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Minerva update

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Minerva Telescope 1, by day.
And by night. My astro-instrumentation student, Mike, sorting out the rat's nest of cables feeding our Apogee camera, autoguider and dual filter wheels.
Last night we tried to get the autoguider working, but were thwarted by a loose USB power connector (we, meaning Mike working with me looking over his shoulder :). Fortunately, Mike stuck with it and fixed the problem earlier today. While Mike was working on the cables, I observed Saturn through the eyepiece on the other Naysmyth instrument port. Here's a picture of Saturn I snapped by putting my iPhone camera up against the eyepiece.


Trust me, this is not nearly as impressive as seeing it with your eye! Even from Pasadena, with 3.5 arcsecond seeing, I was able to clearly make out Titan and three other, smaller moons. 

Tonight we'll continue working on the autoguider and perhaps start testing the photometric precision of our imaging system. 

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