Walter's LogBook
	January 2007

Overview

The P4 computer is finally fixed and back to full power! Comet McNaught (C/2006 P1) was a grand spectacle, though its minimal elongation made for small windows of opportunity at dawn or dusk. DW Cancrii had an unusually bright outburst (3 mags above normal!) this month and I may well be the only one that caught it. Very exciting stuff! I scanned 3548 galaxy images in the search for supernovae this month.

The SXV-H9 is the imaging camera, with exposures for variable stars of 120 seconds at 4x4 binning (unguided). This month's session notes are below the overview section.

Monthly Statistics, January 2007
Night	Imaging Time (s)	Exposure Time (s)	# Targets	# Exposures	T (C)	/\T
01/16/07	43328	38040	64	317	-8.7	-5.5
01/20/07	44477	37680	65	314	-7.6	-3.4
01/24/07	43091	36840	66	307	-5.2	-6.5
01/25/07	23962	20520	39	171	-8.5	-3.8
01/26/07	22015	19200	36	160	-8.9	-2.6
01/29/07	39262	27720	57	231	-6.7	-5.8
6 nights	216135 (60.04 hr)	180000 (50.00 hr)	327	1500

Session Notes

2007 January 9/10

Just before sunrise, I walked to the east side of Winchester to try to see Comet McNaught (C/2006 P1) but there was too much cloud around the east horizon (the northerly horizons were clear).

2007 January 10/11

I walked over to Mount Winchester (at least that's what I call it), a tall, man-made hill immediately south of the arena, arriving right at sunset. There was a stiff NW wind blowing which made conditions miserable, but at least the sky was clear (a rarity of late). I first spotted the comet with binoculars at 16:54, then a few minutes later with the naked eye. By 17:15 the comet was quite obvious to the naked eye, and anyone who happened to look at that part of the sky, even though it was only about 5 degrees above the horizon and the sun was only about 5 degrees below it! I was able to see it from the east end of the Victoria Street extension just at the top of some distant trees, and barely over the bungalow roofs. I was quite frozen after 45 minutes outside (should have worn my observing clothes!) but it was a very successful session. P1 has a nice tail in binoculars and to the naked eye, and will go down as one of the brightest and most memorable comets of the last 25 years! (Its small elongation notwithstanding!)

2007 January 24/25

The CSC called for some cloudiness from 3am onwards and this seems to be what happened. Nevertheless, the observatory continued imaging right until the end of astronomical twilight. I ran the Live Session page tonight starting shortly after 18:00 and at one point there were 10 people connected (the limit of the IIS server included with XP Pro)! I was able to build a Windows script which can FTP the HTM file (every 20 seconds) and JPG (every 120 seconds) file used in the Live Session page out to my webhost account at Netfirms, so this will eliminate the 10 person limit!

Tonight I imaged DW Cancrii in outburst. In fact, it seemed impossibly bright at 11.36 (CCDV) although being so bright it was, in fact, saturated. Nevertheless, the AAVSO chart lists its maximum magnitude as "15v" so something interesting must be happening here! This is possibly the first recorded outburst of DW Cnc!

JAN 26.4340	13.56	V	CTX
JAN 25.2941	11.36	V	MDW
JAN 21.3169	15.29	V	MDW
JAN 17.2918	15.45	V	MDW

DW Cancrii
	2007 Jan 21, 07:33:18 UTC. 3 x 120s
	2007 Jan 25, 07:05:38 UTC. 2 x 120s
The unusually bright outburst of DW cnc.

2007 January 26/27

I ran the Live Session page again tonight. Around 00:30 there was a USB lockup (as usual, just as an autofocus was starting). Although I didn't get up and discover this until 04:30, from the images I could see it was clouding up pretty good at the time of the last image, so I really didn't lose much sky. As a result of this, I decided that I should probably cycle the power on the two USB2 hubs I use (I haven't unplugged them since last summer!). Also, I decided to write a watchdog script to monitor the most recent time listed in the ACP log file. If this time differs by more than 5 minutes from the system time, music will play to wake me up.

2007 January 29/30

Yet another variable star imaging session with the Live Session page running. I tweaked the script that runs the LS page to play music if there is a USB lockup, so that is done.

There was slop in the dec gear tonight, which made the pointing accuracy poor; since the forecast low was -28C tonight (and there was a significant breeze too), there was no way I was going out to the dome to fix it! I tweaked the dec gear in the afternoon of Jan 30th with the sun shining and the temperature up to a balmy -10C! Those are much better conditions to work in, plus I wasn't tired and the chances of losing the small screws that hold the dec assembly cover on were much lower.