Clear and cold!
Quite cold tonight, all the more painful as I spent an hour or so trying to get CGE#1 to point the telescope at RYTau. When I finally did get there I had all matter of focus issues, re-opening an old “can ‘o worms”. I think I need to re-set the guider mirror in the spectrograph. The slit is nicely centered and all, but I’ve read that the mirror must also be the correct distance from the guide camera field lens. In any event, when the object looks focused in the guider it apparently is not focused.
Rig #2: BK Lyn
Rig #2 behaved quite nicely and I got a good sequence of images of BK Lyn. No issues, really.
Calibration images for spectrograph
I took sequences of flat and dark images for the ST8xme#1 + LHiRes combo. Darks were for -15C and -20C in 2×2 mode. Next clear night I need to create a new pointing model.
PhotProc
The PhotProc program is taking shape nicely. Currently it will find and perform aperture photometry on a stack of images, then runs Match_Stars to create the position mapping from the first image to each following image. Then the user indicates a PSF model star using the mouse. The program then fits a 2-d elliptical gaussian to the same star in each subsequent image and writes the parameters to a file. Next up is to write a routine to display an image and let the user select psf, comparison, and program stars in the field. I’m still debating as to whether to try to write a widget routine or just use a clunky mouse/keyboard entry scheme.
