Night #7 (2008/12/21) Visitor's night

During the week we had received an email from Jorge Prieto, from the IAC at La Laguna saying he would like to stop by on Sunday night to take a few astro-pictures of the sky using our electricity..
Indeed he came, and we had our first "external" visit!
While he went to set up his equipment we started our observation of WR140, our early night target.
Later when his camera was taking pictures of the Pleiades, he came inside the warmf of our observatory and we talked a bit. He was kind enough to invite us to visit the IAC-80, the 80cm telescope. We were in the middle our exposures of WR140 by this time, so only one of us could go visit. The lucky fellow who went was me! :) Thomas stayed at the observatory to guide our exposures, and make sure the target would stay on the spectrograph's slit.
I don't want to talk much about the impressive IAC-80 now, because it was dark (telescope in use, we weren't allowed to light anything inside the dome) and because this deserves a separate post later when me and Thomas visit it again in daylight. But it was a pleasant visit! Guiding is not done manually there! It is now being used for photometry.. I promise more details later :)
Anyway, I had to go back to MONS before Thomas would end our observation of WR140, so that we could point the telescope to our next target. One can do it, but two people do it better and faster.
So we proceeded to WR 1, and for the second consecutive time, we could find it. Success again! After practicing and knowng our targets, finding them becomes almost easy..
Around midnight our visiting astrophotographer from the IAC had to leave.. These people work in astronomy and need to be in an office during the day the next day? Well, I guess it happens.

We had taken no spectra of Oe stars recently so, after WR 1, those were our zenith-close targets (HD 45314 and HD 60848). These are two of the only eight known Oe type stars... These are special giant stars that have strong emission lines.. But I will talk about them later as well.
Unfortunately, we were so tired that we both fell a sleep while guiding on the last exposure of HD 45314.. On that exposure, the star drifted out of the slit, and very little light made it through to the CCD camera!
The curious thing about sleeping, is that when you wake up, you wake up! Indeed we woke up and were still able to point to the second Oe star. Of course, at 6:00 am, as soon as our priority target list was finished, we wanted to go to bed!

Still, this was again a succesful night, because we images the only 2 Oe stars visible at this time from our location. We had not pointed at them because of bad weather, that have cut our night down to half.