Weather
While fireworks go off all around me – it’s a perfect summer night. Low tonight around 60F – very clear. Hurricane Albert passed off the coast earlier today taking the clouds with it! Seeing is around 2 arcsec at beginning of night.
Targets
Rig 1: BRITE campaign – P Cyg and Deneb
Set up the following cadence:
- Zeta Aql 6532
- P Cyg 6532
- Deneb 6532
- Deneb 6334
- Zeta Aql 6334
- Zeta Aql 6532
- P Cyg 6532 > repeat w/ occasional visits to Zeta Aql.
I need to find out from Noel what he means by several images of P Cyg – I’ll just run a sequence at the end of the night for now. But he’s interested in monitoring H-alpha changes at several time scales – even 5-minute time scales?
Rig 2: WX UMa
Likely the last night on this object – it’s just getting into the trees too early, the longest run I can do is now around 4 hours and there are more compelling targets in the east!
Photproc Issues
The other day I tried reducing a nights’ data using AIP4WIN – and it produced better results than photproc! So I’ve revisited the optimal extraction part as that appears to be where the problem is. In fact, if I use DAOPHOT’s “APER” task it gets quite close to AIP4WIN’s results, so there is definitely something wrong. Optimal extraction should be able to do a better job than either as both are simple unweighted apertures.
Bailing early!
My knee is killing me! 32 days after knee replacement, not feeling too badly over all, but took a fairly long walk today and the knee is really sore – so stooping to get into and out of the domes is not something I want to do much more of tonight. Out at 1:30am. I noticed small crescents of dew on each telescope.
Another AP1200?
Several are for sale on AstroMart right now. I’ve contacted two of the sellers, one in NC, the other in NY. I’d love to replace the CGE in the north dome…..
UPDATE: See This
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