16 November, 2016

18:50

The call for prayer of Isha marks the end of the twilight and the start of night. Just opened the roof of the observatory.

Tonight's targets are: V0725 Tau Photometric Data and some dark frames at -30C. CCD is at -25C right now.. still cooling down.

Water reservoir is at 19C ; i have set the cooling point to 13C.

21:10

50 Dark Frames of 120 seconds each have been acquired. 

V0725 Tau is still at 27 degrees altitude (very low for any scientific data acquisition) in the eastern horizon.

00:12

Focused the telescope with photometric I filter. Autoguiding at a 10th magnitude star at 0.5 Hz with the combination of Adaptive Optics and Mount autoguiding capability.

90 Seconds of exposure still saturated the star.

00:20

Changed it to 30 seconds now.. nope, still too much light! Lowered it to 15 seconds now and voila! a very nice 40K counts.

Acquisition begins now!

03:15

Have got 162 images in total. Now taking 15 sec Darks for some time now.

04:51

Reduced the data and performed photometry analysis in Maxim DL. As it turned out V0725 Tau star has right now 7.855 magnitude in I band. Submitted the data to AAVSO.