Day: January 2, 2024

[category 

astronomy-report]

Name: Gabriel Skowronek
Crew: 289
Date: 01 Jan 2024

MONTANA LEARNING CENTER
Robotic Telescope Requested RCOS-16
Objects to be Imaged this Evening: SW Tauri
Images submitted with this report: None
Problems Encountered: None

MDRS ROBOTIC OBSERVATORY
Robotic Telescope Requested MDRS-WF
Objects to be Imaged this Evening: M1 (Crab Nebula), M42 (Orion Nebula)
Images submitted with this report: None
Problems Encountered: Neither M1 nor M42 have been imagined. Furthermore, I wanted to process the M1 images I currently have for the practice, despite them being overexposed. However, there doesn’t seem to be any flat or dark calibration images taken. Is this problematic? If so, how should I set up an observation to make sure that they are there?

MUSK OBSERVATORY
Solar Features Observed: N/A
Images submitted with this report: N/A
Problems Encountered: N/A
Additional Notes: I was able to get reasonable estimates for the magnitudes of my images of SW Tau using Afterglow (between 9.3 and 10.4). However, I just wanted to get numbers from AstroImageJ for comparison but am having trouble in choosing the aperture sizes. I noticed that magnitude is variable depending on the size of the aperture I choose and am not sure how to go about choosing the radius of object aperture and inner/outer radius of background annulus? The video tutorials seem to show that there is an ‘Auto’ option for this which is not available on my end.