Submitted by holzinger on Tue, 06/23/2015 - 07:19
In the pre-dawn hours this morning Andris Jaunzemis successfully focused new the GT-SORT f/6 optical train and CMOS sensor (6MP, up to 25Hz). Ryan Coder, presently at a summer internship at AMOS, had spent the last 6 months carefully selecting components and coordinating the fabrication of the new optical train.
The targets observed with the new configuration include the binary star system Albireo (an old GT-SORT favorite), Altair, and Uranus. An attempt to test out longer integration times with the new camera by observing DirectTV-5 met mixed success, which will be resolved when we better understand our new camera control API. However, while we were not capturing images we did see some streaks in the field consistent with low-Earth orbiting space objects, which was very encouraging.
We did think to take a picture of the telescope in the pre-dawn light after it became too bright to continue much further. Special thanks to Dr. Jim Sowell who was also there to help and offer moral support. Hopefully we'll post some of the captured images and video soon!
