Proposal #726

Screening BeSS's own coverage gaps: a small proof-of-concept spectroscopic survey of neglected Be stars.

I'm a high-school student in Vancouver, BC. Rather than observing with my own equipment for this project, I built a screen against the BeSS spectral archive (basebe.obspm.fr): BeSS holds 364,330 spectra of Be-type stars but gates submission on an object already being classified as a Be star, not on BeSS already holding good data for that star. I ran a real SIMBAD TAP query for otype='Be*' stars brighter than V 8 (476 candidates), then cross-matched each one against BeSS's own SSAP holdings star by star, and found 68 real Be stars that BeSS covers with zero spectra, or only a handful of old ones, out of the 476 checked.

This is a deliberately small first request rather than the full list: 4 targets, chosen because they clear at least 55 degrees altitude at every one of TMO61, BSM_Berry, and BSM_NM, and because they sample both gaps my screen found: two stars (del Persei, HD 192987) BeSS has never observed at all, and two (HD 40132, HD 219523) it observed only a handful of times, years ago. One low-resolution SA-200 spectrum per star is what I'm asking for. I want to check whether the data actually resolves H-alpha well enough to be useful, and whether it matches what I'd expect from my own screen, before asking for the other ~28 stars the same screen flagged.

del Persei is intentionally the brightest of the four (V 3.0): through a slitless grating, a bright star spreads its light across many pixels rather than concentrating it in one place, so brightness here is an asset for signal-to-noise rather than a saturation risk the way it would be for direct photometry.

WHICH FILTERS/SETUP: the SA-200 slitless grating -- I don't need a specific station; TMO61, BSM_Berry, or BSM_NM would all work for these four targets.
HOW OFTEN: one spectrum per star answers this proof-of-concept; no repeat cadence needed yet.
WHEN TO STOP: once I have one usable spectrum per target, or after a reasonable number of attempts if weather costs more tries than that.

I'll reduce the frames myself, and if the resolution and signal are good enough, look at contributing them to BeSS as new holdings for these stars, crediting AAVSOnet.