lundi 14 mars 2016

Night of march 14th: at last !

February (but even january and begining of march!) have been terrible from weather point of view. Good weather occured early february but I was traveling for AtroFest in London... so tonight is a long awaited night!

I am now using TeamViewer to control telescope from my heated home while waching TV... :-) Oh, and by the way, there are some great commented game of DeepMind (Google) AlphaGo machine against the world Go game champion Lee Sedol... Lee Sedol lost his first 3 match (and then the competition!) but won the last game on sunday morning with a great game and some excellent moves which somehow disturbed the machine - at least humanity is not completely lost (yet!) from AI machines!!!

Anyway, my first target is V694 Mon, a very exciting star as the spectrum already show just by looking at first raw image which shows a prominent Halpha with a deep absorption (ie: strong P Cygni profile with very large emission line = fast outflow wind), but also several very narrow emission lines in the spectrum...



OK... tonight targets so far:

* V694 Mon (3x900s) and a reference at roughly the same elevation (35-40°), hd81009 (2x600s)
* phi Leo Be star (4x600s) using the same reference star / instrumental response as above
* 53 Boo Be star (6x600s), at higher elevation (40-45°) so another ref star would be nice
* 4 Her Be star (x600s) also at higher elevation (45-50°)

Atik 460 CCD temperature is set at -5°C to be consistent with my master darks and previous observations; pelletier cooling is below 60% so I could go lower temperature.

Sky mag is, after the Moon set, around 20.6 so not too bad for the area. But seeing is not that good; I didn't measure it but should be around 5 or so!...