During the last week observing schedule was replanned to incorporate an observation of MAXI J1957+032, which was accepted as a Target of Opportunity on Sep 29.

A real-time procedure was executed on Oct 5 to perform a routine self-check of the Electrical Interface Assembly (EIA) Sequencer.

An aspect camera dark current calibration was performed from the on-board loads on Oct 4. An assessment of the data indicates nominal aspect camera performance and that the warm pixel counts are consistent with recent mission trends.

A Chandra image release was issued on Oct 5 describing observations of XJ1417+52, a "wandering" black hole. The black hole has been found in the outer regions of a galaxy about 4.5 billion light years from Earth. Evidence suggests this newly discovered black hole has about 100,000 times the Sun's mass, and was originally located in a smaller galaxy that merged with a larger one. Chandra data show this object gave off a tremendous amount of X-rays, which classifies it as a "hyperluminous X-ray source". The burst of X-rays may have come from a star that was torn apart by the strong gravity of the black hole. For details see: http://chandra.si.edu/photo/2016/xj1417/

Of note this week was the release on Oct 3 of CIAO Scripts package 4.8.4. The update includes three new scripts: blanksky creates an unscaled blanksky background file compatible with a given event file from an observation, blanksky_image creates scaled background and background-subtracted images for a given blanksky background file and a reference image, and correct_periscope_drift corrects small (~0.1 arcsec) alignment drifts seen over the course of recent, long (>50 ks) observations. In addition, updates have been made to several scripts. For details see: http://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao/news.html

The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below and includes an observation of SN 2016gfy, which was accepted as a Target of Opportunity on Sep 19, an observation of Proxima Cen, which was accepted as a Director's Discretionary Time Target of Opportunity on Sep 1, an observation of SgrA* coordinated with NuSTAR and an observation of 2MASS J03251116+1300334 coordinated with ground-based observatories.