Thursday, November 5, 2020

2019 - 2020 Update

Sorry for the lack of updates, we have been busy out at Kumeu as always, after testing out the QHY Cold CMOS camera for Astronz, the Auckland Astronomical Society approved the purchase of a 16' GSO Ritchey-Chrétien telescope, we got the new scope onto the mount with the help of Grant Christie, Jonathan Green and Steve Hennerley, the brand new Astronz 40cm Ritchey-Chrétien astrograph is a significant upgrade for the observatory. It is named the "Menzies Telescope" in memory of Barry and Trixie Menzies, both long term members of the Society and both with a lifelong passion for astronomy. Unfortunately Barry passed away in 2014, and Trixie in 2018.

Sadly the collimation of the new telescope was quite far out and we never quite got it right before we started the 2019 Microlensing campaign, despite this our photometry was deemed useable and we proceeded to grab data on as many events as the weather allowed for, at this point we had a few new young society members who were keen to learn the ropes (literally in the case of having to open and close the dome which is on a rope pully system), Sasha Green, Tony Cooper, Janine Lawton and Andrew Marmont all attended mutliple nights of observering during 2019, our stand out moment came when in the late stages of the 2019 Microlensing campaign Andrew Marmont serendipitously discovered a plantery signal while taking normalizing data on an alert that had been called off, it was lucky he was manning the telescope that night because if Jonathan had been their he would probably have been on the priority target instead and we would have missed it, the signal was confirmed by the KMT survey with a 2x Earth mass planet thought to have caused the signal, so the entire Kumeu team was very excited with the news of the exo-planets detection, we are currently still awaiting a paper to be written for this event.

In 2020 sadly our work horse camera the ST-10XME CCD developed a fault that could not be fixed, the council has approved the purchase of a new camera and in the meantime we are borrowing Guy Thornley's SBIG ST-7XME, we only managed to get this camera on the telescope near the end of the 2020 Microlensing campaign but we did manage to cover a few events, the camera has a tiny field of view but we can plate solve and get good photometry so it's more than up to the task for the kind of work we do.

^ The field of view of the SBIG ST-7XME we can't even fit all the sculptor galaxy into our narrow field of view!

There wasn't as many alerts in 2020 this is probably due to the Covid-19 pandemic which is still raging across the world, we did manage to get the collimation looking much better in 2020, so our stars look much more round now, although the collimation can still be improved for sure, we are now looking forward to buying a new camera and to the 2021 Microlensing campaign, we will work over the summer on maintenance of the site and continue to teach new team members from the Auckland Astronomical Society who are keen to learn how to operate the equipment, with an active team of observers including AAS members that enjoy using the site to setup their own telescopes the future is looking bright for the Kumeu Observatory!

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