23/01/2013

Image trailing.. again...

The work so far in resolving the trailing problems has made a definite difference to the number of jobs returned with trailing in the image, but we are not happy yet.. So now it's time for the big hammer approach.

22/01/2013

Teidestar camera sun shutter

For a long while now we've had two E2V L3Vision cameras which we use as nocturnal webcams. The cameras are extremely sensitive and can easily see stars and even see by star light. Over the last few years we started to see damage to the sensitivity of the chip following the line of the sun's progression through the sky. We eventually took the camera off line and sent it for repair by E2V. At this point we realised that we needed to do something to shield the camera from direct sunlight.

08/01/2013

Image trailing update

I spent a while working on changing the order of exposures in the controlserver yesterday. As a result of this we are now imaging in the order suggested in the previous Image trailing post. The number of jobs completed last night was reasonably low due to cloud cover, but the initial results look promising.

Image trailing

From time to time we see images returned by the telescope which have trailing of the stars. With colour images we see the trailing in the red colour channel. The telescope images each colour channel separately in the order red (R), visible (V) and finally blue (B). The trailing in the R channel suggests that it is occurring at that start of imaging for the job.