Nightlog 2011-05-11

SA: Petri
SO: Siphelo
Others: Janus, Tim, Ted, John, Eric, Marsha, Steve P.

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Summary
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- Beautiful and productive night, with several very nice Fabry-Perot
targets and first succesful spectropolarimetry with T Pyx.

- RSS guidance mapping tests. Concern about salticam fold-mirror
stability: there is clear Rho-dependent flexure between salticam
and rss images, and also variation when putting fold-mirror in/our.
Nevertheless, guiding worked fine with several tracks, after star
was hunted down. Needs more work to map.

- Tim ran the all-sky camera - check out the video on the blog-site,
which features a cool surprise visitor caught on camera!

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still working out the bugs....

SBIG responded with some updated software for our all-sky camera.  With a bit of fiddling this was made to work and now images and animations are acquired and produced automatically.  We still need to set up a website for accessing the sky camera data, but, as seen in this video, there are other bugs in the system that need to be dealt with first....

At long last, an all-sky camera....

After years of woe and frustration trying to get our CONCAM all-sky imaging system to work satisfactorily without much success we finally said "enough!" and purchased a replacement. The new camera is an SBIG AllSky-340 which comes fully integrated into a weather-tight enclosure and includes all the software required for automated operation. Unfortunately, that software proved to be buggy and doesn't get along well with Windows 7. The software for talking directly to the camera does work fine, however, we were able to acquire images manually.

Here is an example of a 120-second exposure from the camera's temporary home in the ox wagon.  The MASS-DIMM telescope is to the right, the MONET building in the upper right, and the roof of the ox wagon is covering the left third of the image.  

Nightlog 2011-05-10

SA: David
SO: Zolisa
Others: Ken, Ted, Nic, John, Marsha, Brent, Anthony, Petri, Tim, Steve

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Summary
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A excellent productive night, photometric with seeing varying from 1-2".

Progressed well with F-P commissioning obs, galaxies, SN1006 shock front
plus nice PNe.

More SALTICAM commissioning of globular cluster CMDs.

Nice SALTICAM images of NGC5750.

Tim successfully tried out the new all-sky camera in the ox wagon.

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Nightlog 2011-05-09

SA: David
SO: Zolisa
Others: Ken, Ted, Nic, John, Marsha, Brent, Anthony

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Summary
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* Excellent night, after a long wait!

* "Second Light" of RSS Fabry-Perot

* "Second light" of spectropolarimetry (of T Pyx)

* SALTICAM globular cluster CMD obs.

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Nightlog 2011-05-08

SA: David
SO: Zolisa
Others: Ken, Ted, Nic, John, Marsha, Brent, Eric... and Jack.

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Summary
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- Ridge cloud all night

- More successful RSS Fabry-Perot tests (dry air purge has really helped)

- More successful SALTICAM filter tests (no filter movement errors)

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Nightlog 2011-05-07

SA: David
SO: Zolisa
Others: Ken, Ted, Nic, John, Marsha, Brent, Anthony

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Summary
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- Ridge cloud all night

- RSS Fabry-Perot tests

- SALTICAM filter tests

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