A blog about a telescopic system at the Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaii to determine terrestrial albedo by earthshine observations. Feasible thanks to sheer determination.
We are starting a new blog over at
where issues related to how to design (and one day, hopefully, build) a better eshine telescope are considered.
The present blog will from now on only discuss how to use the data obtained from the Hawaii telescope.
OK, we updated that site with an entry about a NASA proposal.
A wish-list for this system should include
‘proper polar
axis alignment’ and/or
‘automatic centering of
telescope on flattest part of hohlraum field’
In order to better understand the empirical description of the Moon halo we need more deep images of the Moon itself. We have studies of point sources that show the halo but need a connected set of images from one night that allows tracing of the Moon halo out far, and then a set of images of the sky that show the halo but without the Moon in the image. We almost did this for one night but could improve the data in the following way: Image where Moon is in the frame should be deeper which probably means overexposing the CCD or we should get MANY shorter exposures and then stack them. We also need longer exposures from the non-Moon part of the scan to go as far out as possible.
SWARP may be useful for generating one connected picture of the Moon Halo, suitable for study and display in papers.
We know, from observations of the M7 cluster, that the stellar images are not round across the field. This may because some of the optical components are not at right angles to the optical axos. I think that the color filters are angled slightly. We would like to map the ellipticity better and need more images – they should be rich in stars from side to side. Deep images of the Milky Way may be what we need.
