On the night of Mar 26/27, 2019, two activities took place at the Observatory. The ordinary one involved additional measurements of a star for Kain McCall's capstone project. The extraordinary one was the test of a star-tracker for a space telescope on our 14-inch mount.
Physics major Kain McCall is checking a number of stars in the Northern Sky Variability Survey (NSVS) to find out if they really are variable; and, if so, how they vary. His most recent target is ASAS J101435+2324.9 , which also appears in several other catalogs:
Kain opened the dome, set up all the equipment, and acquired a couple of hours of measurements in the V-band.
NASA is funding the CIBER-2 rocket-launched space telescope mission, which will study the light from very distant galaxies. In order to understand the data collected by the telescope during its flight, scientists must know exactly where it was pointing. Professor Mike Zemcov, of RIT's School of Physics and Astronomy, is leading the effort to build a "star tracker:" a small telescope and camera which will detect stars and match their positions to known stars in catalogs. This star-tracking instrument is known as CSTARS.
Zemcov and his team can shine lights into the telescope in the lab, making artificial stars, but they would like to test both the hardware and the software on the real sky. So, this afternoon, they brought their equipment out to the RIT Observatory. Here it is, resting on the floor. Light enters the black tube from the right, and is focused on a sensor inside the silvery cylinder.
After a bit of a struggle, we attached it to the mount normally used for our 14-inch telescope.
We then waited for the sun to go down, so we might see stars.
After about 7:30 PM, the sky DID grow dark. We acquired a good deal of data, but were unable to pick out stars in the quick-look display. Mike and his team are investigating the results ...
Last modified 03/27/2019 by MWR.