Feb 28, 2018 UT: Checking NSV 02831 and NSV 03287

Michael Richmond
Mar 1, 2018

On the night of Feb 27/28, 2018, Victor Rau-Sirois and I took advantage of a rare, mostly-clear evening to monitor two of the stars in his capstone project.

The main setup was:

• Meade 12-inch telescope
• no focal reducer, so working at f/10
• Atik 11000 CCD camera
• ATIK EFW2 filterwheel with V filter
• images taken binned 2x2
• V-band focus position 0.334 (after moving a long way with the electric focuser)

Conditions were fair:

• a little light cirrus, which disappeared soon after we started
• bright Moon high in eastern sky

We used the login appropriate for class work, rather than the one I usually adopt for my own observations, and everything seemed fine.

We took a series of dark images. As usual, the pixel values in the darks do NOT rise steadily and linearly with exposure time; there is at least one jump backward, to smaller pixel values, when the exposure time exceeds about 2.2 seconds.

After focusing, we found a mediocre FWHM = 4 pixels. Ugh. Fortunately, for photometry of isolated stars, this doesn't hurt very much.

NSV 02831

The first target was NSV 02831, of which a finding chart appears below.

                                 RA    (J2000)    Dec              V

  NSV 02831                  06 07 21.9         +26 17 09     

  A = UCAC4 583-024488 	     06 07 57.355       +26 24 00.35      8.678

  B = UCAC4 583-024402 	     06 07 42.122       +26 25 55.01      9.051

  C = UCAC4 582-023609 	     06 07 17.515       +26 21 50.30     11.577

NSV 03287

The second target was NSV 03287 .

                                 RA    (J2000)    Dec              V

  NSV 03287                  06 57 06.2         +44 06 35 	   

  A = UCAC4 672-047819 	     06 57 20.876       +44 14 42.31     10.813

  B = UCAC4 672-047806 	     06 57 07.007       +44 12 42.14     11.102

  C = UCAC4 671-048799 	     06 57 08.550       +44 04 59.11     12.085

Last modified 3/1/2018 by MWR.