December 2019 – IMT3b Observatory

Analysis Report for first partial Exoplanet Data – IMT3 Observatory

I managed to get only 45 minutes worth of data the other night to test if I could both acquire data and then process it. It took some time to get the downloaded HOPS software from the ExoClock mission working on my Mac, but with the help of Angelos from the project. So I opened the 46 images, I did not capture darks or flats and of course no bias due to it being a CMOS camera. I added information about the observatory and then ran the reduction and alignment code.

Completion of details and opening of 46 images

So the initial chart looked promising, I had taken the first set of frames almost on time for the transit even though you are supposed to start 1 hour before. This was because it took me so long to setup. So the data looks like it shows a decrease in brightness over the 45mins, however I have asked Angelos for his opinion and await a response.

I then selected the target star, KELT-18 with the red circle below, along with 5 comparison stars. I may have selected stars incorrectly here as they are probably suppose to be not variable.

The resulting table appeared with the size of the box for each star and its position.

I then ran the photometry code and the following chart was created which to me showed I had done something wrong given the scatter.

Graph output with actual photometric values and PSF in red

I then for fun ran the fitting code from this screen.

The fitting showed and increase in brightness which was clearly incorrect. So I have learned a few things with this, first is to read up on using the software for analysis, second is to gain more data and calibration frames.

Resulting output clearly showing problems with data

Viewing Report 29th December 2019 – IMT3 Observatory

Viewing time period – 17:43 – 17:48

EXOPLANET – HAT-P-20b

Slightly hazy right now but I have opened the dome up and turned the cooling fans on the 12″. Slewed to Atik, a mag 2.8 star in Perseus and aligned the scope.

Atik mag 2.8 star in Perseus for alignment

So the star was almost in the centre when I slewed the scope to it, a slight tweak and now synced on it centrally. The Hitec Astro weather station reports slight haze

Hitec Astro Weather Station showing haze

Gingergeek installed a new Intel Windows small form factor computer recently in replacement for the RPi so we could run the AllSkEye software and see if the loss of one of the colour channels was software or hardware. Here is tonights image, which still needs colour calibrating during the day.

Viewing Report 25th December 2019 – IMT3 Observatory

Viewing time period – 19:10 – 20:32

EXOPLANET – KELT-18b

As always on Christmas Day, or at least it seems so, the sky was clear for a period of time before the clouds rolled in. The day was dry and cold, sunny and bright, the first time in over a month of rain. Now was the time to take a look at a star and see if I could calibrate my setup for imaging an exoplanet transit.

I used the exoclock.space website to find objects for my location and then entered the RA and DEC into The Sky X (TSX) and slewed to it. The star and its associated planet tonight was KELT-18 and the planet KELT-18b. This was very low to the North when I slewed and I struggled doing a slew and sync with the scope in TSX due to not enough stars found.

So instead I placed the RA and DEC into SGPro and asked that to perform a slew and solve, which incidentally worked an absolute treat. The star was centred in the middle of the FoV and the star pattern matched that from the Exoclock website which they give you.

Kelt-18b details including interactive star map

I then setup SGPro to take as many images as I could, each being 1min long as I could not find a guide star. At 1min I did not get any trailing and I should have said, all of this through the 12″. I set the cooler to -28℃ which consumed about 26% power so nicely cold. I choose the red filter as described to lower the amount of noise in the image and allow calibration with other astronomers images.

I had to change the user profile to the Comet profile as I did not wan the guider trying to settle, so restarted the run and was off. I managed to go for around an hour and thus grabbed 46 images. I am not sure if I can use the HOPS software from Exoclock to plot these but will try. I did not bother with calibration frames and if needed I can grab some later.

Either way, a good hours viewing in-between the outgoing festive cheer from one side of my family and the incoming festive cheer tomorrow from the other.

Merry Christmas and Clear Skies

Viewing Report 1st December 2019 – IMT3 Observatory

Viewing time period – 19:03 – 21:27

Tonight I wanted to get the PHD2 guiding working when doing a meridian flip without the need to calibrate. A month ago we still failed to get this done, however a little experimenting tonight and changing a single setting has corrected the problem. The setting was the ‘Reverse Dec Outputted After Meridian Flip’ one within the Guiding table of the Advanced Setup, for which I ticked and this fixed the issue.

Reverse DEC output after meridian flip needed ticking!

I then decided to try 2 objects either side of the meridian and that worked manually slewing to each and then guiding. What did not work was the slewing automatically to the object in terms of centring on the screen. It slewed to the star, I could see it on the screen, the first object Almach worked ok, but the second object, Deneb appeared on the screen but failed to centre with the error ‘ Failed to auto centre, aborting sequence’ followed by ‘ failed to centre on object with an error less than 50 pixels’. Plate solving works fine, well at least it comes back with success.

So I tried different sets of co-ordinates from TSX including the Topocentric and 2000.0 sets. Neither made a difference, with 2000.0 data used I still got this set of errors which shows an error in pixels of more than 50 in DEC.

So I decided it might be the very bright object I had picked, star in this case, that was causing the problem. So to further my experimentation this evening I choose two different and less bright objects, M36 and M39, once again on different sides of the Meridian. Success !!

So after fixing this I am now happy to go off to bed early (9:30 work tomorrow) with a job well done.

Clear Skies 🙂