The Morning After

5:30am Wednesday Nov 27

It’s 5:30am. The alarm has just gone off, and I’m getting out of bed to go turn things off.

First thing I notice: the weather has gone way downhill. It’s foggy. There are no stars, but worse than that, the telescope, camera, and mount are soaking wet from dew. Sigh.

Second thing I notice: the computer doesn’t say that the observing run ended at 5:08am. It says that everything shut down at 1:49am as a result of an invalid math operation while trying to calculate AIRMASS. Sigh.

So, let’s spot check some of the images that we did get:

• 1:49am – image #658 : blank. Dark. Nothing there.
• 12:34am – image #558: blank. Dark. Nothing there.
• 11:18pm – image #458: a handful of really fuzzy, blurred stars
• 10:01pm – image #358: Not too bad. Still looks somewhat out of focus:

(The star in the very center is KIC 9832227. The whole image covers an area in the sky of about 14 square arcminutes — roughly half the width of the full moon.)

So, here’s where we stand:

• It seems that we have about 325 images from 7pm until about 11:20pm that might be usable. That’s about 4 hours out of an 11 hour orbit. Maybe that’ll be useful.
• The bug that causes a math problem when calculating AIRMASS at 1:49am needs to be fixed. (I’ll do a separate posting on this in a day or so.)
• We need to figure out whether the blank images are because the telescope wasn’t pointed at the sky (pointed at the neighbor’s roof??) or because the weather was bad. (Again, this will get its own posting.)
• I’m not going to sweat the out-of-focus images just yet, because if this star was really close to the horizon, I wouldn’t expect sharp images.
• Still need to see whether what we have is good enough to extract any brightness measurements. (And, yes, there will need to be a posting for this, too.)