This is the paper with which I participated in the nineteenth Astronomy State Congress. The presentation is available for viewing in pdf format download from here.
The work focuses on how to get the most out of a telescope in urban areas and to mitigate the effects of light pollution. Despite the poor quality of the results, compared with the observation of dark skies, the use a telescope mounted at home is much higher for the greatest number of hours available each night watching and saving down time for the assembly, disassembly and transportation of equipment.
Now However, the approach is made from a type of observation-oriented data collection, astrometry and photometry. Other modalities may have a lower tolerance to light pollution and turbulence that favors the urban environment, such as for astrophotography with aesthetic or visual observation of deep sky.
A time of submission of the paper
However, it is striking how the technique of CCD image has a considerable extent even in a bright sky background as it is in the city, allowing capture faint stars and deep sky objects like galaxies not too extensive.
"Observatories" urban and which serves as an example, the MPC code J30, face additional problems such as obstruction by buildings and having the restricted field of view the western horizon, up to 60 degrees latitude. From the west, after passing through the meridian, the stars are falling up to the sunset, so after starting to be visible soon lose height and are at a disadvantage to be observed.
In these circumstances the best way to use the site to establish an optimum zone of observation, which will be between 50 and 20 degrees latitude and 250 and 330 degrees of azimuth. Objects within this strip are the ones with a right ascension equal to local sidereal time at least 2 hours of hour angle, and a declination between +20 ° and +60 °.
Programming of comments under this criterion can observe in the best possible conditions at this place. However, the use is still limited by the number of hours that the viewer can focus on operating the equipment, and will be limited by the daily rest.
However, the computerization of the telescopes, and via computer control brings with it the ability to handle the mount, camera and other devices from the software, and, moreover, can do that by a script orders can be established by the pc, independently, handle all the team, making to send point to an object, that CCD make a series of exhibitions and to store, filter wheel by using a proper filter and control, for example, the correct approach and acting on a motorized focuser.
Exposing the conclusions
Thus, programs like autotelcam or ccdcommander, you can automate your computer and have the ability to delegate to the computer all the repetitive tasks. Working automatically, the observer can spend the night to rest and presents the opportunity to use all clear nights, all week, from dusk to dawn.
J30 Observatory, working in automatic mode is running scripts, each with a selection of articles covering 1 hour of right ascension. At a rate of 10 images of 60 seconds per object, 7 or 8 can observe objects in the optimum range of height. In an average night would see, stretched to the limit, about 80 celestial objects.
In practice, when visible the densest areas of the Milky Way, the telescope comes to making observations of 40 objects. Since it was launched observation automated, have come to make 2397medidas brightness is about 70 objects, ranging from eruptive variable stars, pulsating variable stars, quasars, and extragalactic supernovae.
has been given special attention from the start to monitoring the activity of eruptive stars, in particular subtypes or dwarf nova U Geminorum, and SW Sextantis. In this type of observation, which is necessary to obtain brightness measurements almost nightly, automated observation is of unquestionable effectiveness.
In conclusion, the scheduling of the observations, on the one hand, and automation through software, have allowed leverage to a location at the beginning it seemed unattractive for astronomy. This way of working is likely to continue in the coming years, perhaps until the remote control of telescopes in dark sky sites represent a viable alternative.
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