Out on Anderson Mesa

Tonight was our first night on the 72-inch telescope, and we spent the morning at the Lowell library settling on our targets.  Unfortunately, we were the only ones there on a Sunday morning, and nobody left the Wifi password.  After retreating back to our motels, that evening, we went 12 miles south to Lowell's Anderson Mesa Station. 

At Anderson Mesa is the 31-inch, the 42-inch Hall Telescope, and the 72-inch Perkins telescope whose dome is shown to the right.  We were concerned for this night's observing run because we had been seeing weather reports all day predicting clouds and perhaps rain for the evening.  We still had plenty to do.  The Prism camera had just been remounted on the telescope and would need to be focused before we could take some dome or sky flats.  Also, we had to get familiar with the telescope.  Linda used it back in January and thankfully had a notebook full of instructions.  All of the software was custom written and much of it command line driven.

Larry Wasserman came by early in the evening to check us out on the telescope.  After about 45 minutes of - first flip this switch and then push that button, and then fill the CCD camera with liquid nitrogen chilling it down to -113 C.  Larry then quickly ran us through starting up the various pieces of software while warning us that the camera control computer often crashes every night requiring a 5 minute restart.

All this time the wind was howling outside, gusting to 40 mph.  We pointed out that the manual said we could not open the dome slit with gusts that high.  Larry responded 'really?' and called Brian Skiff to find out if the manual was outdated.  It turns out that it was - the only consequence of the high winds would be that we might not be able to guide and have poor images.

After making our way through several forgotten steps, we slewed to our first target and watched a star bounce around on the guiding screen.  However, we locked on, and the telescope managed to get a passable image measuring 3 arcseconds.  Linda thought that was terrible, but I reminded her that was a good night at GMARS.  All this time, Larry had me watching the Doppler Radar which revealed that a rain shower was headed our way, so we beat a hasty retreat.  With all of the forecasts predicting clouds for the rest of the night, we decided to call it a day and will try again tomorrow.  The forecasts were right.  It rained off and on in Flagstaff for most of the night and we continued to get snow flurries into the next day.