Engineering Run
I’ve been suspicious that my collimation is off so I got out the ol’ laser collimator and tried to tune it up a bit. Afterward it was much worse! That how I do things around here.
So, on the advice of another amateur astronomer, I tried out CCDInspector. It examines all the stars in an image and reports on the asymmetry of the star profiles. It’s kind of inelegant software, in a number of ways, but it gets the job done. I was able to improve my collimation by 10% or so. The image above is one of the types of outputs it makes and shows a visual of the collimation and reports some statistics.
A quick look suggests that I reduced the asymmetry form about 18% to about 9%. I’m going to see if my photometry improves after a meridian flip with tonight’s data.
I’m running on GSC 4868-831, a double-mode RR Lyrae (RRd) that I’ve been looking at for a year or two. I’m trying to extend the baseline a bit prior to publication.
Sure is nice that winter is over! I hate winter. Winter is over! Yay!
Friday, March 23, 2007