2019-05-03 update (pm)

Though we had some passing high clouds last night / this morning, one of our telescope operators did a run on the nice spiral galaxy M101.  Even with non-optimal conditions we were still able to pull out some good imagery using the luminance filter with no special processing. The image shows the full frame of the camera/telescope system.

2019-04-03 update (pm)

We're finally getting some better weather. We've been able to collect some asteroid data for our founding science team members. They'll do astrometry on the data to obtain a Minor Planet Center observatory code.

We also did a live tour for the Youth Outreach group on Friday night March 29. It was fun having students choose targets using their own planetarium software, then we could point the telescope at the targets and take some short exposures for them.

After the tour ended, I grabbed fourteen 2 minute frames of asteroid 6478 Gault on 2019-03-30 at 04:50UT. This is the asteroid that is spinning quickly and coming apart as it's moving along. It therefore seems to appear with a tail.  The asteroid itself is at magnitude18, the tail is much fainter. The individual images were aligned on the head of the asteroid resulting in the stars appearing to trail.

2019-03-06 update (pm)

We had a brief moment of clear, so was able to to capture the Lunar - X on Feb 12 at 03:00 UT using the 16" telescope and CCD. The CCD is so sensitive that even using the H-alpha filter, had to take a super short exposure and work some photoshop to not have a blown out image. I hope others are able to catch this lunar surprise.