Cepheid Variables

[Christina LeGrand]

Hello All,

I am a faithful, devoted, multi-decade user of Sky Tools, and really love it.   Is there a way to get a list of bright Cepheid variables in the Milky Way?   It might be a fun thing to add to my public outreach observing list to show people and explain about Henrietta Leavitt, Ed Hubble, the accelerating expansion of the universe, etc., and all that good stuff.

Thank you for any ideas!
Christina LeGrand

[theskyhound]

Hello Christina,

Thank you for your loyalty and kind words! Yes, you can use SkyTools 4 Visual to make such a list. In a better world, I would be able to snap my fingers and create a video tutorial to answer your question, because it is often easier to show how to do something than type a lot trying to explain it. To that end, I have been working on ways to make tutorials much more quickly. I think I may almost be there, so I hope you don't mind if I use your question as a test to see how quickly I can create a tutorial using AI assistance. Its 10:40 AM my time. I'll see you in a bit.

[theskyhound]

Here is a quick tutorial which should answer your question.

This was an interesting exercise. I ran into some unforeseen problems, but had I everything on hand to do this, such as per-formated thumbnail, I estimate this would have taken me about 40 minutes, including upload and publishing.

[PMSchu]

Hi Christina,

Here's a way to use the Data Base Power Search (DBPS) to get a list of the Cepheid variables. SkyTools recognizes 3 types of Cepheids, classical, beta and delta cepheids so you'll need to search for each one separately. Here's an example of how the DBPS can be set up to search for classsical cepheids brighter than 15 magnitude:     

You can repeat the search for beta & delta cepheids to get all 3 types. To limit your search to stars in the Milky Way is more complicated. Do you mean stars in our galaxy? You could try limiting the search to selected constellations containing the Milky Way or set a limit on the distance in lightyears to exclude extragalactic stars.

Hope this helps,

Phil S.

Greg, that's a very nice tutorial. Well done!

[Christina LeGrand]

Thank you for the help, Greg and Phil!    Very much appreciated!    Greg, the tutorial is fantastic!  Impressive that it was done with AI.  I will give it a try now and get that list of Cepheids! 

Thank you both again for your help!
Christina LeGrand

[Tempus]

Greg, that was a fantastic tutorial. Clear, concise and the voice was actually pretty good!

[theskyhound]

Thanks for the feedback on the tutorial. I have been working on being able to do many more tutorials and it looks like this is a good way forward.