Barnard's Star

Stack/overlay of six images taken over the course of 28 months.
Barnard's star is the jagged sequence near the center of the image.
Use "mouse over" to see dates.

Here's a close-up of five images aligned on the other stars and then stacked together. Also shown is the best-fit regression curve.

Based on these six observations...
The measured parallax is 0.547757 arcseconds, which corresponds to a distance of 1.832 ± 0.061 parsecs.
High precision professional measurements give it a distance of 1.834 ± 0.001 parsecs.

The computed proper motion is a whopping 10.55 arcseconds/yr.
The professional measurement of Barnard star's proper motion is 10.37 arcseconds/yr.

For an explanation of the proper motion and parallax, see http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/images/NJP/BSaaap.pdf.

For a detailed explanation of how the best-fit curve was found, see http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/tex/BarnardStar/BS.pdf .

19:33 EDT, Oct 27, 2014
Starlight Express SXV-H9 on 10" RC
Luminance = best 121 out of 234 eight-second frames
Fat-tail Richardson-Lucy deconv

23:23 EDT, Jul 05, 2014
Starlight Express SXV-H9 on 10" RC
Luminance = best 130 out of 200 eight-second frames
Fat-tail Richardson-Lucy deconv

05:40 EDT, Apr 10, 2014
Starlight Express SXV-H9 on 10" RC
Luminance = best 90 out of 100 eight-second frames
Fat-tail Richardson-Lucy deconv

21:25 EDT, Sept 6, 2013
Starlight Express SXV-H9 on 10" RC
Luminance = best 120 out of 150 eight-second frames
Fat-tail Richardson-Lucy deconv

02:44 EDT, June 6, 2013
Starlight Express SXV-H9 on 10" RC
Luminance = best 125 out of 140 eight-second frames
Fat-tail Richardson-Lucy deconv

03:21 EDT, June 21, 2012
Starlight Express SXV-H9 on 10" RC
Luminance = best 85 out of 110 eight-second frames
Fat-tail Richardson-Lucy deconv