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Was over at Shane 120 visiting again during my last Vulcan Shift Sunday about Midnight. The target was the Andromeda Galaxy, M31, a big easy, basically naked eyed object. So I asked "What's so special about Andromeda?"
Well it turns out that the researcher was looking at CLUSTERS inside Andromeda! Gee, in all the years I've looked at Andromeda, and I've probably looked at it hundreds of times, I never stopped to think that there would be clusters in it too, just like Messier clusters in the Milky Way. Duh, I could have had a V-8!
Each of these clusters is probably mag 12 of fainter. So trying to find them with my 10" DOB would be next to useless. It was quite fascinating to see these, albeit in a spectral response, as the spectrograph was being used at Cassigrain focus. The telescope moves were very small as the clusters were closely packed in Andromeda. Even so, the telescope tech, my friend Andy, had to run out in the dome and make the moves from the primary console there since the spectrograph had cables hanging down to the floor which had to be watched so they wouldn't tangle or get caught..
Toward 3AM, the researcher wanted to look at M81 so a large telescope move was required. I just happened to be back over for a 3AM visit so Andy let me in the 120 dome to watch the move. The move was spectacular to watch! That telescope is probably 90 feet high and to watch it's fork and Dec mount gracefully move across the sky while the dome rumbled along keeping the telescope slit aligned, was a sight not to be missed. Massive machinery moving in a delicate way is a sight to behold.
I might mention that the dome alignment is basically mechanical. There is a small moving scale model of the scope with sensors on it that tell the dome how to move. The actual dome azimuth is feed back to this system from a barcode type pattern that totally encompasses the 360 degree ring of the dome. No fancy software! That's how they did things back in 1950!
The other highlight of the night was a trip into the Adaptive Optics room. I actually got to see the A.O. hardware used by LNL in their A.O. experiments. It basically is a 4X8 foot optical bench mounted in a frame. The optical bench has probably 150 parts - lenses, mirrors, actuators, cables, connectors, power supplies, circuit cards and so on. It was a physicists dream! The whole thing is fork lifted up to the bottom of the 120 where its bolted in place. The actual A.O. mirror is quite small, maybe 8 inches.
Vulcan went extremely well despite a failed experiment with Digital Dome Works. We are trying to automate the dome. Went to manual as the result of the DDW not working. Got over 72 image sets - about 3 gigabits worth of data - the long nights sure help, but it does make for a 13+ hour observing shift.
Anyway, that's the latest tales from Lick.