SARA-RM Report Archive

Date	Name	Affiliation	Other Observers	Instrument	Hrs Observed	Hrs Lost	Reason	Observing Program
09/16/2020	Todd Vaccaro	Ball State University	Robert Berrington, Melanie Isenbarger	Andor CCD	0	8	Clouds	Eclipsing binary photometry cancelled for RM due to overcast conditions.
09/14/2020	Roi Alonso	IAC	none	ccd	0	10	Clouds	Cloudy and rainy night
09/13/2020	Chris Karwin	Clemson University	Yong Sheng, Dieter Hartmann	RM	10	0	No problems to report	Fermi-LAT BL Lacs
09/13/2020	Todd Vaccaro	Ball State University	Melanie Isenbarger	Andor Camera	6	2.5	Software/Control PC Issues	Eclipsing binary star; Lost 2.5 hrs due to software issues. First one was around 1:30am where we noticed tracking had trouble and then the dome was said to be Ajar and vignetting the scope and slewing said it failed. We had to do a full reset. Then at about 4:25am the CCD software crashed and we thought we started it back up alright, but we lost our field, which at first we thought were clouds, but after 30 mins we moved to M42 and the sky was not behaving, so we went through many restarts and after a couple full resets we were able to observe, but lost 2 hrs. It seemed that the tele was not aligning with the dome's slit and we must have been observing the dome. At 6:15am the telescope was stuck in the west and couldn't be parked. A few resets later and using the paddle to move tele freed it up and we closed.
09/11/2020	Matt Wood	A&M Commerce	John Morales	CCD	0	All	Clouds	Clouds - didn't open.
09/10/2020	Matt Wood	A&M-Commerce	John Morales	Andor CCD	10	1	Equipment Failure	Telescope again shut down at 38 deg altitude (Z = 1.6) observing DQ Her. Did the RA/DEC reset trick, and that didn't work. Rebooted eveyrthing, and eventually got back to work. Clouds so probably not a big data loss, but the telescope should be able to track to more than 2 airmasses.
09/09/2020	Matt Wood	A&M-Commerce	John Morales	Andor	10	0.5	Equipment Failure	This was my first time observing in too long. Thanks to all who smoothed the path, particularly Kurtis for the rusty-observer training. We restarted everything at the beginning of the night. It ran well for hours, then at about 38 deg altitude (Z=1.6) tracking stopped. I'd forgotten the ra/dec reset trick - thanks Bill for reminding. Stowed telescope at HA=0h, DEC=-25 (per Bill).
09/08/2020	Todd Hillwig	Valparaiso University	none	Andor camera	8	2	Software/Control PC Issues	Tried to use the autoguider for the first time. The camera seemed to work as expected, but no corrections were being made to the telescope's pointing. I attempted to adjust exposure time, focus, parameters, etc, but nothing made a difference. There are a number of other issues which I hope will be worked out over time. The primary one is that the guider images display over the science camera image on DS9. And I did not see a good way to redisplay the science image in another frame (no access to the D: drive?). Near the end of the night the RA tracking stopped. The telescope would not move in RA. I could move the telescope in Dec using the hand paddle and it would move some distance in Dec when trying to slew before canceling the move, but would not move in RA. Regained motion control once but lost tracking again almost immediately. With only 45 minutes left in the night at that point, I restarted the entire system again and got motion control, so just moved to stow position and closed for the night.
09/07/2020	Xianming Han	Butler University	no	CCD	0	8	Clouds	Just took bias and darks.
09/06/2020	Keefe Kamp	Florida Tech	Saida Caballero, Jordan Forman, Minh Le, Stephen Fowler	CCD	8	0	Software/Control PC Issues	Cyg X-1 Observations and a Few Moon pics for outreach. Weather Computer had Low Disk Space Warning on Start Up. Telescope stopped Tracking around an HA of 3 after a RA and Dec reset it would track again but after a little bit would stop again. There was also a dome azimuth problem where the dome would not go to the correct azimuth as the telescope this was solved by cycling power to the dome azimuth control.
09/04/2020	Roi Alonso	IAC	none	CCD	8	0.5	Equipment Failure	WDs observations, no filter. Focus at 102069. Stopped tracking (RA) multiple times at the end of the night.
09/04/2020	William Keel	University of Alabama	3 cats, DragonCon Space Track folks	Andor CCD	8.5	1	Other	Public outreach for virtual edition of DragonCon Space Track - livestreamed 5.5 hours of observing. Lost first hour to dust. No operations problems.