Petri Kehusmaa Astroblog

Summer has taken over and night skies are lightening up again. So, it’s time to take this mandatory break and continue again on august.

Yesterday I received an alert from SWIFT satellite that a very bright gamma ray burst is visible. This is the initial alert:

GCN/SWIFT-BAT
GRB Position
RA=218.010 DEC=+36.267d
ERR=3.00arcmin
T=06:12:49.25 UT
I=187.56
R_Signif=206.72
I_Signif=22.50
GRB, Not_in_on-board_cat.
Not_in_gnd_cat.
R_trig, Pnt_src,

To my bad luck I only checked my email at 01:00am when this GRB was dimmed to mag 19. I tried to reach for it but couldn’t catch it with my 8 inch SCT. Anyway I reported my negative GRB observation to AAVSO.

This is the GRB field at the time of it’s burst. Limiting magnitude is 17.6. Red circle indicates the location of the gamma ray burst.

Gallery was offline due to error made by my web domain service provider.

My image gallery is currently off-line and images are not available or visible in posts. I’m working on to solve the problem.

This is start for my M42-project where my goal is to get hours worth of Ha and LRGB data. This image is combination of one 2 minutes (for core) and one 20 minutes images.

Operating System reinstall went smoothly and basic elements are installed. Cloud Sensor graphics is working again but other astronomy specific softwares are yet to be installed and configured. That’s tomorrows job.

Due to some mystical issues on controlling the dome and SBIG cameras, I have decided to  reinstall  the operating system of my observatory computer. This operation will take the Cloud Sensor off-line, so there will be no cloud sensor graphic updates for a while.

There is now live webcam feed coming inside my observatory. The picture is updated every 2 minute. You can access webcam by clicking the link at the right bar.

It took about 4 hours to get my new observatory computer up and running. Now there are 3 serial ports, 4 port USB Extender and 4 USB2 ports available for equipment (UPS, Boltwood Cloud Sensor II, SBIG STL11K, SBIG ST7, DDW, Digital Feather Touch Focuser, AP 900GTOx2). It all seem to work together! This computer also sends cloud sensor graphics to my web site via FTP.

Cloud Sensor Graphics will be out of service today while I change my observatory control computer to one with more CPU/memory capacity. Estimated out-of-service time is 2 hours.