Welcome!

My astronomical homepage is especially dedicated to show my results from nearly 10 years of CCD observations of variable stars and asteroids since 1994. I am still very enthusiastic about the CCD technology which makes astrometry and photometry in professional quality available to many amateur astronomers.

With the impact of CCD technology my early interest in variable stars and their observations was revitalized. When I started with astronomical observations beeing 13 years old with a small 60-mm refractor it was diffcult to obtain a precision of 0.1 magnitude in visual estimations of the brightness of a star. Today a photometric precision even below 0.01 mag is possible and I am fascinated by the possiblity to obtain such a quality in the results.
Moreover it is convenient to use CCD cameras together with modern GoTo telescopes as they are quite easy to automate. In the 80's I spent several nights with professional photometer with PMT which was very time consuming and in consequence I was awfully tired the following morning. Now my equipment is fully automized and am able to gather data during the whole night even while I am asleep . With a tool like a CCD camera photometry and astrometry really becomes fun.
Looking back to 10 years of CCD astronomy I see much progress in computer hardware and computer software. Meanwhile there is a lot of very professional software for photometry, astrometry and telescope automation available to the amateur astronomer. Some of it is even freeware! You have not to be an expert to obtain professional photometric or astrometric results. Most of the software is as easy to handle as your texteditor. Please feel free to have a look to my observatory: observatory, equipment and software.

In February 2004 I started to include my observation results in this new online database. As there are some 250 stars to be entered with sometimes several observations it will certainly take some months until it will be complete. Presently there is already a folder and a page for almost all of these stars but many of those pages are still under construction. I invite you to send a mail if you are interested in a special star in case the results are not yet online or to check again after some time.

Dieter Husar - Hamburg, March 7th 2004

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Himmelsmoor Private Observatory
MPC observatory code: 637
contact:
Dr. Dieter Husar
Hamburg / Germany
husar.d (at) gmx (dot) de
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