The HOYS-LCO project is progressing well. We have had now 28 applicants and as a collective they are taking images of IC5146 roughly every three days. Each set of images consists of three 2min exposures in blue, visual and red. At this rate, all applicants will have taken their first data set by mid September. If you know of any other people who are interested to learn how to take observational data for the HOYS project, and who are currently without observing equipment, please point them to our application page.
All but two of the existing data sets are of excellent quality. We have generated a deep colour stack of all the good data, which has now a total of about 80min integration time in each of the filters. This can be seen in the image above. More and more of the details of the structure in the nebula and the fainter embedded stars do become visible. Ultimately, at the end of the one year project, the signal to noise in the deep stack will be another factor of three better, revealing even more details and fainter stars.
We already have a tutorial video describing how to view the light curves of the stars in the images on our website. More detailed videos with more analysis features are in preparation and will be posted on the website soon. This will include how to make colour images and how to do some more detailed light curve analysis, e.g. measuring the rotation period of stars. We will also be adding some short videos explaining more details of the science we are doing with the data.