SARA-CT Report Archive

Date	Name	Affiliation	Other Observers	Instrument	Hours Observed	Hours Lost	Reason	Observing Program
04/22/2022	Todd Hillwig	Valparaiso University	None	Andor CCD	10	0	Other	A lot of E-W telescope motion/drifting throughout the night. Also one case of large N-S oscillations for about 20 minutes at Azimuth 77 degrees and Altitude 48 degrees. Also, the guider was not sending corrections to the telescope.
04/17/2022	Ted von Hippel	ERAU	Alondra Valentin-Torres, Ryan Bowen	imaging	8	0	No problems to report	student projects
04/21/2022	Yong Sheng	Clemson University	Dieter Hartmann	CT griz	11	0	No problems to report	Clemson University blazar study. The night went pretty smoothly, no issue to report
04/13/2022	Todd Hillwig	Valparaiso University	None.	Andor CCD	10	0	No problems to report	Student Projects for the first half of the night, PN central star observations the second half.
04/10/2022	Tom Rutherford	ETSU	None	CCD	0	11	Equipment Failure	Asteroid. When I first logged on, the CCD camera would not respond to commands-- actually, it would appear that it was working, but not actually take any images. After four restarts of the CCD computer it begin operating correctly. I restarted the telescope computer along-side the CCD computer and when it came back up, many of the control windows were blank. Several restarts later, the controls were all back and everything except one thing appeared to function-- that one thing was the telescope pointing. The telescope would accept commands to slew to a particular area, but would not actually slew to the new location-- it stayed where it was, with "slewing" never disappearing from the control window. The hand paddle would not move the telescope either. Several more restarts had no effect so I closed up.
04/08/2022	Van Hamme	FIU	Samec	CCD	11	1	Equipment Failure	Drive problems on first start up. ACE rapidly fixed them. 625 observations on 2 interacting binaries. Beautiful night. No airmass issues.
04/08/2022	Van Hamme	FIU	Samec	CCD	12	null	Equipment Failure	Drive problems fixed rapidly by ACE. All went well afterwards, some 634 observations of 2 interacting binaries. No airmass problems.
04/07/2022	Ken Rumstay	VSU	None	CCD	5	2	Connection Issues	Was observing from home; my Internet connection failed just before sunset at CTIO. Relocated to the university and resumed observing. All worked fine until about 12:30 am EDT. While slewing to a target the N and W limits turned red, even though the telescope was east of the meridian. I was able to close the mirror covers and the dome, but could not budge the telescope. Restarting ACE and the telescope computer did not help. I've informed Peter Mack and Brian Blondell of the problem.
04/05/2022	Judi Provencal	University of Delaware	DAS	Andor	6	0	No problems to report	Observed multiple open clusters and nebulae for DAS members.
04/04/2022	Todd Hillwig	Valparaiso University	None.	Andor CCD	0	10	Software/Control PC Issues	Camera computer non-responsive. Difficulty contacting telops. They should be on it today.
04/03/2022	Stephen Gillam	ERAU	Leila Alamos, Lilyanne Pepe	Andor Camera	0	10	Equipment Failure	ROAp stars. The camera computer remained incommunicado. So, we finished up at 8:30 pm.
04/02/2022	Stephen Gillam	ERAU	Leila Alamos, Kiara Richardson	Andor Camera	2	8	Software/Control PC Issues	ROAp stars. Around midnight, the camera stopped working. We restarted the ACE node service seven times. The camera remained inoperable. Then, the TCS reported that the encoder had failed. We completed the procedure to reset the DIO96 board (Shutting down the Tele. computer and power-cycling the tele computer and ACE control cabinet.) The camera was still not connecting. We then tried to power cycle the camera and the camera computer. using the APC switch rack. The camera computer did not come up again. We were unable to connect to it.
03/25/2022	Xianming Han	Butler University	none	CCD	9	0	No problems to report	eclipsing binary
03/31/2022	Priya Gokuldass	Florida Institute of Technology	Kamp	CCD	10	0	No problems to report	Be stars, Multiplicity survey and TESS follow-up. We had no problem during the hours of observation.
03/25/2022	Walter Van Hamme	FIU	sAMEC	ccd	0	10	Connection Issues	Inability to connect since Win10 computers cannot connect to CTIO through VPN at present. We gave time tonight to another observer.