First light for 0.4m at Haleakala

Eagle Nebula

Wayne, Haley, Jacob, Edward

Swan Nebula

Wayne, Haley, Jacob, Edward

Helix Nebula

Wayne, Haley, Jacob, Edward

NGC 253

Wayne, Haley, Jacob, Edward

Trifid Nebula

Wayne, Haley, Jacob, Edward

Trifid Nebula, RGB version

Wayne, Haley, Jacob, Edward

This week a commissioning team (Wayne Rosing, Jacob Towsley, Haley Gomez and Edward Gomez) have been at Haleakala , and  were finally able to observe on sky last night. We were working on the 0.4m telescope in the South end of the Haleakala enclosure, sharing it with Faulkes Telescope North. The night was successful and we have achieved a reasonable level of pointing, tracking, collimation, focusThe point at which a lens or mirror forms an image of a distant point of light., and some spectacular images.

The night started out a little frustratingly because every time we slewed we did not see the object in the field of view. After Wayne looked through the finder scope and we managed to get the star Altair on the CCD, we realised that we were about 15 degrees out, which corresponds to roughly 1 hour in Right AscensionRight Ascension, abbreviated R.A., is a measure of distance on the celestial sphere measured eastward along the celestial equator. It is similar to longitude and is measured in hours, minutes and seconds.. Because the camera computer’s clock was incorrectly setup to use daylight savings all the calculations for location in the sky were out. When we put that right we began commissioning in earnest!

Stars were drifting south across the field of view so Wayne and Jake made some very delicate adjustments to one of the telescope axes, with a 3’ crowbar! They moved the azimuth axis by a few 10th of an inch and the tracking of the telescope was improved sufficiently to carry on with the rest of commissioning. We followed this with some pointing, focusing and collimation calibration runs.

By the end of the night we had achieved the images you can see on the right. Each of these uses a 60 second exposure, using the air filter option (a place in the filter wheel where there is no filter) so the CCD received the maximum number of photons. 

Tonight we will continue to improve the image quality and tracking, of the Southern 0.4m and bringing up the 0.4m in the Northern end of the enclosure.

Enjoy the images! 

Read more about our commissioning trip to Haleakala at Haley Gomez’s blog.