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.

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.

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.

Green across the board.

The winter '12 service trip ends today. We've finished all of our scheduled work and the telescope is operating well. Possibly even more satisfying for us, our system monitoring package is all happy.

The trouble with domes.. part 2

As I've mentioned before, checking the dome is a part of the regular maintenance work we do on the Tenerife trips. We moved the dome around as usual and listened for noises that shouldn't be there.

A night in the life of the Bradford Robotic Telescope

A few years back we had an issue where the telescope was taking a lot of pictures of the inside of the dome. In the end we found that there was a problem with the mount configuration and we got everything working well again. In the process of trying to debug the problem we created a number of tools to help with the diagnosis. One of these tools was a script which the controlserver runs before it starts each imaging job.