Astronomy Report
03/20/2015
Mohammad Iranmanesh
Observation night: 03/19/2015 to 03/20/2015
The sky was clear and beautiful. We opened the observatory at 10:45 and closed it around 12:45. We did not do a long observation night because of an EVA planned in the next morning.
Since it was our first day, we went slowly and made sure to follow all the procedures.
The first night procedure was followed and 5 stars (Sirius, Capella, Denebola, Spica, Arcturus) were needed for the 2 star alignment procedure to finally display the “Alignment Successful” message on the hand controller.
Since it was our first time using it, I decided to follow these procedures with the white light on so that we do not damage anything because of lack of visibility. Unfortunately, because of that, our eyes did not have enough time to get used to the darkness and we had trouble seeing some of the lesser bright stars of interest for our next year project concerning “monitoring of atmosphere opacity”.
Please let me know if there is a formal template to follow for the Astronomy Reports, I could not find any.
Mohammad IRANMANSH, Crew Astronomer