2018 first semester Obs Log

I am keeping log of my astronomical specteoscopy observations and here is my status as of end of june 2018.

First of all, all my spectra have been uploaded in BeSS.I am #1 in terms of number of spectra (each echelle order count as 1) and I am reaching 20000 of them so far as today's count is 19924 but I have 299 more waiting for validation.

My next goal is to reach 1000 spectra in Halpha alone.


I keep my log in an Open Office Calc spreadsheet. An overall analysis show that the first quarter of 2017 has been terrible (due to very very bad weather this year and lot of rain) but the second one okay specially as all second part of june has been clear (12 nights from june 15th to june 30th).
Overall, I have observed 173 nights (N) or evening (S) at the Observatory of Belle Etoile, accumulating 846 spectra and a total of 2.7 million seconds of exposure time.
The important thing is that the donload time has now decreased to 3% with the help of some scripting (AcqTarget.pgm) and the % of use time is high despite short nights and fix overhead (calibration frames done once every night) - a "Start&Calib.pgm" script has been helpful too.

To reach my goal of 1000 Halpha spectra, I have 52 more to go. I note that 82% of my spectra are Be stars, those are my main and only targets at the moment.
Total exposure (photon) time is reaching 794 hours (equivalent of 33 days!) and the percentage of useful time (photon time over total observatory opening time) is now around 80%.

The percentage of use time is impacted by several failure. I have logged all of them for the past 82 nights and woekd on them.

The focuser was returning several time an interface error. It is going through a USB/RS232 interface so not very reliable but increasing the interrogation time from 1sec to 5sec in PRISM software really improved it (same for the Losmandy Titan Gemini.Net ASCOM interface: PRISM is by default talking to the equipment too frequently that it crashes).

The main problem remaining is the connection with the Atik camera. I noted that the memory allocation to PRISM was increasing when using the autoguiding camera. I suspect a memory leak but there seems to be an issue with Atik drver and the way PRISM handle it - too many services crsshing and memory not released then. On typical night, memory allocated increased to more than 3.5GB and then crash (either freeze during image download, memory crash...). This has been reported to PRISM and Atik and a solution should come to improve reliability of the overall system. In the mean time, I quit and rerun PRISM every 4 hours and this does the trick...

Other failur are more spread out and several are user errors. I also noted a weakness with the dome shelter battery which doesn't recharge through the solar panel so I manually recharge it from time to time, every 15 observing nights or every month whatever comes first.

Last but not least, I have switchd to 1x1 binning. There is some pro & cons. I may switch back to 2x2 mainly to reduce the disk space (larger image file size) and reduce download and backup time. At the moment, I am still operating at 1x1 binning.