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The first astrocusanus pub meet-up

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 tl;dr - On the late morning of December 27 2025, a group of thirteen current and former members of astrocusanus met for an informal get-together at the local pub. Image 1: The participants of the first official astrocusanus meet-up.   The students astronomy group of the Cusanusgymnasium Bruneck first saw the light of day in 2006 – the year of the total solar eclipse in Turkey. After witnessing the two eclipses in 1999 (Austria) and 2001 (Zambia), I definitely didn't want to miss this one. However, this time the celestial event would take place on March 29, right in the middle of the school year. I therefore I proposed to the head of my school to combine pleasure with business and to assemble a travel group of young astronomy enthusiasts, who were just as eager to see the eclipse as I was. As you can probably guess, this was an easy task. A few weeks later we all experienced one of the most fantastic shows  this planet has to offer at the sunny beach of Side. Image 2: T...
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Our seventh paper on CY Aquarii

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 tl;dr - In 2008 we started monitoring the star CY Aquarii, a pulsating variable with a remarkably small period of ~90 min and a > 0.7 magnitudes amplitude. Together with Prof. Dr. Christiaan Sterken from Vrije Universiteit Brussel, we recently published data tables and findings from the 2022-2024 observing seasons in our seventh scientific paper.  It is now common knowledge that among all the stars in the sky the students of the Cusanusgymnasium Bruneck have one undisputed favourite: a tiny little speck of light in the constellation of Aquarius with the unpretentious designation CY. The latest Gaia measurements put it at a distance of 1,367 light years, hence, despite being hotter, bigger and brighter than the Sun, to us it appears ~100 times dimmer than the faintest stars visible to the unaided eye. Yet, its remarkable property to change its brightness fast (within ~90 min) and considerably (~ doubling its energy output) secured it a special place in our hearts. Ind...
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Standort: 39031 Bruneck, Autonome Provinz Bozen - Südtirol, Italien
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A search for faint asteroids

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 tl;dr - A teacher and two teenagers drive up to an observatory with a 16-inch telescope at 1,600 m in South Tyrol on a clear December night. The plan is to discover faint asteroids with the so-called “blink” method. Despite several obstacles, as a snowstorm of hotpixels and a merciless ski-slope light dome, they come away with ~  3x15 faint asteroids  (and one interesting variable star). Here’s the full story! On 28 December 2024 the sky was clad in a perfect winter blue, and two of my students — Emma (15) and Miriam (17) — despite being in the midst of winter holidays, agreed to an observing night at our school's rooftop roll-off observatory. Ready to hunt down asteroids. Our 16-inch RC telescope. The evening started promisingly: While we set up our equipment the air smelled cold and clear. Then however, the village below started their night-skiing and a gruesome light dome devoured all faint stars in the southeast. We had no other option but to postpone plan A (our ast...
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The habitable planet of Gaia BH1

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 tl;dr - ... does most likely not exist. As every year in March, I attended the Mathematik Modellierungswoche last week, held at the Rechtenthal Castle in the small village of Tramin , South Tyrol. Along with four other STEM teachers, I brought an assignment for five of the most talented students from various schools across the province. Their task was to work on it and get as close to a solution as possible. As usual, my assignment this year came from the wide and never disappointing field of astronomy. Over the past year, I was 'commander-in-chief' of a nice 16-inch remote rental telescope in Australia and used it to image the southern night sky. During the bright moon phases, galaxies and nebulae weren't ideal targets, so I focused on finding interesting star-like objects to point my telescope toward. I can't recall exactly where or when I first read about Gaia BH1, the first stellar black hole discovered by the prolific astrometry satellite Gaia in 2022, but it su...
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A lost son and a heavenly home

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 tl;dr - On the evening of Sunday, 17.11.24, the International Space Station ISS had a favourable  flyby over our hometown Bruneck. Our observation of the event was extraordinarily thrilling and at least a partial success. After reading about a successful hunt for the ISS by our friend Sebastian Voltmer  in "Sterne und Weltraum" 11/24, I sent out a call for volunteers to follow Sebastian's example on the evening of Sunday, November 17, 2024. When the time came, I was astounded by the number of students who flocked to the "torretta", the observatory of the Istituto Pluricomprensivo Brunico . Altogether, we were nine people crammed into the small space in the dome - even Felix showed up, a "long-lost son" who had not taken part in any of our activities for years.  The "ISS crew", I mean the crew that hunted down the ISS. The passage of the space station, currently home to seven astronauts, was scheduled for 18:34 CET, but we met more than an ho...
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Australian skies don't let you down

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 tl;dr - Last week, three members of our school's astronomy group observed the exoplanet TIC 46432937 b using a remote telescope in Southern Australia. The light curve turned out exquisit and was promptly  submitted to the TRESCA database. Our successful observation constitutes a valuable contribution to the understanding of extrasolar planets. Clear autunm skies are usually the best for astronomy. Looking up into the vast blue, you could easily feel drowning. However, not this year. Up to now the first three weeks of September were quite wet, again with an indisputable drowning risk. Luckily, as a local folk song states, the world is "groß und weit", and so the two freshly recruited members of the astronomy group, Magdalena and Miriam, didn't have to wait too long for their first mission. They teamed up with senior astronomer Alex and used a remote telescope in Australia to successfully prey their first exoplanet.  The target, TIC 46432937 b, was only recently discov...
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Shooting stars XXL

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 tldr; - For almost a year now, an all-sky camera has been on duty on the roof of our school. It quite reliably captures approximately 5000 black-and-white frames per 24 hours of the sky above Bruneck, South Tyrol. Recently, we started checking the huge dataset for bright meteors, also called bolides. During our first two-hour search run, we found four; two more followed. (Yes, astrocusanus does homework assignments, too 😉.) In 2019 we won the 'Reiff-Preis', a recognition for our year-long efforts in the field of astronomy at school. With the money awarded to us we were able to fulfill a long held dream of an automated all-sky camera (see "Can't take my eyes off you" ). With this new 'toy' we not only hoped to be able to check on the weather without the bother of looking out of the window. We also were eager to begin a hunt for bright meteors, aka bolides. The bolides search team rocks the (overcast 🥺) sky! Alex, Amy, Letizia, Mara & Christof Wiedema...
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