Kaiser Wiki

The Student Telescope is located in the West Koepel at the Old Observatory. The control room for the Student Telescope is located under the 10-duims telescope. The Dome for the telescope is fully manually operated, which means that during exposures you need to track the dome by hand. The Telescope is mounted on a high pier, which also houses all power and network connections.

The telescope mount is a Software Bisque Paramount ME support, which is computer controlled. The telescope is a Takahashi Mewlon 300 with focusing on the Secondary Mirror. The front end of the telescope is modified to hold an aperture mask for DIMM (seeing) measurements or Non-Redundant Mask for sub-diffraction limit observing.

The Imaging Source DMK 21AU618.AS fast camera . This is a fast (60 fps), small format (640×480 pix) camera that can be used for freezing the atmosphere. A barlow adapter is available to improve the pixel scale.
FLI Proline 16803 CCD Camera (~0.5“/pixel, 0.6×0.6 degrees FoV, but bad quality at edge of field) with CFW 3-10, 10 position filter wheel (from slot 0 to 9: open, UBVRI,L,OIII,SII,Halpha)
Shelyak eShel spectrograph, R~10000, 450-700 nm. With Atik 11000M as camera for the spectra and a Watec 120N camera for guiding. ThAr, Tungsten and LED calibration sources.
Van Slyke Instruments SideWinder Optical Manifold. Allows attaching multiple instruments to be at the telescope and switching between instruments.
SBIG All-Sky 340 All Sky camera. (being tested in optical lab, to be attached to roof of West wing)

All network connections in the West Koepel and under the 10-duims telescope are within the STRW domain. The West Koepel contains a single Windows 7 PC for controlling all instrumentation. The telescope and periphery is controlled by TheSkyX. The control room contains 2 linux PCs which can be used for data analysis. One PC has 2 screens to allow for viewing the control computer. This PC also hosts a web server that allows streaming of the all-sky camera data.

Login to student telescope with: rdesktop -f koepelwest -u koepelwest -d sterrewacht or username: koepelwest password: koepelwest2waarneem

The West dome was installed about 1924 and housed instuments for astrometry. The main instrument was an azimuth telescope, which measures transit times at a fixed elevation. This instrument was also used for the Kenia expedition in the thirties end late forties of the 20th century.