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Dr. Paul Wiegert at the University of Western Ontario is moving
forward with a fully autonomous monitoring station. The stations'
main task is to quantify and qualify the site in terms of seeing,
sky brightness, cloud cover and weather. The station has a small
low power computer that logs all the data which are stored on
an SSD. There is enough capacity to store several years of data.
The little computer has a built-in LCD display and runs XP on
a CF card, its total power consumption is only 5W. The seeing
monitor is located 3m above ground level to minimize ground turbulence.
The station is powered by a 230W solar panel and 63 AH 12V battery.
There is sufficient energy to power the station during the longest
and coldest nights with several days of heavy overcast.
The total cost of the station is ~$10,000 which Western is contributing
together with a significant amount of time in building and integrating
the station. I am very grateful to Paul for his assistance here.
There is no equivalent station available in the market place,
commercial stations with only a fraction of the functionality
are several times the price and have extremely limited storage.
The station is state-of-the-art and could be used anywhere in
the world to qualify/quantify a site.
Figure 1 - Block Diagram of the Monitoring Station
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