I am working at the MIT Wallace Observatory for the summer. Tonight, I am practicing finding Pluto and taking images to get ready for the upcoming occultation!
When we arrived at the observatory, the sky was completely clear except for these beautiful clouds to the West.
Once the sky became dark enough to observe, one of the other observers, Ryuga, pointed this telescope to Pallas. Pluto doesn't rise until around 1am in Westford, MA. Pointing the telescope to Pluto looked approximately the same. This is one of our manual telescopes - the observer must point the telescope by hand without the help of a computer.
At 1am, when Pluto rose above the treeline, I pointed the telescope to Pluto. To do so - I first had to find the location of Pluto by using the JPL Horizons website.
This website returns the location of the selected body during the specified times. The image below has the Right Ascension and Declination of Pluto tonight.
Once I had the location of Pluto, I could point the telescope to that location.
The monitor on the left shows the telescope and dome location (the image is very small and dark since the video camera cannot see in the dark). The monitor on the right has an image of the pluto field.
In order to identify Pluto, I then made a finder chart. A finder chart shows the nearby stars and has a circle around where your object will be found. My favorite website for these is this.
Here is the website:
This is the completed finder chart. The location that pluto can be found is circled. The size of my camera is the orange box.
By comparing this chart with my field, I identified pluto! It is small and fuzzy, but is there.
Pluto is located in the green circle!
While the telescope was busy taking images, I took some series of images with the DSLR camera outside to create star trails. Here is a star trail of the big dipper:
This star trail had clouds continuously moving in and out, the stars look more like shooting stars!
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