SARA 

Michael Fauerbach

FGCU

NA

CCD

0

10

Other

Except for some images of the Moon the rest of the images turned out to be all useless. There is a bright light that turns on every few seconds in the dome. Please see pictures in the Discord channel.

Todd Vaccaro

Ball State University

n/a

arc

0

11

Other

Domes are CLOSED due to: dust/smoke in the air High pollen counts. Never opened.

Ken Rumstay

VSU (Emeritus)

None

CCD camera

3

6

Clouds

AGN variability program. High cirrus and a gibbous Moon made for a bright sky. At about 04:30 UTC cloud cover became too extensive to proceed. No technical issues.

Gary Henson

ETSU

none

Spectrograph

6

.5

Equipment Failure

Spectroscopy of Be stars. Guide camera quit displaying images so lost long exposure, it did this twice then worked ok for next couple hours. Also had to drive Focus to zero and reset to get reliable focus change response going again.

Xianming Han

Butler University

none

ccd

8

2

Equipment Failure

Both the telescope and CCD computers rebooted themselves sometimes during the day. In late afternoon, the Dome status was blank, and called ACE, and Peter determined that the Dome UPS was off. He went to Kitt Peak (originally planned for something else) and turned it back on. Then I noticed the CCD temperature was 19C. I turned it on, took 2 hours to cool down sufficiently for observations. But now the bias values were at around 0 initially. But later it returned to its normal values (just below 200), may be Peter reset some parameters.

Xianming Han

Butler University

Betuel Paz

ccd

9.45

0

No problems to report

star

Michael Fauerbach

FGCU

NA

CCD

9

0

No problems to report

asteroid photometry.

James Webb

Florida International University

Chrissy, Georgie and Sparkle cats

CCD

6

0

No problems to report

Blazar microvariability S5 0716+71 and 1044+71 for WEBT consortium

Michael Fauerbach

FGCU

NA

CCD

9.5

0

No problems to report

Asteroid Photometry. After slewing to a new object it always took a couple of exposure before the telescope started tracking properly.

William Keel

University of Alabama

2 impatient cats

ARC CCD

2

8

Equipment Failure

Focus 119500. Guider not working - after reconnecting the QSI camera to Maxim, it disconnects with error code 30006 every time an exposure or guiding start is done (Maxim does seem able to control the spectrograph camera). Tried cycling telescope outlets and restarting NS/CC/ACE, but no joy. Tracking quality is highly variable around the sky; hour-long exposures for narrowband are right out.

Kurtis Williams

ETAMU

None

ARC/Leach

5

5

Software/Control PC Issues

Nice night. At least 1 hr lost due to user error (assuming 120 30s exposures was 2 hours). Rest of time was combo of user and software. I set up on a new target and snoozed deeper than intended. After 5 min, software stopped telescope tracking. When I awoke 4 hrs later, I had 4 hrs of star trails. Suspecting feline involvement, I restarted tracking but noticed that every couple of minutes ACE was throwing a quick red error (too fast to read) and tracking would stop again; status window showed a blue box with a statement that flexure file had been successfully loaded. I moved to another part of the sky, came back, and the red box stopped flickering. Telescope tracked fine for rest of night. (Error occurred at HA=-2, Dec=-03, in case that is relevant).

Kurtis Williiams

ETAMU

none

ARC

10.5

0

No problems to report

Nice night. Time-series white dwarf photometry. Decent seeing.