Action Stations!

OB171317

On Saturday the 15th of July Jonathan Green and Steve Hennerley were at Kumeu Observatory, after some advice from Grant Christie that the microlensing target OB170019 was still viable, we took just over an hour's worth of data on the target, Grant had advised that we didn't really need any more than an hour so we were kind of stuck for new projects as there had been now new microlensing alerts for a while, that day Jonathan Green had signed up for the Center for Backyard Astrophysics (CBA) in the hopes of finding some more projects to take on, he had copied down a few Cataclysmic Variable targets to attempt to image, so we attempted a few of the targets but found that each of them was only just above the noise level, so not knowing if that would be useful or not we decided to take more images of OB170019, unfortunately the clouds started rolling in about this time and we couldn't guide for 5 minutes anymore so we decided to pull the plug on the night and headed home with the idea of doing some research and finding some new projects to pursue when we don't have any more microlensing work to do.

On Sunday the 16th of July we finally had a new microlensing alert so it was action stations! Only one problem the forecast for that night was for increasing clouds! We decided to give it a go anyway and just hope for the best, Steve arrived 1st and found the sky was half clear and thankfully our target was on the clear side, so he opened up the dome and got to work, he captured 14 300 second exposures of our target OB171317 before Jonathan arrived, after a few cloudy patches we got back to work but it was slow going with passing clouds causing our guide star to fade more often than not, Steve headed home and Jonathan stayed on to keep imaging for as long as possible, we got to 27 300 second exposures of our target OB171317 although thin clouds may have affected a few of them.

Jonthan imaged the target when gaps allowed until 1:30 am when this cloud bank appeared in the West, it didn't take long after this photo was snapped for the cloud bank to move over our target and even though Jonathan stayed on at the observatory until around 3 am he never saw another opportunity to collect more data, so after calibrating the data we had collected he headed home and sent the files to Steve for submission to MicroFUN, hopefully we get a few more breaks in the clouds tonight to grab our normalizing data as apparently our target has already faded considerably.

Posted by Jonathan Green