few weeks we will be starting also to send data to BeSS and will post some comments on the most interesting stars of our program. Please understand we still are "new in this business" - so we look forward to listen to comments and recommendations from all of you, particularly on how we could improve our work and better contribute to this forum. Thanks in advance !

Best regards to all,

Tasso Napoleão.

[Christian Buil]

Welcome here Tasso.
Your spectra have already qasi professional quality!
Great news if you publish also into BeSS database.

Christian B

[Tasso Napoleao]

Many thanks for your kind answer, Christian !
Yes, we plan to start sending our spectra to the BeSS database next week.

Amicalement,
Tasso.