What to Know Before Observing.

When you go observing in the 'real world', the job of the telescope operator is to operate the telescope and ensure that everything and everyone is safe. It's up to you, the astronomer, to know what you are looking at, what your science goals are, and how you are going to accomplish them. With this in mind, here are the things I expect you to have when you arrive at the telescope.

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There is no internet access at O'Brien!
You must have this information ahead of time.
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Things to bring to the telescope:

• The coordinates of your object.
  Use Simbad to get the coordinates.
  Enter the name of your object and Simbad will return a variety of information, including the object's RA and DEC. Make a printout of the results page from Simbad or just note the FK5 coordinates.



• Which standards you would like to use.
  Standard star observations are essential to an observational program.
  You can pick standards from this list of Landolt Standards. Try to pick standards that are close to your object and are actually up when you will be observing.



• At least 3 nearby 'pointer' stars from the SAO catalog.
  This is especially important for faint extragalactic sources. The ability to see a few pointer stars in the neighborhood of your object gives you confidence that the telescope is pointing correctly and avoids long exposures on blank sky.
  Check out the SAO Help page to find your SAO stars.



• An image of your object, if possible.
  You can be assured that you've found the correct object if your image looks like the one in the picture.
  You can use the Nasa Extragalactic Database to get images of most of the objects on the target list.