Walter's LogBook
	June 2007

Overview

Steady as she goes! The automated variable star imaging is humming right along and the 10 nights of imaging was a new record for June.

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, June 2007
Night	Imaging Time (s)	Exposure Time (s)	# Targets	# Exposures
2007-06-14	18600	15220	80	296
2007-06-15	18991	16080	51	219
2007-06-18	18854	16640	37	147
2007-06-19	16340	14240	33	122
2007-06-21	19070	16620	41	156
2007-06-22	16321	14280	31	119
2007-06-23	19134	16360	49	168
2007-06-24	15747	12160	63	223
2007-06-26	19341	16460	56	228
2007-06-27	17546	15500	45	180
10 nights	179944 (49.98 hr)	153560 (42.66 hr)	486	1858

Session Notes

Mon/Tue, June 18/19, 2007

I watched 2 Iridium flares and 1 pass of ISS/Shuttle (docked) tonight:

Sat	Time (EDT)	Mag	Alt	Az	Comment
Ir8	21:35:45	-3	56d	60d (ENE)	twilight sky
ISS	22:14:56	-0.8		67d (SSW)	22:12:05 EDT 10d WNW..22:16:34 EDT 22d SE
Ir12	23:10:07	-7	23d	36d (NE)

I was a little late starting tonight's imaging session -- there was some cloud around in the evening but the night turned out to be quite usable otherwise.

Around 3am the dome passed through the home position going clockwise, which screwed up the azimuth readout and put the dome out of synch with the scope. As it happens, I got really lucky. V542 Cyg was completely blocked by the dome, but was only 4 exposures (6 plate solve failtures will end the run). Then the remaining targets for the night were all within 10 degrees of the zenith, so the dome azimuth didn't matter! Talk about luck!

I have been lucky the last few weeks to have been able to avoid having the dome go through the home position moving CW by simply by dropping half a dozen stars from my plan. However, the sky is moving along as the season progresses (plus I was almost an hour late starting last night) and this period of luck is coming to an end.

Thu/Fri, June 21/22, 2007

The CSC said it would be cloudy tonight, but it was clear! I watched ISS go by low in the west and then opened the dome and did dark frames. Session ran until it clouded over at around 03:25, about 20 minutes before the end of astro twilight.

June 2007

I built a little VB app to help me do variable star photometry in MaxIm. It shows some information from the FITS header (right side, below the check boxes), some information on the variable, and can also calculate the (x,y) position of the variable in the image. This was fairly easy to do by using the scripting capabilities of MaxIm, ACP, and PinPoint.