On the night of Sep 14/15, 2020, RIT physics major Evan Muskopf joined me at the Observatory for a session of photometry on his target, the eclipsing binary star RT And.
In addition to acquiring images of his target tonight, Evan also took careful notes on all our procedures. He is making a checklist to help him (and future students) set up and put away all the equipment properly. He put a copy on a Google drive we share with other students, and he'll be modifying it over the next few sessions to make sure it is complete.
We opened at 8:15 PM on this evening. The skies were said to be clear by all the weather services, but I could only make out the brighter stars in each constellation -- maybe down to mag 2 or 3. I think smoke from the big wildfires on the West Coast was dimming the light of all celestial objects; the sunsets have been extra colorful in the past few days, and a waning crescent Moon in the early morning sky looked very orange.
Just after I placed the CCD camera on the telescope, it slipped off; evidently, I did not tighten the set screw sufficiently. Fortunately, the bungee cord we use as a safety device helped me to catch the camera before it fell very far, and no harm was done.
We started taking images of RT And around 9:46 PM, using 5-second exposures in the R-band. We continued until 11:07 PM, taking a set of 317 images in that span of time.
Last modified 9/21/2020 by MWR.