AAVSOnet status, 2018-04-09

Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Mon, 04/09/2018 - 13:42

Most of the AAVSOnet systems are operating nominally.  That said, there are a few items to mention!

OC61 appears to be having some mount issues (stars become "dumbbells", which indicates looseness in the drive chain so that the mount bounces between two positions), which usually only occur on the first image to a new field.  We often work around that by taking an extra image at the beginning of a plan.  Often this can be fixed by tightening the belt, so we've asked Nigel Frost to look at it again.

BSM_NH continues to hang downloading exposures shorter than 2 seconds; Helmar and I can't figure out why this is happening.  We'll restrict targets so that they are fainter than for other BSMs.  BSM_NH is doing pretty well, observing on more than 1/3 of the available nights, showing that you can obtain data in the Northeast!

TMO61 has three issues.  First, the shutter uses a battery charged by solar cells.  The current bank of solar cells was broken during vandalism, and Jon Holtzman hopes to replace them very soon now.  The mount also has problems if it goes too far west; it takes too much power to move back east and the drive controller halts motion.  Finally, the dome position has failed a couple of times.  I'm hoping that all of these problems can be addressed this spring.

BSM_Hamren has had a non-functioning electronic focuser for a while.  I've sent Mike Linnolt repair parts, so we may have full control soon.  He currently manually focuses at the beginning of a night, and so end of night images can be somewhat out of focus.

Arne