Mission 8 - 16 September 2007

On this page we will give you a daily logging of our mission.

Thursday, 6 September 2007
We are in the last days before our departure to the observatory of Saint-Véran. The normal preparation stress comes up. Make sure we have everything with us, being good prepared, ...
Our observing program is nearly the same as last year :

  • photometric observations of exo-planets
  • photometric observations of some minor planets to determine theirs rotational period
  • Some deep sky astrophotography, using different instruments

We will go to the observatory on Saturday the 8th of September.

Saturday, 8 September 2007
We arrived successfully at the observatory. The sky was clear, so we could dream of a nice week full of observations.


The first sunset shows immediately the green flash! The week couldn't start better.

Sunday, 9 September 2007
Today we start to organize ourselfs for the nightly observations


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
This morning the sun is back.


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
The mission comes in a good shape after 2 nights with succesfull observations. We need to do some changes to the tip-tilt system to use the system with the new camera on the T62.


This night we like to see if these adaptations are successfull...

Wednesday, 19 September 2007
We are back in Belgium and we can look back at a wonderfull mission 2007. We had te opportunity to observe for 7 to 7 nights and bring back more than 20GB and 2000 images to process. For sure, it will give us a lot of pleasure for the coming weeks and months, to pre-process, process and analyse all these pictures. I can give you already a preview of what is coming with the follwoing image. By clicking on it, you will be able to see the image in full resolution (3Kx3K, 3.4MB). Enjoy!

high resolution image

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:

M31 - 20cm f/4 Flat field - Apogee U9000 click image for full resolution



NGC884 - 20cm f/4 Flat field - Apogee U9000 - filter h-alpha - T:100min click image for full resolution



M8 - M20 - 20cm f/4 Flat field - Apogee U9000 - filter h-alpha - T:100min click image for full resolution



NGC7822 - 20cm f/4 Flat field - Apogee U9000 - filter h-alpha - T:100min click image for full resolution



NGC2244 - Rosette nebula - 20cm f/4 Flat field - Apogee U9000 - filter h-alpha - T:100min click image for full resolution



IC405 - 20cm f/4 Flat field - Apogee U9000 - filter h-alpha - T:100min click image for full resolution



IC1805 - 20cm f/4 Flat field - Apogee U9000 - filter h-alpha - T:100min click image for full resolution



M45 - 20cm f/4 Flat field - Apogee U9000 - T:100min click image for full resolution



M33 - 20cm f/4 Flat field - Apogee U9000- T:100min click image for full resolution



IC5067 - The Pelican Nebula - 20cm f/4 Flat field - Apogee U9000- T:100min click image for full resolution



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Last updated on 19th of September, 2007
Homepage made by AstroDuvel. Email:mailto:Dominique.Suys@pandora.be. Comments and suggestions are welcome!
Copyright © Dominique Suys 2007
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