SARA-KP Report Archive

Date	Name	Affiliation	Other Observers	Instrument	Hours Observed	Hours Lost	Reason	Observing Program
05/24/2025	Todd Hillwig	Valparaiso University	Webber, Osterhus, Wood, Blanton	CCD	4	5	Clouds	Clouds for first half of night (thin clouds for 2 hours after that, but was able to be open).
05/24/2025	Hillwig	Valparaiso University	Wood, Webber, Osterhus, Blanton	CCD	0	9	Other	Dust/smoke in the air, domes never opened.
05/23/2025	Todd Hillwig	Valparaiso University	Blanton, Wood, Webber, Osterhus	CCD	8.5	0.5	Clouds	Evening flats are not usable because the dome was vignetting the telescope. Donuts on the images were slightly cut off on one side. Moving the dome clearly improved this until the donuts were completely round and symmetric. Had to turn off auto dome and manually move the dome to different azimuths until the donuts were round. Have three more nights on the telescope, so will try to get usable flats tomorrow.
05/19/2025	Zach Savery	University of Delaware	Millie Dill, Kaylee Grace	CCD	0	10	Other	Dust/smoke prevented dome opening
05/20/2025	Ken Watanabe	FGCU	Max Smuda	KP	0	11	Other	Dome is closed due to dust in air
05/17/2025	Zach Savery	University of Delaware	Kaylee Grace	CCD	3	7	Other	Dome had to be closed at ~11 pm Mountain time due to dust/smoke warning. Warning was in affect for the rest of the night.
05/16/2025	Zach Savery	University of Delaware	Millie Dill, Kaylee Grace	CCD	10	0	Other	KPNO Sky cam linked on Weather page is frozen at 22:28 UTC May 15th. Forgot to report yesterday with losing the hours due to the dust/smoke. no other issues
05/15/2025	Zach Savery	University of Delaware	Millie Dill, Kaylee Grace	CCD	0	10	Other	Dust/Smoke particle level in the atmosphere prevented the dome from being opened.
05/13/2025	Alejandra Goded	IAC	No	ARC CCD	2	3	Clouds	Student research projects on exoplanet transit, 2nd half night.
05/11/2025	Gary D Henson	ETSU	none	Arc CCD and Spectrograph	0	8	Clouds	Clouds, some wind, chance of dust. Very poor night so never opened.
05/10/2025	William Keel	University of Alabama	3 cats	ARC CCD	4	0	No problems to report	Transient followup. Focus=423800; feels like focus has hysteresis of a few hundred units trying to reproduce it (focus did seem to slide around or jump a lot). Guide focus 32050.
05/07/2025	Todd Vaccaro	Ball State University	n/a	ARC	7	2	Clouds	eclipsing binary and other. Mountain closed first two hours for threatening clouds, so no eve flats. All seemed fine till the last hour when target was around +1.5 HA and the focus looked bad and couldn't recover; seemed a spontaneous shift out of nowhere. I was also thrown off for the first few hours of Bessel BV data as I had set the binning to single in the ARC Simple window, but the sequence had previously been used with the setting of the first two filters for 2 and I had BV double binned and my R single binned that worked with my flats obtained in the morning and the darks/bias frames from earlier before sunset, so I've asked on Discord for Bessel BV double binned flats and bias frames if someone can share. Shortly after zenith parking the scope and starting my morning flats I lost connection to both computers and it took a few minutes to regain connection, but all was still as I left it and I rushed to finish flats. I stowed the scope, shut the mirror covers and dome and homed the dome, watching with the camera.