Fourth Day: Kuiper!

We found out Sunday that we accidentally left a filter for the camera in Kenosha and had to have it sent to us, so the fourth day in Tucson started with a mad dash to the Arizona campus to pick it up. After waiting for the (late) Fex-Ex truck, we did a run-through of a local grocery store to pick up supplies for the next three days on the mountain. We drove up the scenic Mt. Lemmon / General Hitchcock Hwy to get to Mt Bigelow, but we didn't have time to do more than stop briefly at a couple of the scenic overlooks. The couple we did stop at were beautiful, and I attached pictures from either the drive or the overlooks.

Once we finished the long and winding drive up to the mountain we were all very excited to finally get to the facility we will be working at. Our telescope is the 61-inch reflector (picture attached), and we were able to watch one of the Steward staff install the filter we brought and see how our camera and mount were attached. We got a crash-course in preparing and opening the telescope, and even though it was early we decided to open and try taking sky flats. Flats are images taken (usually) of a blank white screen to determine if the optical configuration is producing any vignetting (uneven illumination of the field of view that occurs when the scope is capturing a wider field of view than it can actually see) or if there are any other irregularities caused by the optics.

We waited an hour or so for it to get dark enough, then we hooked up the webcam and started taking our first images of Jupiter. It was interesting to watch the Jupiter group experimenting with the focus (done by hand), and the images we recorded became progressively better. A couple people started stacking the individual webcam frames to produce images, which I think at least one person already posted. After Jupiter moved too low in the sky to image we moved on to looking at planetary nebulae. This was very interesting as well, and required the use of the observatory CCD camera and computer array so we all learned how to use them. There were a few wispy clouds that had us worried for a while, but thankfully it stayed clear enough for us to get some good work in.

Unfortunately the area suffered a major power outage in the early hours of the morning, leaving us with just the computer back-up power until someone could come start the generator for us. By the time we were up and running again the clouds had arrived and the sky was completely obscured, so as far as power outages go, this one was relatively well-timed. Sadly this did mean that we didn't get to do any imaging of Saturn, which is my group, so I don't have any images or data of my own to report. It looks like it will be a very nice night tonight (Wednesday), though, so hopefully we will have progress to report by tomorrow.

Jenny