Bess Monthly reports

The database BeSS records amateur and professional spectra of Be Stars to aim at supporting outburst statistics analusis over a long period of time.

The database BeSS is accessible here http://basebe.obspm.fr/basebe/

Every month, an activity reports is published. From all stars observed in H-alpha during the month, visible evolutions are noted and a time serie showing this evolution compraed to previous spectra is presented.

Three categories are highlighted:

  • Emission Event
  • Moderate Event (including V/R, assymetric evolutions...)
  • Decreasing Emission

The BeSS monthly activity report is published since june 2012.

Click on the link below to see the pdf file of each monh

> Reports 2024
January July
February August
March September
April October
May November
June December

Click on the link below to download a zip file containing all the pdf reports of the corresponding year

> Archive by year

2012 - from june 2016 2020
2013 2017 2021
2014 2018 2022
2015 2019 2023

BeSS report Materiel & Method

For each star having a new spectrum loaded in BeSS database for the month, the last h-alpha spectra from BeSS are loaded and displayed for comparison. A visual check is performed to detect any change in the H-alpha profile. Sometimes a copy/paste is needed for subtle evolutions.

For each star, which exhibits a change, the thumbnails time series are generated with the following steps. Each spectrum is zoomed on the H-alpha line. Each profile is scaled on the continuum on a region around 6580 angströms. The x-axis is converted into Doppler velocity centered on H-alpha.

If too many spectra of the object are available, a shorter period of observation is choosen.

All data are processed with Visual Spec, a freeware with specially designed functions to automatically load BeSS spectra and automatize most of the above processing.

- Compiled by Valérie Desnoux, amateur and admin of BeSS for spectra validation, Visual Spec author