A surprise dust storm hit Kitt Peak about an hour before sunset and delayed the start of observing on the last night of Campaign 111 by two hours. After the dust settled, observations proceeded under clear skies, but with a very bright, waxing gibbous moon and in awful seeing for most of the remainder of the night. The seeing ranged from 2-6 arcsec.
This successful campaign formally ends the contribution of the 2.3m Bok Telescope to the Fermi/Steward monitoring program. During the first 10 cycles of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope mission, data were obtained with SPOL at the Bok Telescope on a remarkable 357 nights; nearly a full year of observations! Thanks to all those at Steward Observatory involved in keeping the telescope in top condition and allowing this unprecedented spectropolarimetry/spectrophotometry effort to be as efficient as possible.
The final campaign for Fermi Cycle 10 (and the project as a whole) will
start on the night after Independence Day at the other workhorse of the program: the 1.54m Kuiper Telescope on Mt. Bigelow, Arizona. We will see what the
2018 edition of the monsoon has in store.
