Steve Broadbent's Astronomy Site

This is an ongoing project with observations continuing.

Graph of position of Hα lines over time since June 2023
The red and blue Hα line positions change as the jets from the black hole precess.
This is caused by the opposing jets pointing towards the Earth and then away during precession.
Thus the H lines from the jets cycle from blue shifted to red shifted over the quoted prescession period of 162.4 days.
The green plot shows the brightest line from hydrogen in the system but not in the jets.

The gaps in the data was due to weather and seasonal observability.

The red and blue curves are the best fit sine curves to the data,
they should cross at the wavelength of the system Hα shown in green.
However, light from the jets is affected by time dilation around the black hole
which causes the light to be 'stretched' to longer wavelengths (relativistic doppler effect)
and thus they cross at longer wavelength.

Below is a phase diagram of observations so far superimposed on published data from
Goranskij,

Example spectra from 2023

HAG 24" RC 'David Harris' telescope, Lhires III spectroscope 300gr/mm, ZWO ASI2600MM Pro camera.
Analysis with RSpec software.