TOM1 Setup

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

While the moon is shining on everything, I am trying to get TOM1 
setup.  Things are progressing.  The images are presently drifting 100 
pixels an hour south and 14 pixels an hour west.  The stars look pretty 
round with 100 second exposures, just about what would be expected from the 
drift rates.  Attached is TwoStars.fts.  North is to the right.

The next clear night I will again adjust the mount rotation and the RA 
drive rate and see if I can improve the drifts.

I am setting up to run production.  I have two types of runs.

1) Dark and flat.  In this mode I take 25 exposures moving the camera to a 
new star field for each exposure.  This includes 4 darks and 21 object 
fields.  The idea is to use this run to get a dark and a flat.  This takes 
a little over an hour.  I suspect that after a while this will not need to 
be done every night.

2)Follow Run.  This run follows one field for 50 exposures.  The exposure 
is 100 seconds, and the interval between exposures is 189 seconds.  Thus 
the field is followed for 2.6 hours.  This is about as long as I can run 
with the present RA drive and the mounting position of TOM1.  The present 
RA drive mechanism should be able to track for 4 hours in the dome.  Later 
I will modify it and should be able to get 6-8 hours if I cut down the side 
plates.

Last night I got one 50 image run before the moon arrived.  It might even 
be possible to look for interesting objects in this fun.  Anyone 
interested?  There are lots of stars as the run is close to the Galactic 
Equator.  This would be a 3 disk set.

Tom Droege

Twostars.fts