What's New Oct 1998 What's New Oct 1998
The 1998 PLANET observing season is almost complete. Unfortunately due to the absolutely shocking weather over the last month or more we have basically had no chance to do any observations whatsoever. This is quite unusual to have such a long interruption; John says he can't remember such a sustained period of bad weather in the life of the telescope.
The one rather important bit of observing that did get done was Peter Stevenson's test of the new autoguiding software he has been designing as part of his Honours project. The new ST-5 camera was connected to the telescope and used to capture images while driving the telescope to get an idea of the pointing errors at different positions. This information will be used to develop algorithms to better control precisely where the telescope is pointing. Peter gave his honours seminar last week describing the results of his study; the new software certainly looks very impressive and with luck will considerably improve the image quality at Mt. Canopus.
Some of the observations of the X-ray transient XTE J2123-058 have resulted in a paper, which is currently in preparation: "A study of the newly discovered X-ray transient RXTE J2123-058 during it's post-outburst state", by Roberto Soria, Kinwah Wu and Duncan Galloway. The paper analyses data from the ASM (All Sky Monitor) on board RXTE, the ANU 40" telescope at Siding Spring Observatory and Mt. Canopus. This paper will be submitted to MNRAS soon.
Coming up in December is the annual PLANET group meeting, which this year will be held right here in Hobart. Collaborators from all around the world will be attending the week-long conference, and also spending a week before the conference working on the data and other activities.
In one sense this run of bad weather has been timely because we had a rather serious failure of the MTC box early this month. This unit acts as an interface between the encoder which measures the telescope position and the control computer. Thanks to Keith and Kym the offending board has now been replaced and by all reports is working fine. In other telescope news:
The observer's notes have recently been updated. I haven't been to Mt. Canopus for months so this may not be completely up to date; so apologies for any errors or omissions.
We have some vacuum equipment which is surplus to requirements for sale. Follow the link for a detailed description of each item.