On this page we will give you a daily logging of our mission. Thursday, 6 September 2007
We will go to the observatory on Saturday the 8th of September. Saturday, 8 September 2007 The first sunset shows immediately the green flash! The week couldn't start better. Sunday, 9 September 2007 and to explore the new instruments in the observatory. The second dome is nearly finished and equipped with a Losmandy Titan mount. The second new instrument is the Apogee U9000 CCD camera, with a 36mmx36mm CCD chip: We installed the new camera on a 20cm flat field telescope for wide field astrophotography. A nice sunset but also some clouds concludes the day. During the night, the main telescope was pointed to the star GSC 3089:929 to measure the transit of its planet TRES-3b. The night was stable, but lightning near the Italian border, could influence the accuracy. Analysis afterwards gives us a nice curve: The accuracy is estimated to 2 milimagnitudes in the beginning of the observation run and ends with an estimated accuracy of 4 millimagnitudes. We are happy with this result. Further in depth analysis has to be performed later in the coming weeks. Outside the observatory, we observed visually with our proper instruments to enjoy the clear and transparant night. At 2 o'clock in the night, clouds covered the sky and we had even some snow! Monday, 10 September 2007 During the night, the T62 was again working for some photometry on exo-planets, this time on the planet TRES-1b. In the second part of the night, we did some photometry on the minor planet (88) Beatrix to help to determine its shape. The second dome is this time also open. The Flat field telescope is equiped with the new Apogee CCD camera. Our first goal is to get used to the new mount and camera. After a while, we could start some real imaging. Here an example of NGC 1499, better known as the California nebula. This image is only preprocessed. No post-processing is happed yet. The combination of this camera with this telescope seems to be a good mariage... Tuesday, 11 September 2007 This night we like to see if these adaptations are successfull... Wednesday, 19 September 2007 This image of the Rosette nebula in Monoceros is made by using a 20cm f/4 Flat Field Lichtenknecker telescope and a Apogee U9000 camera equipped with an h-alpha filter. The exposure time is 100 minutes. Fully preprocessed (bias, dark, flats) and some changes using curves is the only action taken during the post processing. This is a photo of the setup: Thanks for following us during this mission. We hope to see you back next year. In the mean time, keep following our website, as we will publish here the results of this mission as soon as they are available.
Some other results from our missions:
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Last updated on 19th of September,
2007
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2007
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