Today I visited another backyard observatory near Tucson. Roy Tucker owns the Goodricke-Pigett Observatory and he has been doing spectroscopy with the SBIG SGS, so I contacted him to see if we could compare notes.
Roy is an extremely skilled astronomer, having worked on numerous professional telescopes at the engineering level. His engineering skills were quite evident as much of his system is self-designed.
His control room is an astronomer's dream, with a large rack of computers capable of processing the huge quantity of data that Roy obtains on clear nights.
The largest building houses 3 big newtonians, which operate in a unique configuration he calls "MOTESS" ("Moving Object and Transient Event Search System"). MOTESS basically is intended as an asteroid search system, using drift-scan techniques, and has discovered a great many asteroids; but the data is also useful for discovering variable stars and monitoring other events.
Roy also does photometry and spectroscopy. It was fun to compare our processing strategies, I think it was time well spent.
It's clear tonight, but my brother is visiting so I'm taking the night off from observing.
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