Observatoire de la belle étoile: OHP2017: Automatic observations with PRISM v10

Every year, a group of spectroscopists gather together at Observatory of Haute Provence. This year, more than 50 people joined this world class spectroscopy star party with around 30 telescopes in the field!

OHP 2017 group picture

I brought a NEQ6 mount for Steve Shore (a professional astronomer from Pisa university, who came to give us several astrophysics courses) students. They were very autonomous so I did setup my second NEQ6 mount with a small Televue 85mm refractor and a Zwo ASI178MC color CMOS camera.

Alessandra, Marco, Marco & Giovanni

The Zwo ASI 178MC is a low cost camera which works very well for astronomy with small exposures (less than 30sec typically). File size is fairly large as this is a ~3000x2000 pixel image with a Bayer color matrix. While well adapted for some visual assisted astronomy, it is not designed for science.

my own equipment at OHP

PRISM v10 includes a very powerful automatic observation tool. I played with it and basically loved it. It is very easy to use and I was able to acquire several objects in Sagittarius with very few clicks.

The process worked very well except that the TV85 defocused itself after some time and I have no motorized focuser.

Preprocessing, image alignment and addition took lot of time due to the large number of images and large file size. Result is still satisfactory, specially as the Zwo ASI178MC camera is fairly low cost: