samedi 5 janvier 2019

Review of the year 2018

2018 has been the first complete year with the observatory fully functional. It is a good time to review what happend then.


Mid 2017 the observatory was bck to functional with the Losmandy Titan mount refurbished. I have then been able to observe manually through 2017 with very good success.

In september 2017, I invested in some equipment to do remote. This was a key milestone for more productive (and with warmer environment!) observations.

2018 started with a very very bad weather conditions. I was able to observe seriously in june. But a major turn occured in july as I developped a script for more automated observation including software control jump from one target to the next and of course all acquisition and autoguiding. At the beginning I gave th script a list of target to do. In september, I added the ability to select the next target based on its distance to current telescope position in the sky, the BeSS Be Star Spectra database current priority and my own priority (some bonus for some targets).




During 2018, I have observed 123 nights (partial or total), with more than 615 hours of total exposure time. My project (and only one - almost mono-maniac!) is the spectrscopy of Be stars. I thus acquired 536 spectra of Be stars (more than 12000 orders), reaching a total of 1361 spectra in BeSS and close to 30000 orders.

I reached #1 in number of orders in BeSS and top 3 for the number of spectra of Halpha in BeSS:



Based on all those observations, here is the updated graphs showing the observatory performance on Be stars in terms of SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) versus Visual Magnitude.






Some sheeps around the observatory this last Fall: