Forum der Vereinigung der Sternfreunde

WR2013 campaign

Last night (Sep.5) report: WR135 and WR134 were not complete with a third series because clouds came! WR1 suffered a bit from clouds at the begining, but the clouds cleared a bit after. We also got Nova spectrum, that Martin commented on earlier (Thank you, Martin).

Tonight we started only at 20:30UT. If clouds permit, we expect to have all program WR stars acquired in the three sets we want, also Bety and Zety (nice nicknames for our stars in Aquarius and Aquila, no?) We will decide later about doing the other "optional" targets depending on weather and available time, but we want to get all three, in triplicate, as expected.

We were a bit worried with the possibility of some high clouds jumping over us during the night.. I'm still not sure if we are clear of those, so we would obviously welcome observations from other sites... The clouds may be back closer to the end of the night..

Cheers,

Fil & Eva

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Fil.

It's Team #9 again to say three things:

Clouds! - It is probable that we will be clouded tonight (mostly at the beginning, i.e. affects WR targets)! Please observe!

We had a surprise visit from Carlos Martínez, sub-director of the IAC!
He stopped by with family in the afternoon and we briefly talked about what we are observing here and the instrumentation at the telescope.
I hope to not have said anything wrong in my "imperfect Spanish" about our targets and observation goals, but I did tell him the telescope is very good and behaving perfectly, as that has been our exact experience so far.

Cheers,

Fil & Eva

PS - We now have a semi-automated way (script) to get weather graphs from almost every weather station on Teide, for compiling an observation log. It works even better than I expected Only the amount of dust in the atmosphere is not automated, but can be fetched manually from Stella at any time! (http://stella.aip.de/stella/status/getd ... mit=submit)

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Fil.

...Well, it seems the clouds passed before the night came, or are passing under us; and the seeing is getting nicer.. So perhaps we will not be clouded tonight.

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Fil.

Hi Fil,

thanks for the observation log. Not all teams have done that, but it is very useful. I uploaded the latest Nova spectrum to the server. The spectra are much appreciated by our french colleagues.
One remark: the seeing image I could only open after changing the file extension to .PNG

Clear skies, Martin

We like the nova as well But we still need to become more efficient at fitting all targets in one night. Right now, the best we made was one exposure short of all three program WR stars, and this ended 90s after the telescope limit. This was possible in strait collaboration with the operator to make sure nothing went wrong. The following ThAr was taken with the scope "not tracking" This is what I call "cutting-edge observation"!

The night is still long enough to do everything, but things must all run according to plans...

Ah! PNG.. ok, Great thing you found that out!! That is a bug on our script it shall be corrected.


Tonight we are a little bit behind schedule, because we were finghting stars that did not like to be round.. For the looks of it, we might again not be able to fit novaDel again in the schedule

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Fil.

IAC-80 is powering up, and a good night awaits us!
Last night we managed to take spectra of all program stars in triplicate, as desired, just 8 minutes before the telescope would reach the limit! However, we did not observe Nova Delphini..
data in montreal..
So, to commemorate our achievement, tonight we hope to repeat this but also with nova del spectra!
We expect nova del spectra be taken somewhere between 00:00 and 01:30 UT.

Dome is now moving, like a bell ringing for work!

PS - It is great when we discuss stuff with multiple operators, and neighbouring telescope observers.. We learned a lot about FOVIA during dinner! Great knowledge exchange and very nice people!

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Fil.

Hello again,

Well, this is one more night at IAC-80, now we have some clouds in sight, slowly approaching from SouthEast. It the clouds descend, as it has happened in previous nights, we are OK, if not, then not

Last night we again did not observe the nova No time for it..
Anyway, here is a graphical representation of last night's observation schedule.
Seeing was never "good", but it became insanely bad from the middle of the night to the end (over 3" seeing)!

Any feedback on the spectra quality is appreciated, even if just an empirical analysis... We are convinced the signal is not "super", and we are currently blaming seeing for it.. However, if different opinions point to our procedures, we would love to correct them
Right now, we can do little more than comparing our FITs with previous teams' and looking at seeing conditions for their spectra...

Cheers,
Team #9

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Fil.

Here we are again at the controls of IAC-80.
Last night we had two occurrences worth mentioning. The dome started offsetting a bit to the left, more so as the targets were lower in the sky, fixing this costed a bit of time. As a result the last WR (134) star only had one exposure.
Then later in the night humidity started rising to 75% (limit is 80%), but we started having strong wind gusts. This was the reason for us stopping observations at aroung 4:30 (at the time observing WR1).

Tonight humidity is the strongest concern, clouds are still away.

There is a Tornado/hurricane called Humberto, to the southwest of here, currently an F2 storm. Looks very photogenic on the satellite image! We believe it will not hit our island directly, but humidity and clouds are bound to dominate on coming days... Meanwhile, we observe

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Fil.

At around 2:00 am humidity passed 80% (now at 99%). Dome closed, bad weather predicted for Thursday and Friday as well.
Hurricane Humberto is pushing the bad weather over the islands, though it is expected it will move away into the Atlantic and not affect us directly.
But until Friday we will not likely observe.

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Fil.

Bad weather seems to be here until the weekend.. Weekend seems not to be good as well.. It is unlikely that Teide can observe before Monday

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Fil.

Hi Fil,

I reduced the last spectra. They look good as always. Here two examples. From WR1 I used only 4 images. Keep going.

Regards, Martin

Thank you Martin!

Regarding weather, it seems the humidity is gradually lowering.. There is a chance we may open the dome after all!

Flats and Bias are done, darks_before are still finishing..

I am not that good a weather predictor, as you can see..

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Fil.

Today is Friday 13th! That explains the amount of unexpected things that happened after midnight here at IAC-80!
From the main targets we managed to get only one take at WR134 and WR135 because of weather limits. Only managed ZetaAql, due to clouds no BetaAqr was possible. Then we stood with WR1 for the rest of the night with only a computer interruption in the middle..

We met Sergio, another Operator, excellent communication and IAC-80 operation!

The sky right now is clear, and we have already started the preparations for another night Data will start transferring to Montreal very shortly.

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Fil.

Hi Fil & Eva! Excellent work and obviously highly professional.

Cheers, Thomas

Thank you Thomas.

We are again observing, and other than windy, everything was running smoothly until now (humidity hit the limit). Dome is closed.
The dome issues have already been clearly identified, and the workaround is very simple. I think it is even possible to switch the order of two stars, and the problem may solve it self!

Anyway, in this last week I learned a bit of Python (scripting language) and created a very helpful script to detect spelling mistakes in the FITS header, wrong headers for a ThAr files, exposure checking to make sure none finished half-way, and to make some statistics about team #9's data, helping in generating a nice observation log.. The good news is this should be work for any other Team's data, if you wish

With this, we know we have gathered stellar exposure time of 57h24min in 10 nights. (36h20m of WR134/5/7, 16h of WR1, almost 31m of ZetaAql and BetaAqr each; a comic amount of 1m40s of Bias images! , 27h of dark frames; 1h50m of ThAr exposures!). Tonight's values are not yet in here.

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Fil.

Well, Fil, I already ecountewred your programming skills some four years ago. Great idea. I guess we all appreciate if you could check the other data.

Cheers, Thomas

...And we're here on our last night of observations... Tomorrow has to be an evening of packing, so that the guys from maintenance that come on the 17th morning can do their work on the telescope.

This is the night with best seeing we have had so far (0,4"~0,7") The previous team had had 0,3" on their last night! So perhaps we get there too at the end of our last night

Meanwhile, the WRs are shining through the fiber..

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Fil.

Team #9 here again.

The instrument and all stuff is packed! The luggage is ready for pick-up to be sent to Johan.
From every thing we packed, we could only find one cap for the fibers, the others have gone missing. Replacement caps were improvised from our origami skills and careful use of tape.
No tools were found, apparently an allen wrnch and some other tools went missing as well. Other than this, we seem to not have forgotten anything. And the best news of all, is it all fits back in the same "box"

Our job inside the dome is now over.

It was a pleasure for us to go up and down, turning ThAr lamps on and off under the watchful mirror of the 82mm telescope during these two weeks.
Data from last night is not yet at Montreal, and because we are amateurs, we will intentionally delay that for a few hours ha, ha!

A big thank you for being here, and participating in this way.
Team #9 signing off!

Fil & Eva.

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Fil.

Dear Eva & Fil! That was an excellent job. I feel obliged to you. But in fact I did not expect anything else than cool and professional attitude from our Portugese team.

Thanks again, Thomas

Hi Fil and Eva,

here are the last spectra, excellent as usual.

Martin