This night was a short first tutorial night for the new enforcements that will be part of team #3 from Sunday onward. We showed them the telescope and observatory and started doing flats. Meanwhile, the Telescope Operator came by, warning us of the bad weather conditions, so we could not open the dome. She later called us giving green light to open the dome, but this happened too late for us to point at our usual first target of the night, WR 140, so we skipped this star.
We looked at HD 14134, Telluric star Alcyone at low air masses (near the zenith), Theta 1 Ori C (a curious case of a star with stellar winds that "flow" along its strong magnetic field lines), HD45314, and Alcyone again (but now at higher air masses, being nearly 30ยบ in altitude).
Exhausted, we ended the night at 5:00 by calling the Telescope Operator so she could come inspect the telescope and mount, to certify we had not broken anything.
This daily inspection of the telescope, we learned, is a duty of the Telescope Operator, the person responsible for the telescope. However, it was only now the first time we had seen it happen. We may have come in a complicated time near Christmas, thus not seeing this before.
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