RCT Supports Summer 2012 Astronomy Camps

For the second summer in a row, the RCT was used by students attending the astronomy camps  directed  by Dr. Don McCarthy .  Four camps held in June and July engaged a total  93 teenagers from the US and five  foreign countries .  The RCT was used for temporal monitoring of two comets, a flare star and Saturn’s moon Titan. The picture below shows the campers at the 12-meter telescope observing the transit of Venus.  The other image is a mosaic of several nights of observing Titan in orbit around Saturn, which was part of a project using Kepler’s Third Law to determine the mass of Saturn. Titan is shown as different colored dots which represent four different epochs of observations

Update on dome

After many tests, we now think either the dome encoder is failing or the dome power supply is incorrectly set, following the powerout for the UPS replacement. More updates soon.

The pointing was recentered (off after worm-gear lubrication work) and the focus was readjusted (for seasonal drift).

RCT update on blank images/guiding

Folks,
Several have noticed the following behavior in the last few nights with the RCT:

  • Several images are blank, likely with the dome completely in the way
  • The centering of the field seems to drift from night to night
  • At high hour angle, there is significant trailing in the images. There is still notable “coma” in images near zenith

    • I believe these are all symptoms of the encoder slippage and worm gear oscillation. I believe they needing cleaning/re-greasing. I’ve put in a service request with KPNO. I still think part of the PSF is mirror support related, but we wont know for sure until we eliminate the other sources of confusion.

    Tonight I was able to zero point the telescope, and test the guider. It appears that the pointing tolerance for accurate guiding is about 15″, or ~20 pix from the absolute center of the chip. Guiding works better now, but it does not improve the PSF substantially.