After getting in at a reasonable time the night before because of the weather, I stayed up to try to acclimatize to the observing schedule. Today, after sleeping in I was hunkered down in the motel room watching rain, hail, and then snow out the window while I worked on an abstract and paper for the upcoming DPS meeting, which is due at the end of the month.
Things were not looking great for the night when Linda and I went out to dinner with a couple of the Lowell astronomers. We arrived at the 72-inch at dusk to see skies clearing. We got through the telescope and camera start up routines without much trouble, and were pleased to find our evening target, a Near Earth Asteroid which a suspected binary. In 1993 it was reported to have a 2.4 hour rotational period, and we observed it about that long.
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| In the 72-inch Control Room |
After midnight, we switched over to our primary target, a Trojan asteroid on the leading edge of the Trojan swarm. It is on the edge of the Milky Way in a crowded field - a real test for StarBeGone, a routine in our analysis software that can remove background stars that are polluting the light from the asteroid. Figuring it was time to refocus the telescope - disaster struck! Disaster always strikes after your support team has gone to bed. In this case, the camera control software did its nightly crash. The computer crashed when we tried to activate the focus program while the telescope was still guiding. It took a while with diminished brain capacity to realize what we had done, but once we did, it only took a few minutes to reboot everything. On we went. As I write this, we are well into imaging the asteroid with about two hours of darkness left in the night. Not bad for a night we considered a wash!
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