Feder Observatory

Nathan and I went out to the observatory tonight. The sky was clear when we opened the dome at 7:30 pm. The ambient temperature was around 4.1 F. We initialized the telescope and mounted the spectrograph assembly at 8:20 pm. The rest of the night was uneventful, since we could not align the star on the slit. We changed the focus, but it did not help much. I changed the alignment of the spectrograph. First the the camera was facing toward the cable outlet. Later, I oriented the spectrograph parallel to the fork. But nothing worked. We might be out of focus. Temperature dropped to -0.2 F when we called it a night at 9:30 pm.

Matt and I went out to the observatory tonight. Both seeing and transparency were below average. Matt spent about an hour following the instructions for the start up procedure at the observatory. We mounted the spectrograph assembly around 8:20 pm and acquired data of Ne spectra using both the low and high resolution mode of the spectrograph. I am looking forward to spend some time on those two files and try to get some information of wavelength versus pixels. The ambient temperature was 7.4 F and the dome temperature was 6.2 F, when we called it a night.