Log Book Entry No.52

Created: 27 Oct 2014 19:23:05

Last Revised: 28 Oct 2014 15:26:50

SimonWoeginger

MSc Observation_LN_SW

27th Oct 2014 Msc Observation.

Begun: 18:30

Finished: 22:30

Conditions: Mostly clear, a little muggy. No cloud coverage.

Begun observation session with a run down of the procedure to prepare the dome (i.e. opening the shutter, rotating the dome).

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.

Went through the alignment and tracking procedure on the telescope to account for the rotation of earth.

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, 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.

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 (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.

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• 20141027_SW_LN_SB.rar: Observation data, corrected path names. Use this one