Galactic astronomy and small telescopes

Abstract

The second data release of ESA's Gaia satellite (Gaia DR2) revolutionised astronomy by providing accurate distances, proper motions, apparent magnitudes, and in many cases temperatures and radial velocities for an unprecedented number of stars. These new results, which are freely available, need to be considered in virtually any stellar research project, as they provide crucial information on luminosity, position, motion, orbit, and colours of observed targets. Ground-based spectroscopic surveys, like RAVE, Gaia-ESO, Apogee, LAMOST, and GALAH, are adding more measurements of radial velocities and, most importantly, chemistry of stellar atmospheres, including abundances of individual elements. We briefly describe the new information trove, together with some warnings against blind-folded use. Even though it may seem that Gaia is already providing any information that could be collected by small telescopes, the opposite is true. In particular, we discuss a possible reach of a ground-based photometric survey using a custom filter set. We demonstrate that it can provide valuable information on chemistry of observed stars, which is not provided by Gaia or other sky surveys. A survey conducted with a small telescope has the potential to measure both the metallicity and alpha enhancement at a ~0.1 dex level for a large fraction of Gaia targets, a valuable goal for galactic archaeology.