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Log Book Entry No.52
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Conditions: Mostly clear, a little muggy. No cloud coverage. | ||||||||
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< < | Begun observation session with a run down of the procedure to prepare the dome (i.e. opening the shutter, rotating the dome). | |||||||
> > | Begun observation session with a run down of the procedure to prepare the dome.
Dome Procedure:
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< < | Identified a bright object in the night sky with the naked eye to set as our target for observation. Aligned the open dome shutter and telescope with said object. This was done crudely first by eye, then using the viewfinder and finally centred with the help of continuous exposures in the Maxim suite. By setting the camera mode to continuous and applying a short exposure time, you are able to produce images of what the telescope is looking at in relatively rapid sucession allowing for an almost real time feed of what the telescope is aligned with. This makes centering and aligning the telescope easier. | |||||||
> > | Once a object in the sky has been chosen, the next step is to align the telescope to enable the activation of tracking. | |||||||
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< < | Went through the alignment and tracking procedure on the telescope to account for the rotation of earth. | |||||||
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< < | Once the scope was tracking the star, used positional data coupled with stellarium to identify it as the star Vega (alpha lyrae). Took multiple observations of Vega at different exposure lengths. | |||||||
> > | Using stellarium, the telescope was then trained on the open cluster M-39 in the constellation cyganus (800ly away from earth). Again took multiple exposures. The cluster is composed of a number of stars. Using the star chart in stellarrium the star patterns were compared to that shown in the exposure allowing for individual identification of the stars the cluster is made up of. | |||||||
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< < | Using stellarium, focused the telescope on the open cluster M-39 in the constellation cyganus. Again took multiple exposures and through comparison to the stellarium star chart, identified individual stars. | |||||||
> > | You have the ability to manually focus the telescope. If it is out of focus the exposures of stars can present as donuts (dark centres with bright outer ring) or they seem flat and blurred at it's edges. The procedue to manually focus the telescope is first to 'unlock' the mechanism. There are two dials, the shorter one can be rotated to unlock the device allowing the second longer dial to be turned focusing the telescope. | |||||||
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< < | Experimented with the manual focusing of the telescope. Noted that the earth's atmosphere above can act to take the image out of focus. | |||||||
> > | Last target of the night was the andromeda galaxy known as M-31 (as it is a messier object) and is 2.5x106 ly away from earth and the closest spiral galaxy to the milky way group. This galaxy has a mass ~ 1.5x10^12 M0. 10 exposures were taken one after the other with the intention of eventually using them to form 1 image with considerably less noise. | |||||||
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< < | Last target of the night was the andromeda galaxy (spiral galaxy also known as M31). Took 10 exposures one after the other with the intention of eventually using them to form 1 image with considerably less noise. | |||||||
> > | An interesting point to note is that movement of the atmosphere above the telescope can cause exposures to shift in and out of focus. This was made evident as during continuous exposures of M-39, the stars were alternating between being in focus and out of focus. The exposures taken during the night of observation are attached to this post. | |||||||
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