News

BeSS is a professional/amateur program that started in 2007. Today it has more than 12,000 spectra for more than 2000 Be stars. BeSS data has been used by more than 53 scientific publications.
During the week of October 23 - 27, 2017, we celebrated the tenth birthday of the BeSS program. Fourteen people - professionals and amateurs - were in attendance from the USA, Portugal, Germany, Holland, Belgium and France. The week started with a general discussion of Be phenomenon and the BeSS (...)

The Be-binary star ζ Tau shows periodic behaviour in the radial velocity of the HeI 6678 absorption line. There is a serious request from professional astronomers to amateurs to contribute their observations to the monitoring of this parameter. Fortunately it´s fairly easy, even with relative small instruments, to take part in this kind of monitoring project. One of the most interesting publications regarding radial velocity in zeta Tau is "Long term and orbital changes of zeta Tauri", by (...)

Halpha V/R time behaviour in pi Aqr
The V/R measurements in Hα spectra of the binary star π Aqr since October 2004 until today, makes possible an analysis of a possible periodic behavior. Fig. 1 shows the V/R time behaviour in seven visibility phases, fig. 2 shows in power spectrum a dominant frequency with a period of 83.3 d, and fig. 3 shows the phase diagram with the ephemerides:
JD 2453 345,7 + 83,9 * T
This period lies suspiciously near the orbital binary period of 84.1 d (see: The (...)

On Friday february 20th, 2011, we had a meeting in Meudon, between Amateurs (V. Desnoux, M. Bonnement, P. Chambraud, O. Thizy, F. Cochard) and Professionals (C. Neiner, M. Floquet, E. Alecian, B. De Batz, B. Leroy).
The goal was to discuss the best way to analyse available BeSS data.
We confirmed that best contibution from amateurs is to make a descriptive analysis, and we must specially focus on the profiles typology.
Each spectrum profile can be classified in a profile family, by (...)