Winter Break at SkyPi

While the snow has been falling at the high elevation of 7,800 ft. in Pie Town, New Mexico, there has not been much imaging time during the last week or two. Therefore we took advantage of the "downtime" of the Astronomical Telescope for Educational Outreach (ATEO) to take care of some annual maintenance and upgrading. As we posted earlier, the crew at SkyPi Online Observatories successfully cleaned the 16" primary mirror of the remote telescope with a polymer solution. That was checked off our list!

The ATEO patiently waits for the snow and skies to clear up in the high elevation of New Mexico.

Muir Evenden, Insight Observatory's Systems Engineer, sent down to the staff at the New Mexico site a few adaptors to install for reaching the "Sweet Spot" of the CCD camera's field of view. This allows the coma in the outer area of the field of view to diminish. Muir also sent along an Astrodon brand "V" filter to replace the Ha filter that had been in the CCD camera filter wheel since its installation last May. The purpose of this filter is to allow users of the telescope to perform real scientific research. The projects included can be studying variable stars and their magnitude changes as well as recording the changing magnitudes of asteroids.

The black Wall Mounted Flat Frame Light Box (left) is to be mounted in Gamma Observatory at SkyPi Online Observatories where the ATEO resides. Photo by Dustin Smith.

This telescope maintenance period also convinced us it would be a convenient time to purchase a Wall Mounted Flat Frame Light Box for creating flats for image processing of data taken by the telescope. The light source is an electroluminescent panel housed behind a sheet of translucent white acrylic, providing perfect even illumination of the field edge-to-edge. A dimmer will be included so we can easily adjust the panel brightness to fit our needs. The alternative to purchasing this built-to-order device was to rush through twilight to shoot all of our flat frames. The lightbox will be mounted in a position inside the observatory where the telescope park position is so we can take flats anytime. With the beta version of Insight Observatory's remote telescope access portal being released within the next few weeks, we thought the timing of delivery of the flat field box to Gamma Observatory where the telescope is housed to be more than ideal.

Last but not least, Muir successfully installed and tested the latest updated version of TheSkyX software by Software Bisque remotely from his home office. This software application runs all of the telescope and imaging equipment with a Linux operating system installed on a Raspberry Pi. We will be sending notices out to our subscribers and social media followers when the online beta portal is released.

Once again... Many THANKS to the wonderful staff at SkyPi Remote Observatory for all of their hard work and assistance with the maintenance and upgrades of the Astronomical Telescope for Educational Outreach (ATEO).

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Imaging Galaxies with the ATEO

Over the past few months, we have been putting the Astronomical Telescope for Educational Outreach (ATEO) through its paces to help us identify areas for improvement and to understand how far we can "push the envelope" on this system. Typically this entails measuring the performance on key areas like camera cooling, tracking and guiding, and focusing accuracy, not to mention monitoring how our tiny little Raspberry Pi (which controls the whole thing!) performs...

NGC 1398 - Isolated barred spiral galaxy located in the constellation of Fornax. Image by Muir Evenden.

The real fun part comes, however, when the results from our testing give us little surprises and reconfirm just how good an imaging platform the ATEO telescope really is. A case in point occurred about a week ago as we were testing the cooling capabilities of the FLI camera; after we got the camera down to -46° Celsius we decided to image a number of galaxies that were relatively low in the sky (< 30° above the horizon) for one single 15-minute exposure each... The only image reduction done was by applying darks. As the few sample images from that session shown below attest to, we got some quite stunning images; aside from some slight guiding errors and potentially some focus improvements, we were quite pleased!

NGC 1232 - the Intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Eridanus. Image by Muir Evenden.

The wide field of this scope has also proven to be a real treat as well - it is fun to identify all the additional galaxies and other objects that appear in addition to our primary target. Who thought testing would be so much fun?

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Imaging the April Fools Comet

As we have spent most of our time the past few months planning for the big road trip to New Mexico to install the Astronomical Telescope for Educational Outreach (ATEO), I thought it would be nice to do a little remote imaging during one of our weekly ATEO planning conference calls. With all of the comets that have been observable lately, why not quickly capture an image of one remotely from one of iTelescope's remote robotic telescopes, hosted at New Mexico Skies. This remote telescope hosting facility is not too far from where Insight Observatory's ATEO telescope will be hosted just over a month from now at SkyPi Online Observatories.

Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák pictured with the star Beta Draconis (lower right).
 Image by Insight Observatory.

On the morning of Thursday, April 20, 2017, at 5:05 am EDT, I logged into iTelescope's T14 which is Takahashi FSQ Fluorite with a Petzval Apochromat Astrograph optical design for taking wide-field images. The CCD camera used to image the comet was an SBIG STL-11000M. The image is a simple combined 2 luminances at 5 minutes a piece. The comet's location was just north of the star Beta Draconis in the constellation Draco. If you zoom into the image, you will notice there are two comet nuclei. This demonstrates how much the comet moved between both five-minute images.

Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák, a comet whose identity took nearly 100 years to pin down, made its closest approach to Earth on Saturday, April 1st, just in time for April Fools' Day, but it was not a cosmic prank. It was the comet's closest Earth encounter in more than 50 years, and maybe more than a century stated NASA officials.

The comet was first discovered in 1858 by Horace Parnell Tuttle of the Harvard College Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was then re-discovered by Michel Giacobini in 1907 and Ľubor Kresák in 1951. The comet had two close encounters with Jupiter that altered its orbit slightly. A member of the Jupiter family of comets, 41P makes a trip around the sun every 5.4 years, coming relatively close to Earth on some of those trips. On this approach, the comet will pass our planet at a distance of about 13 million miles (0.14 astronomical units), or about 55 times the distance from Earth to the moon.

As the comet passed closest to Earth (0.14 a.u.) from mid-March through early April, it continued to hurry across the circumpolar constellations Ursa Major and Draco. Created with Chris Marriott's SkyMap

"Comet hunters in the Northern Hemisphere should look for it near the constellations Draco and Ursa Major, which the Big Dipper is part of," NASA officials said in a statement. "Whether a comet will put on a good show for observers is notoriously difficult to predict, but 41P has a history of outbursts, and put on quite a display in 1973. If the comet experiences similar outbursts this time, there's a chance it could become bright enough to see with the naked eye. The comet was expected to reach perihelion, or its closest approach to the sun, on April 12." The comet should stay visible through the month of July this year.

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