SARA-KP Report Archive

Date	Name	Affiliation	Other Observers	Instrument	Hours Observed	Hours Lost	Observing Program
12/15/2020	Steve Gillam	ERAU	Leila Alamos	ARC CCD	10	2	RoAp stars. The focus continued to be problem. The smallest repeatable unit of secondary mirror motion appeared to 15,000 - 25,000 encoder units. This made it impossible to focus precisely. Consistent changes in FWHM of star images resulted when jogging the focus un the "+" direction. There was not consistent focusing behavior when jogging in "-" direction. At the star of the night on 12/14 stars were focused at 300,000 units. (1.0- 1.5" seeing in a 15 sec exposure.) on 12/15, the best focus (again 1.0' - 2.0" FWHM) was obtained at 520,200 units. At one point, we moved the mirror back to the zero and re-fucsed. This did not improve the focusing performance. Further, the focus radically changed when we moved to a new target.
12/14/2020	Steve Gillam	ERAU	Leila Alamos	ARC camera	10	0	Rapidly-oscillating Ap stars. The sky was clear and the transparency very high all night. We had difficulty focusing. It seemed that changes in focus from a few hundred to 6000 units made no difference to FWHMs. FWHMs would change minutes after the focus had been changed. We could not make small changes to the FWHM. It appeared that the stars were either in focus (at around 300000 units) or they were donuts.
12/12/2020	Samalka Anandagoda	Clemson University	Kyle Pellegrin	ARC CCD	4	6	GRB afterglows, Ring Nebula. Hours were lost due to cloud cover and increasing humidity.
12/12/2020	Samalka Anandagoda	Clemson University	Kyle Pellegrin	ARC CCD	4	6	GRB afterglows, ring nebula... Some hours were lost due to t
12/10/2020	William Keel	University of Alabama	Fluffiest Cat	ARC camera	0	12	Dead-quasar survey. Or that was the plan. Gave up watching humidity at 0100 MST.
12/09/2020	Samalka Anandagoda	Clemson University	-	ARC CCD	0	12	GRB afterglows. Could not observe due to clouds and rain.
12/07/2020	Keefe Kamp	Florida Tech	Me, Myself and I	Spectrograph	0	14	Spectrograph darks were taken without a problem, but then clouds came.
12/06/2020	Todd Vaccaro	Ball State University	Melanie Isenbarger	Leach Camera	9	2	Lost 2 hrs messing with focus
12/04/2020	Keefe Kamp	Florida Tech	Sydney, Tobolski, Minh Le, Saida Caballero	ARC CCD, Spectrograph	7	0	Cyg X-1 and Be Star Spectroscopy. Only minor problems occurred. During Use of the ARC CCD, a few of the exposure there are issues tracking causing the stars to line; however it stopped without intervention. One of our spectra did not readout. MaximDL froze, saying "reading" for several minutes.
12/03/2020	Gary Henson	ETSU	none	CCD & Spectrograph	8	2	Excellent track Rate of 15.055, +0.011 Spectroscopy of Massive Stars and M31 H-alpha Monitoring
12/03/2020	Gary Henson	ETSU	none	CCD & Spectrograph	8	2	Spectroscopy of Massive Magnetic Stars and Colliding Wind Binaries, Monitoring M31 in H-alpha ----- Tracking Rates 15.055, +0.011 excellent for 5 min exposure on M31
12/02/2020	Nayra Rodriguez	IAC	none	ARC CCD	8	3	Student research projects on exoplanet transits. The focus was good practically all night at 335000. Had to close around 01:30 MST due to wind speeds ~ 40 mph.