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The 197th annual meeting of the American
Astronomical Society was held jointly with the
American Association of Physics Teachers from January
7 to the 11, 2001 at San Diego California. DFM Engineering
set up a prominent display with one of our 16-inch
telescopes as the focus. The telescope was operational
running under computer control from our Telescope
Control System (TCS), and from "THE SKY", from Software
Bisque. The Software Bisque programs ran our telescope
and our filter wheel over the Internet, partially demonstrating
Software Bisque's impressive new Internet Access Remote Observing
Suite of programs.
On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings, visitors to our
booth were able to fully exercise the Software Bisque's Internet
Access Remote Observing software by remotely operating the
18-inch telescope at the Little
Thompson Observatory in Berthoud, Colorado. They were
able to command the telescope to Go To coordinates, command
the filter wheel, and acquire images from the telescope's
CCD camera. These hands-on demonstrations show that remote
observing over the Internet is a reality.
Our visitors were provided data sheets describing our complete
line of telescopes and support equipment. The 16-inch
telescope was equipped with our FW-82
eight position filter wheel, our new SM-125
Slide Mirror assembly, and a CCD camera loaned to us by
Apogee
Instruments. The Slide Mirror assembly provides the traditional
"Flip Mirror" functions of field viewing and then switching
to the straight through position for imaging. It may also
be used to switch between two different cameras. The assembly
can be operated remotely from the control room or manually
operated at the telescope. A sliding mechanism is used because
it is more easily motorized than a rotating flip mirror.
We also had several articles available for our visitors.
One of these articles discussed Telescope
Pointing and contained actual data from five DFM Telescopes
and one older B & C telescope which we retrofitted
with our Telescope Control System. All of these telescopes
point open loop (without optical feedback-which is cheating)
to better than 14 arc seconds RMS. The Dickinson
College DFM 24-inch telescope pointing error graphs were
also included. This telescope points to 9.5 arc seconds RMS.
Another popular article was our newly revised booklet on
"HOW
TO BUY A TELESCOPE FOR YOUR INSTITUTION". We had
to make additional copies of the booklet during the meeting
to meet the demand. This booklet discusses many factors of
choosing and evaluating a telescope and ways to protect your
institution.
We want to thank all of our collaborators for their part
in making our display such a success. Software
Bisque and DFM have worked together for most of the past
year refining the Internet Access software and adding control
for DFM telescopes and filter wheels. Tom Bisque also provided
expert assistance at our display demonstrating the capabilities
and powerful features of their software. Tom Melsheimer, President
of the Little
Thompson Observatory Foundation made the telescope available
and Andrea Schweitzer from the
Little Thompson Observatory coordinated the remote observing
demonstrations from our display. Bryan Short was the night
assistant at the Little Thompson Observatory.
We also had assistance in setting up and tearing down our
display from some of our customers including Dr. Dan Caton
and Lee Hawkins from Appalachian
State University.
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