Data Last Night

[Tom Droege <droege@wwa.com>]

Last night I was able to run about 4 hours before the clouds moved in.  The 
sky was clear until then.  A nice high pressure cell.  I was feeling 
great.  Arthritis responds to high pressure cells.

This pair of cameras looks pretty awful.  Both CCDs have had their lids 
off.  If anyone out there has the facilities to clean CCDs I may call on 
you in the future.    The result of all the work on this pair of cameras is 
that one can see a lot of spots and funny places on the image.

However the evening was pretty constant, so I was able to make a flat from 
16 images.  When applied, this seemed to clean up almost everything.  The 
background was flat to within the noise.

I picked a V image and calibrated it against a known star.  When set to 
find stars to a 3 sigma limit, 6000 stars were found to mag 15.2.   I 
looked at a few.  The 15.2 could just be noise, but by 14.4 it was an 
obvious star.  This is not a particularly crowded field.  It was centered 
on 15h52m and 2 N.

It is getting to the point that I can just take data.  Well, every so often 
I have to fix something.  Thursday night I tried to run and the RA drive 
was slipping.  This gave long star trails.  It turns out that the oil had 
dried out of the chamois and it no longer swelled up to grip the drive 
screw.   A little light machine oil fixed the problem.  This is one reason 
I have not been so quick to ship out cameras.  I want to uncover problems 
like this.  "Apply a few drops of light machine oil to the RA drive nut 
monthly".

Tom Droege