Photometric Calibrations

So I've decided to create a small log of what I do every day at the office ... in the hopes that it will motivate me to keep on working.

So yesterday I spent a large amount of time doing photometric calibrations for the KELT-South telescope. All this means is calibrating how bright stars look with our telescope compared to how bright the stars are in published catalogs.

We used the Tycho2 and NOMAD catalogs with B, V and R magnitudes to calibrate the KELT-South instrumental magnitude.

Sonoita, Arizona, USA

So I recently (17 - 21 September 2011) spent some time visiting the Winer Observatory in Sonoita, Arizona. I went down there to help Rob Siverd (the guy who does everything KELT related) fix the KELT-North telescope. They've been having some problems with the telescope not knowing where in sky it was pointing and we managed to trace the problem to some faulty "homing" sensors on the telescope mount. We managed to get it fixed in fairly short time, but let me first show you what Sonoita looks like ...

The image shows the view from the "lounge" of the observatory hostel, which is actually just the people who run the observatory's house. I was "unfortunate" to use this space as my sleeping quarters for a few days :)

So this is what the observatory looks like. It's just one big "garage" with a machine shop and warm room on the bottom and a big slide off roof on top with a few telescope underneath. Some of the telescope under the roof include DEMONEX, KELT-North and some telescope owned by the University of Iowa. The site is located about 30 miles north of the border with Mexico and Sonoita itself has a very large Border Patrol facility. The town itself only has one stop sign. I'd have to say that it's even smaller than Sutherland !!!

Here you can see some of the telescopes. On one of the days we needed a part for the telescope and drove the 45 minutes to Tucson. On the way there we first made a stop at the hardware store in Sonoita and this is the sign above the door that greeted us ... Next we encountered an aircraft graveyard ...

As far as the eye could see there were planes. Big ones, little ones, fat ones, skinny ones, broken ones, not so broken ones ... you name it, it was there.

So all in all, a good trip down to the south of the USA. Got stopped once by Border Patrol, ate lotsa awesome ribs and steak.

Bluebird on the Mountain (2nd)

So last night I spent another night volunteering at the Dyer Observatory for the Bluebird on the Mountain concert. It's an event held by the Bluebird Cafe during the summer and fall that is really cool. They invite some very famous singer/songwriters to play a few songs on the Observatory grounds and people come and watch and take a tour of the Observatory afterwards. Last nigh I listen the talented Bob DiPiero, Leslie Satcher and Al Anderson. I was really impressed by the musical talent.

After the music I stood around for about an hour answering questions the people had about telescopes and general astronomy related things.

Really good night.

Time for a revival !!!

Hey peeps, so I do know that there are not many of you out there that actually read this blog, but I'm just going to be updating it mostly for myself from now on. I'm doing some really cool things here in Nashville at the moment and I need to keep track of what I'm doing and on what days. So this blog will serve as a little public diary of sorts.

See y'all later