On the night of Oct 16/17, 2017, capstone student Victor Rau-Sirois and I spent 4 hours at the Observatory.
Our first job was to re-align the telescope mount; this was more a matter of forcing the LX200 software to recognize its position than actually having to modify the mount's orientation. We did make a small adjustment to the mount, after which the software was able to slew to Vega and (after we made a final manual adjustment, mostly in RA), declare success. We re-set the park position as well, so that the optical tube should be vertical.
The main setup was:
Conditions were good:
After that, we turned to one of the objects on Victor's list of possible variable stars: NSV 13854, also known as HD 206695. One of the sources for this object's suspected variability is
The target is at
RA = 21 42 07.8786 Dec = +54 49 17.837
A chart made with Aladin, based on the DSS2 Red plates, is shown below. The chart is 36 x 36 arcminutes on a side, with North up, East to the left.
The bright stars are HR 8290 at middle right, and HD 206823 at lower left.
We did not use the guider this evening. Over the course of about 1.2 hours, the stars showed a relatively steady drift. Very rough average values are about 1 arcsec per minute West and 2 arcsec per minute South.
Last modified 10/17/2017 by MWR.