SARA-KP Report Archive

Date	Name	Affiliation	Other Observers	Instrument	Hours Observed	Hours Lost	Observing Program
04/25/2021	Gary Henson	ETSU	none	Spectrograph	4	5	Spectroscopy of Massive Stars -- No equipment problems but bright Moon with significant cirrus clouds for most of the night hampered observations.
04/24/2021	Todd Vaccaro	BSU	Nicolette Terracciano	ARC	5	2.5	Eclipsing binary program. 2 min dark showed bright bottom right corner and top right corner, but 30 second darks used didn't have issues. CCD maintained -99C. Focus wasted about 1.5 hrs from finding optimum focus at the beginning of night and again 2/3 of the way through as it seemed to have lost focus. Last hour lost as tele pointed 311 Az/46 Alt in NW showing trailing stars and wouldn't stop, so I closed up.
04/20/2021	XIANMING HAN	Butler University	Andrew Gebken	CCD	9	0	eclipsing binary The filter wheel froze frequently. In the end, I decided to use just one filter instead.
04/18/2021	James Webb	Florida International University	none	ccd	8	1	Blazar microvariability Focus took off again. Took over an hour to get it back.
04/18/2021	James Webb	Florida International University	none	ccd	8	1	Blazar microvariability, Focus took off and it took a while to get the focus back, Weird! Telescope was stuck on west limit when I logged in. I had to back it off the limit using t soft hand paddle.
04/13/2021	Ted von Hippel	ERAU	no one	none used	0	all	The night originally belonged to TAMUC colleagues but was made available after the camera cooler worked. We had thought it could be useful for our purposes but found that the excessive dark current (and to some degree other problems such as focus jumps), made the telescope + imager unusable for our purposes.
04/05/2021	James Raymond Webb	Florida International University	none	CCD	0	10	local network down
04/14/2021	VanHamme	FIU	samec	Research Camera	0	11	Observations of eclipsing Binarirs
04/12/2021	Saida Caballero	FIT	Klare, Fowler, Zamora	Spectrograph	8	0	Spectroscopy of Be stars
04/10/2021	Ted von Hippel	ERAU	Sarah Kokinakkis	imaging	5	5	Observing program: identifying H alpha excess objects Problems: the high dark current on the CCD was a bigger problem than expected both operationally and for our project. Operationally, the previous observer had left the guider pick-off in the beam center and the telescope was out of focus. Add that to the unreliability of focus position and the fact that using the auxiliary instruments window repeatedly crashed ACE (necessary to first see if the pick-off mirror was in the beam and then necessary to move the pick-off), and we spent some hours before we could find targets and obtain focus. From a project perspective, it isn't clear that these data will dark-subtract well enough to see faint H alpha emission, but we'll see ...
04/07/2021	Keefe Kamp	Florida Tech	Fowler, Klare, Le, Malagon	Spectrograph	7	0	Spectroscopy of Massive Stars. Everything went well with the spectrograph however partway through the night the Guide Camera could not be focused. Would not initialize and would only "focus" up (Positive)
04/06/2021	Saida Caballero	FIT	N/A	Spectrograph	0	10	CCD still not in use. Planned on spectroscopy observations, but too many clouds at the start of the night.