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Last night during long observing sets at the Vulcan Camera, I had time to stumble along in the dark and make my nightly visit (4am), to the Shane 120. Each time I go there, I learn more and more. It's absolutely fascinating. And each night is something different.
Sunday morning's visit was the first time I'd seen the Coude' focus in operation. Basically, the Coude' focus is used for making spectrographic examinations of stars. The light from the star is bounced off the main mirror, to the secondary, then to a third mirror below the secondary where the beam is sent down through the center axis of the telescope fork into the "Coude' Room". There, the light beam is split into its component parts, making a spectrum of the light. Detectors take this spectrum and transfer it to computer displays in the control room. There, the astronomer can manipulate the spectrum to make various spectral studies of the target star.
I personally have yet to got to the Coude' room and will try to get a quick tour one of these days from one of my Shane friends. Basically, I think its set up as an "optical bench" in a sealed, dark room. By the way, it takes the telescope tech's at least a day to reconfigure the Shane from Cassigrain to Coude' so its no simple task.
Last night was an examination of star pairs. For reasons of confidentiality, it's probably not appropriate to discuss those observations here as that's best left to the researcher.
But if I was left alone in the control room with a spectrograph of my favorite target star, you can bet I'd be running all sorts of graphs and paredo diagrams of the spectrum. With that data one can determine the star's composition, temperature, red shift, and maybe its angular velocity around its companion (if its a true binary double) among other things. This would be some serious science!
I might add its not all peaches and cream working professionally; I had several instances of unexplained computer "lockouts" happening over at Vulcan last night on my "Black Box" computer. I had to resolve these before I could make my trek to Shane so needless to say I was very busy fixing things between midnight and 2 am. Fortunately, NT crashes in layers and not all the applications I was running went down at once and "White Box" and "Blue Box" where image and tracking data reside, were ok. But it was a great mystery to me for a while why the mouse arrow moved, but yet none of the "button" commands worked. But after threatening it with my 2X4, it finally came around. Computers! They're like men - you can't live with them and you can't live without them! (Well maybe you can live without them.... hahahaha!)
Well, enough for now and I hope I'm not boring you all with this.