SARA-KP Report Archive

Date	Name	Affiliation	Other Observers	Instrument	Hours Observed	Hours Lost	Reason	Observing Program
10/11/2025	Gary Henson	ETSU	None	Spectrograph	0	9	Humidity	High Humidity, weather threat all night
10/10/2025	Gary Henson	ETSU	none	Spectrograph	0	9	Humidity	Clouds, Rain, storm threat, never opened
10/03/2025	Martha A. Leake	Valdosta State University	none	CCD	0	12	Connection Issues	Could not connect with the three computers. Information that CCD camera is not connected at present, although spectroscope may be available. Not ready for spectroscopy, especially without a CCD camera. Did no open. Weather at KPNO is "mostly clear" but there is a breeze tonight.
10/03/2025	Alexandra Yep	Agnes Scott College	AST-300 Class	Spectrograph	3	0	No problems to report	Spectrograph and associated equipment all working! Had to cycle the spectrograph cabinet to get ACE to control the spectrograph. Then worked fine. Even the autoguiding worked! Yay! Pleased.
10/01/2025	Ken Watanabe	Florida Gulf Coast University	Jonathan Zielinski	CCD	0	8	Equipment Failure	CCD Cooler down. Unable to observe.
09/30/2025	Yong Sheng	Clemson University	Dieter Hartmann	CCD	0	10	Equipment Failure	The CCD cooler is down, so we can't observe for photometry.
09/29/2025	Ken Watanabe	Florida Gulf Coast University	Jonathan Zielinski	CCD	0	8	Equipment Failure	Unable to observe due to CCD cooler being down.
09/28/2025	Kaylee Grace	University of Delaware/MCAO	N/A	N/A	0	8	Equipment Failure	Couldn't observe due to the cooler issues. Alas, no one in our group had a target for the spectrograph.
09/23/2025	Robert Berrington	Ball State University	A486 Adv obs class	arc	8	2	Equipment Failure	Arc CCD camera was warm at the start of the night at -60 C, and cooled to about 67 C. I was not sure if this was because of coming out of monsoon season, and this was the first night that we have been observing. Also amp C was returning only zeros for the bias, but not for something like a flat. Not sure what is happening there. So I switched to Amp B which seemed to be working well.
09/24/2025	William Keel	University of Alabama	none	ARC CCD	0	11	Equipment Failure	CCD warmed from -100 to -35 C while running darks and kept going, with dark rate 1 ADU/second per pixel. Peter thinks the dewar has lost vacuum (it was supposed to be pumped again when the mirror went out for recoating...)
09/21/2025	Zach Savery	University of Delaware	Angel, Evelyn, and Caitlyn	CCD	0	11	Clouds	There were 30% chance of thunderstorms predicted at KP, so we didn't feel it was worth chancing.
09/20/2025	Zach Savery	University of Delaware	Angel, Caitlyn, Ben, Evelyn, Jarrod, and Kaylee	CCD	10	1	Clouds	Lost the first hour right at sunset due to threatening clouds. Towards the morning when switch to a second target, there was a slight tracking issue causing oblong stars that moved across the CCD's frame. However, this was fixed by the telescope itself after a few minutes. Unsure what would have been the cause, maybe jumpy or sticky gear teeth.