7   Slit-Viewing & Autoguiding Systems

7.1) Introduction

7.2) Andor Cameras for Slit Viewing

          7.3) Autoguiding and Acquisition at the MDM Telescopes

7.1  Introduction   

All telescope mountings are imperfect, so to maintain accurate pointing for any but the briefest exposures it is necessary to monitor the telescope's drift, generate a correction signal, and feed this back into the telescope's fine motion controls. The autoguider accomplishes this using Finger Lakes Instrumentation (FLI) CCDs and the Maxim DL software package resident on the Win10-based TCS PC.  This chapter assumes that you are familiar with the operation of the Multiple Instrument System (MIS Chapter 6).

Slit-Viewing is performed using science grade CCDs at both telescopes (excepting CCDS which utilizes its own SBIG camera currently).  

It is assumed that instrument rotator encoder has been set to zero degrees at the actual mechanical zero. (Section 8.2).