March, 2011: ARO joins the University of Calgary's Quark Nova Project. ARO is leading the search for the theoretical Quark Nova.
January 9, 2011: I was archiving the 2010 data and thought I'd report some stats. I was able to observe for 103 nights in 2010 and collected 98 gigabytes of data. Most of January was lost due to equipment problems and maybe 5-10 additional nights lost due to vacation, etc., so not a bad year. All of these nights were used for variable star research for Turner/Majaess, observing campaigns initiated by the AAVSO, observations of a couple of Wolf Rayet stars for an HIA astronomer, and a very productive hour of supernova searching on New Year's Eve.
The highlight of the 2010 year could of course have been the discovery of SN2010lt on New Year's eve. For some reason, I did not report on 2009, but it was a bad year with only 55 nights, largely due to equipment problems which had the down for about the last 4 months of the year when the Gemini telescope controller failed. It was replaced with a SiTech control system in January 2010.
January 2, 2011: A supernova, SN2010lt, is discovered by Kathryn Gray, Paul Gray, and myself.