Coude Auxiliary Telescope User's Guide


Table of Contents


Description
Introduction
Overview
Optical Arrangement
Operation
Opening
Pointing
Bore Sighting
FAT-CAT (Wide field acquisition camera)
Guiding
Image Rotator (Hamilton Manual)
Closing
Limits
Pointing
Weather

Observing Hints (Hamilton Manual)
Checklists
Old Cat Manual
Hamilton Spectrograph Instrument Manual


Data Archive
Mt. Hamilton Homepage

FAT-CAT

The Field Acquisition Telescope for the Coude Auxiliary Telescope, FAT-CAT, is a wide field CCD camera mounted at the top of the focusing mechanism for the CAT secondary mirror and is used as a finder for the CAT. In its current configuration it consists of an Opticstar DS-335C CCD camera coupled to a 180 mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens with a plate scale of 3.95 arcsec/pixel and an effective field of view of 135 arcmin x 101 arcmin. The camera is connected to a computer named fatcatpc that resides on a shelf near the MOS via a USB cable. The camera software is run remotely using a VNC environment. To use FAT-CAT follow these instructions:
The current Hamilton boresight is (1110, 674) for 1x1 binning, (563, 340) for 2x2 binning, or (280,170) for 4x4 binning. Click for larger image.


At the start of the night center a star on the slit and start guiding then capture an image making a note of the (row,column) coordinates of the star. Move the cursor to the location of the star on the image and right click the mouse to mark this position. To use FAT-CAT to find your way when you are lost follow these instructions:

Known USB issues: When you first start up the Nebulosity program and select the camera if you are greeted with a popup window saying "Cannot Init Camera" then close the program and go upstairs and unplug the USB cable coming from the camera from the USB extension cable and then reconnect the two cables. Do not unplug the USB cable from the computer!

Other Notes: