Um pequeno teste, com muita turbulência numa noite com algumas nuvens altas. Sem flats nem grandes artifícios, apenas uma passagem no Registax 6.

After some maintenance on the weekend, last night I grabbed some frames from M13 with my setup to try out the collimation. It’s only 20 minutes (click on image for full size) but it’s good enough. The sky was very hazy, with thin clouds and lots of dust from Sahara and ashes from the many fires that have stormed Portugal recently, but the purpose was to see the shape of the stars, and that was done.

M13, also know as the Hercules Cluster is a globular cluster of stars, composed by a several hundred thousand stars bound together by gravity, located 25100 light-years from Earth. At the telescope it appears like a small puff of cotton, with the core appearing to untrained eyes like some dirt on the glass, but with time it resolves nicely, and it’s a beautiful object to see. It can be seen with the naked eye from places with very dark sky, and in Portugal I’ve been lucky enough to see it twice from Alentejo.

HAT-P12-b captured on the night of June 15, 2010, from the UFObservatory, Portugal, under a Full Moon and hazy skies.

This capture was the first real test of the complete robotic system that’s been under construction and has just become operational at UFObservatory, a robotic multi-pier observatory. The session was done remotely (but just for a few dozen meters) by me and my friend João Gregório, that happens to be the first amateur to produce a light curve for this exoplanet. Another friend was capturing pretty pictures from his living room, more than 100Km away.

No Filter
Celestron C8 and Alan Gee Telecompressor + QSI 504
William Optics ZenithStar 66mm + Atik 16IC
Losmandy G11 Gemini

Captured last night, at Astrovide 2009, with my little TMB 80 and a Atik 314L, guided by a Skywatcher 70/700 with a Atik 16ICS loaned by Rui Tripa. Everything was monted on a Skywatcher HEQ5 Pro.

Exposures:

• Luminance: 150 minutes (6x300s + 12x600s)
• Red: 30 minutes (6x300s binned 2×2)
• Green: 30 minutes (6x300s binned 2×2)
• Blue: 42 minutes (6x420s) binned 2×2)

No darks, no flats.

This dull image was captured July 5, 2009 at 22h31m58s UT, and is the first image obtained remotely from the observatory. The star is Cor Caroli, the brightest in the constellation Canes Venatici, a small patch of sky near Ursa Major. The star also know an Alpha Canum Venaticorum, was named Cor Caroli Regis Martyris by Sir Charles Scarborough in honour of Charles I.

For this first test, I connected remotely to the observatory’s computers and commanded the roof to open, unparked the mount, pointed at the target and took test exposures, while a friend was on location reporting on the events and making sure that no catastrophic event would ruin the evening that was a complete success. The weather wasn’t great, with some clouds rolling in, but in the 45 minutes the roof was open I managed to point the telescope at 4 targets, and somewhat successfully image the sky.

I got a short exposure of M3, the globular cluster in the constellation Boötes before the clouds rolled in:

Mizar, one of the components of the famous double in Ursa Major:

And the last, probably the worst image of M51 that I ever made, but the one that I will keep for a long time:

The test was a success, and a major milestone was completed in our little observatory. We expect to be fully operational in a few months, and by the winter the telescopes should be looking at the sky every clear night. With a little luck, it’s going to be one of the best Christmas presents ever !

A few months back while searching for solutions to automate the observatory’s roof, I came across a small shop on Bulgary that sells USB and Serial relay boards, in various configurations. At the time I bought a couple of USB One Channel Relay Units and they sitted around for a while, while I finished some other small projects.

Today I finished the assembly of the board. I got a small plastic box, that turned out to be a tiny bit smaller that it should, forcing me to chop off a few millimeters at the corners of the PCB, cut a slot on one end for the USB port and power cable, and got a cheap triple extension cord from the local hardware store to make the thing useful.

The final result was this, with a unused board on the side:

To control it, I made a small C# application (.NET 2.0, Windows only), that presents a simple form with a button, and can be controlled from the command line. You can download it here (zip, 5Kb) if it’s useful for something.

To change the COM Port, you should edit HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SigmaPower\COMPort on your registry (the key is created on first run)

To use it from the command line, you should pass it a single parameter: “ON” / “OFF”, or “1″ / “0″. Ex:

c:bin>SigmaPower ON

This one should be installed on the observatory by tomorrow!

It must have been a great show…

Yesterday I went to the observatory for another night of observing with Doctor and the Kid. I had planned to capture data for a light curve of Wasp-1 but clouds in the beginning of the night, and the usual delays that always happen made me change my mind and I ended up with a night of technical refinements, mainly a much needed polar alignment on the system. As usual, PAM dribbled me a bit for an hour or so, but I eventually managed to get a plate solve from it (plate solve on Maxim was trivial for a long time) and a session of measure-adjust-refine occupied my time while D&K tried to adjust the GM-8 that apparently had taken a bump. After some tweaking I looked for a target to test for alignment, and ended up doing a little more than half and hour on asteroid 9 Metis. Looking at the first and last frames from the sequence showed some movement in RA, so I went back and spent more time trying to further improve polar alignment. At the end of the night I had and error of less than 6 arcmin in azimuth, and less then 4 in elevation. Not good, but the observatory is not ready yet, and the odds of someone giving it a bump while doing some maintenance work are not slim, so I shutdown the pier at 4 am and 20 minutes later I was inside the sleeping bag.

By 8h40m I was tired of being awake trying to rest (insomnia has been frequent lately) and went back to the observatory to check the equipment. Doctor and Kid left later in the night, and everything was parked and covered in dew, so I opened the roof and let the equipment dry for a bit. It was a sunny morning with blue sky, nothing like the cloudy and boring day before, and I sat on some stairs to think for a bit, while getting some sun.

Eventually the Kid got up, and together with the Engineer (that had arrived late the previous night) we went for a coffee and a bit of talking, before raising our sleeves and get some work done, mainly electric work related with the UPS system on the observatory, and some cable management to avoid a rats nest. All went smoothly without much notice, with the exception of some excess energy that “blessed” my hand, kindly provided by the friendly chinese that manufactured a power strip with the live blue wire connected to the earth contact… Too bad it didn’t light me up.

This time we packed early, had lunch by 2pm, returning home after it with a brief stop for another coffee. 

Another weekend, another Sunday…

After a few tries, that were used mainly to refine procedures and test practices, finally, my first exoplanet light curve! The data was captured on the night from September 13 to 14, 2008, in the UFObservatory, Portugal, with a Celestron C8 and a Atik 314L (full details soon) guided by a Losmandy G11. It was a full moon, and the transparency wasn’t very good, but the night had the purpose to setup piers III and IV at the (still under construction) UFObservatory. Pier II (mine) was already setup, aligned, and ready to image, and this exoplanet was used to perform technical first light for the instruments.

Capture started at 2008/09/13 22h49m44s UT and the last frame is time-stamped 2008/09/14 2h26m31s UT, covering a little more than 3.5 hours. The ephemerides for this transit (from www.transitsearch.org) predicted beginning of transit at 2008/09/13 23h53 UT (JD 2454723.50) ending at 2008/09/14 1h35 UT (JD2454723.57). The scattering on the measurements is very high, much more than I expected, and will have to be further investigated, but for now I’m blaming it on improper calibration (I didn’t captured flat frames for the sequence) and poor guiding. RA guiding was very acceptable, but Gemini often displayed a “DEC motor lags” message. Both RA and DEC motors were examined but there’s was no sign of binding on the worms, so next session is going to be monitored with a voltmeter, to make sure the power supply is functioning properly.