This was our third consecutive night of observation this year!
This is particularly great because we observed WR 6 in all these three nights. WR 6 is a WR star that has a rotation period of 3.76 days. Observing it during the complete period is a very nice thing. Lets hope tomorrow we make a fourth measurement, and then we will have observations for around the period.
This night, however, did not finish at 6:00 in the morning.. At around 21:00 wind speed was near 30km/h and it started to rise slowly but consistently (plus or minus a few km/h).. At 2:00 it reached a peak of 45km/h. Inside the dome almost nothing was felt, just a very cold light breeze.
Information on wind speed comes from two weather stations located at the top of the same hill that shields our observatory from the NNW wind...
We kept the dome open as the wind dropped sligthly, but before 4:00 it jumped to 49 km/h. Since we were a bit tired and the dome was not ours, we could not justify keeping it open, despite the light breeze that was effectively (not) influencing the dome. Consequently we closed the dome and waited a bit while leaving the CCD doing calibration images.
Around 5:00, the wind shyly started dropping below the 45km/h limit, but we could not guess it would really keep below it for the rest of the night. We ended it there, and did not look at the final stars of the night.
This situation is a bit frustrating because the weather station information must be our offitial weather information for deciding when to open or close the dome. Still, the weather station is placed on a location that is important for other higher telescopes, but when the wind comes from NNW the wind does not affet us much. If that dome were mine, more stars would have been measured!...
This is particularly great because we observed WR 6 in all these three nights. WR 6 is a WR star that has a rotation period of 3.76 days. Observing it during the complete period is a very nice thing. Lets hope tomorrow we make a fourth measurement, and then we will have observations for around the period.
This night, however, did not finish at 6:00 in the morning.. At around 21:00 wind speed was near 30km/h and it started to rise slowly but consistently (plus or minus a few km/h).. At 2:00 it reached a peak of 45km/h. Inside the dome almost nothing was felt, just a very cold light breeze.
Information on wind speed comes from two weather stations located at the top of the same hill that shields our observatory from the NNW wind...
We kept the dome open as the wind dropped sligthly, but before 4:00 it jumped to 49 km/h. Since we were a bit tired and the dome was not ours, we could not justify keeping it open, despite the light breeze that was effectively (not) influencing the dome. Consequently we closed the dome and waited a bit while leaving the CCD doing calibration images.
Around 5:00, the wind shyly started dropping below the 45km/h limit, but we could not guess it would really keep below it for the rest of the night. We ended it there, and did not look at the final stars of the night.
This situation is a bit frustrating because the weather station information must be our offitial weather information for deciding when to open or close the dome. Still, the weather station is placed on a location that is important for other higher telescopes, but when the wind comes from NNW the wind does not affet us much. If that dome were mine, more stars would have been measured!...
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