Hints for Field Acquisition

• At the start of the night it may prove useful to acquire some familiar astronomical object, center it on the detector, and then reset the RA setting circle. One can also note what the error is in declination.

• It is essential that you use current equniox coordinates when setting the telescope: equinox 1950 coordinates will lead to errors of 1/4 of a degree! There is an IRAF routine astutil package that can be used for this purpose.

• With the guider TV xy stage ``centered" (as judged by eye looking at the stage), the TV shows the central 20 arcminutes of the field.

• If you need to reposition an object by a few arcminutes, one can do this with some accuracy by first aquiring a star on the guider TV and judging the size of the motion from the fact that its field of view is 20 arcmin. The directions should be marked on the TV monitor.