Observing Report: May 28

The night went exactly as planned. The clouds vanished around 8:30p and a modestly clear night ensued. The data set from the night is pleasing to the eye, but may not be worth while since the night was not perfectly photometric. Still, we shall see how good it comes out when I reduce it and analyze it in the coming weeks. It was a good end to the week as I now turn and head back to Dartmouth where I will finish up with classes and then enter into the summer months with a (hopefully) good set of data, all 22GB of it! I hope to have something to report on from this data set, and if I do, I will certainly let everyone know.

Observing Report: May 27

The night began as predicted. Storm clouds rushed in and sat overhead for the first hour or so. Once they cleared, and the weather predictions indicated that no more fronts were approaching, it was time to open the dome. Seeing was decent throughout most of the night. It wasn't until about 2:30a that things deteriorated. Seeing became horrible. Some sneaky cirrus clouds may have moved in unnoticed, I am still not entirely sure, but even at low airmasses the seeing was around 1.8" compared to the usual 1.2"->1.5". I tended to focus on objects that were yielding good images without adjusting the focus on the telescope since that can be a time consuming process. Once again the clouds hampered any opportunity to take evening twilight sky flats so I will once again be up a bit longer taking dome flats. Although I could more than likely use flats from other nights, since the detector has been kept at a constant temperature (-120 C), it is better to be safe than sorry and have dome flats on reserve just in case the sky flats from various nights highlight different detector characteristics. Aside from the clouds, no technical problems were encountered, thankfully!

Observing Report: May 26

Well I was finally able to open up last night around 8:30p. This didn't mean that the clouds had relented entirely. They persisted for a little longer, until around 9:00p. It turned out this wasn't too bad since I still needed to focus the telescope and get everything in order. I was able to observe 6 of my 8 objects and several of the photometric standard fields which are used to calibrate the images when it comes time to extract useful information from them. Conditions steadily improved over the course of the night and by 1:30a the seeing was down to about 1.2", allowing for some decent exposures. The data will still most likely not be of any use, though, since the conditions were not of the quality needed for scientific measurements. In the twilight of early morning, I was able to obtain sky flats in the R and I filters, or ~630nm and ~800nm pass bands. Since I was not able to obtain sky flats in the B and V filters, or ~430nm and ~540nm pass bands, I stayed up for about an hour longer in order to take dome flats in those two filters.

MDM

It is official: I have confirmed the booking of a plane ticket to Tucson, AZ for my first observing run. This is very exciting. I have focused most of my career on the theoretical, modelling side of astrophysics, while only working with observational data during the summer of 2007 while at the University of Rochester. Even there, though, the data was taken using the Spitzer Space Telescope and sent through a series of pipelines and initial data reduction before being logged and archived on a server at Cornell.

Now, I get to take the data myself. Point the telescope, focus the lens and get my hands "dirty" taking data on the top of a lonely mountain in the Arizona desert. Whereby "dirty" I mean I will probably get orange finger tips from a bag of Cheetos as I sit at the desk and tell the computer what to do. Either way, my hands will be dirty!

This run is kind of short notice and was not actually planned until Wednesday when I got an offer to go and train for a few days before my big run in May. Since the data in May will need to be very accurate, I will need to cut down on human induced errors, aka: stupid me. So arose the prospect for a training weekend. I will still be taking data, obviously, but the need to super high accuracy may not be necessary since I still have 5 nights in May.

The telescope I will be using is the 1.3m McGraw-Hill telescope at the MDM Observatory located on Kitt Peak in Tucson, AZ. Right next door to this scope is the 2.4m telescope which another professor from Dartmouth will be working on. He will be the one training me, but he will spend most of his time on the 2.4m, taking data for another professor at another university who is apparently in Chile on an observing run.

So with only a weeks notice and little time to prepare for the upcoming run, it should be a good trip and an interesting time atop the mountain.