Observing Techniques: (remote) observing

Technical information on the telescopes can be found starting from here and there is also a gallery of objects taken which might excite your imagination. I found that the CCD attached to the AREO-1 reached saturation at about 46,000 counts. Also, the standard filters (Luminance,Red,Green,Blue) can on request be replaced by these ones: R, V, B, C, Ha, SII, OIII and Infrared.

La Palma proposal template (tar file)

New Mexico site:
105^o 31' 44" West
32^o 54' 14" North
GMT-7

Website: www.arnierosner.com
Our scopes:

AREO1: Mewlon f/11.9 30cm

AREO2: Mewlon f/11.9 30cm

AREO3: Sky 90mm

AREO4: Epsilon Astrograph f/3.4 25cm

AREO5: Epsilon Astrograph f/3.4 25cm

The text section of the website contains information on equipment
including filters.
account info

Ideas:

asteroids with known positions, R,I band photometry
colour-colour diagram of a nearby star cluster (min 3 filters)
on-band off-band photometry of a planetary nebula
B,R band photometry of nearby galaxies, perhaps see dust lane

occultations

Asteroidal Occultations

Cepheiden in a globular cluster

See also the project archive of students at Ohio University on observations carried out with a similar telescope. Most of these cannot be exactly duplicated owing to the season being different, but there are some great ideas which can be applied to different objects.

Getting started:

work out visibilty around the appropriate dates; recall that (by definition) the Sun is at Right Ascension RA=0 at approximate date March 21. Fro this it follows that a star with RA=12 is on the meridian close to midnight on this date. For each month later add 2h of RA, so a star with RA=6 should be on the meridian close to midnight on December 21.

time allocation

Current timetable for the remote observing (you must arrive in plenty of time as the telecope does not wait!):


I have asked for a booking which gives us
a choice of telescope, as shown in the 
following TABLE OF TIMES and TELESCOPES.
Areo-2 has small pixels for good astrometry.
Areo-4 has a large field.
Note also that the filter sets are different, as shown below:
                
               OBSERVING SCHEDULE
                                                                              
Harriet  Monday    October 10  9-11     areo-2  LRGB       30m cluster    90m mars/kuiper-belt

Rebecca  Wednesday October 12  9-11     areo-5  BVR etc    80m galaxies   40m cluster  

Maarten  Thursday  October 13  9-10     areo-4  BVR etc    60m cluster  
                               10-11    areo-5  LRGB       60m galaxies

Tessel   Monday    October 17  9-9:40   areo-4  BVR etc    40m cluster  
                               9:40-11  areo-5  LRGB       80m galaxies

Eva      Wednesday October 19  9-11     areo-2  LRGB       30m cluster     90m mars/kuiper-belt

Note: you can check the visibility of your potential targets by using this aid (for the "site" choose "Kitt Peak" which is very close to the New Mexico observatory)

This image illustrates that stars with greater RA rise later, one hour for each hour of RA. Indeed, this is exactly how the RA of stars is traditionally measured (the relative time at which a star appears in the viewfinder of a "meridian transit" telescope which can only scan along the median.

A star (here OBJ2) whose declination equals the value of the local latitude, here 32^o) will eventually cross through the zenith. Notice the behaviour of OBJ1 and OBJ3, which have Declination of 52^o and 12^o respectively. Note that OBJ4, which is a "southern star", reaches an observable elevation, at least for a couple of hours.

The Kapteyn institute page astroresources has links to catalogues, where you can find (e.g.) coordinates and magnitudes.

Exercises

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