which means no fans, vents or openings of any kind are permitted into the interior OTA space. Because of this and the difficulty in cleaning the OTA it's important to me to keep the OTA as sealed up as possible. The OTA's are surrounded on the upwind sides by a windscreen and I can monitor local microclimate conditions as well as wind information for each OTA.īecause these OTA's are fully exposed during the night and only partially protected during the day they bear the brunt of living in a forest dust and particulates when the wind blows covering optical surfaces, pollen from trees in the spring REALLY covering optical surfaces and always small spiders and animals looking for new homes. They are brought in during sustained inclement weather but in general are simply covered with a TG365 cover (with dehumidifier, thermal pad and temp/ humidity monitor) during the day and then uncovered at dusk to acclimate prior to astronomical twilight when they begin the imaging routines. The OTA's have some human interaction at dawn and at dusk but they are basically visited more by elk and the occasional bear than by a human and are operated entirely remotely by computer with occasional checks by me via VNC and a webcam directed at the OTA watching its position and condition, the deer and elk and javelena and occasional bear. they get images of any galaxy or nebula that happens to pass by, much like a fishing boat with a net will catch any fish which happens on by.
To begin it's useful to understand my particular situation in regards to imaging: I have a group of C14 and C11 telescopes which operate at a mainly remote location acting as "sky-roomba's". Other problems are more difficult to understand and hence more troublesome to find a solution for.
Some issues lend themselves to relatively simple understanding and there are available solutions: differential flexure is simple to understand and there are solutions available to combat that polar alignment is simple to understand and there are again solutions available to address it. Other factors however are more controllable by us, we simply need to understand the problem and determine a solution. In addition, a method for simulating acclimatization at any location or date in a repeatable, controllable way will also be discussed as well as a methodology for better understanding and discussion of the thermal characteristics of a telescopeĪs deep space imagers there are many challenges we face in our quest for "the perfect shot", which can be put into two categories: things within our control and things outside of our control.įactors outside of our control include clouds, rain, light pollution and object availability which can be managed to some extent but basically "are what they are". It was found that "crash cool" systems exhibited more initial thermal stability as well as more overall stability for all temperature gradients tested There was also data collected in terms of OTA system thermal dynamics over a variety of temperature cooling gradients. As part of the data collection phase of a larger thermal modeling project for a C14 OTA, the thermal characteristics over time of a closed tube C14 OTA of both a conventional "slow cool" and a "crash cool" method of acclimatization were observed.