Goal: inform acquisition of twilight sky flats and transition to observing with short exposure times
Objective: monitor sky brightness in ugrizy bands as a function of alt,az, and sun angle below the horizon.
Initial Design
This device has no lens. It is basically composed of a photodiode attached to an electrometer. The optics are baffles and iris to collimate the light to a fixed solid angle value. The alt-az mount provides an accurate pointing in the AltAz system. The filter wheel stores the 6 LSST filters, ugrizy.
Optics Layout
This setup comprises a manual filter wheel, some thorlab parts for adjustment of the light beam, an optical bench with an Alt-Az mount on a Vixen bar.
Parts List
Aug, 7, 2024
The deliveries from Agena Astro did not arrive on time, we are still waiting (Aug 13)
Keysight Electrometer (B2983B) Connection Setup
Step-by-step for connection setup
Connect a USB Type B on the back of the electrometer to the laptop
The USB cable is connected to a USB hub that goes into the USB-C power entry of the laptop. This step is needed because the laptop does not accept a high-voltage entry through USB.
Turn on the keysight electrometer (see apparatus manual for instructions)
After that, the electrometer should pop-up as an external driver (hard disk)
Make sure you have install keysight commander
With keysight commander discover what is the name of the instrument USB
Run the python script keysight_usb_connection.py
AltAz iOptron - Python Interface
https://www.ioptron.com/product-p/3700az.htm
The AltAz mount has an easy connection to windows os. But it has no straightforward to mac os.
link
After some deep dive on some forums, I found out that is possible to have a python interface through RS-232 scripts
https://groups.io/g/iOptron/topic/controlling_cem26_mount_from/97702939
https://github.com/chimerasaurus/ioptron-python
Chris found that we can use the indi library to connect to the iOptron mount. I should check only if they have the driver for the Skyhunter mount.
Documents
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1sVX5E0UK0jYq_DHZrAbwoV0uhllU9BdI?usp=drive_link