Report - 08/04/2009

Tuesday, 04 August 2009 22:41

Too bad it wasn't baseball!

After peeking at the clear sky chart for my back yard, which also happens to be my favorite observing site, I decided that tonight, I would make a conscious attempt to get and do some observing. 

By roughly 9pm, the moon was visible, and the sky was starting to darken visibly, but still showing it's bluish glow, which is typical of summer evenings.  By 9:45, I was shutting down my game of Final Fantasy, on my NES emulator, and was raring to go.  The sky was dark, though not black, and there were just a few clouds lurking about my 'horizon', which is about 10-15 degrees above the real horizon, due to the trees on my property.  The western sky was still visibly awash in light, but I didn't care.  My target was the moon and Jupiter.  My goal was to image them.

Went outside, uncovered the scope, went to plug in the mount, and realized that my cases were all over my observing deck.  So I ran back to the house, got the collapsible table that we bought a few weeks back, hauled it back to my observing deck and set it up on the grass alongside my observing deck.  Gotta admit, it was a little low to the ground, but to be expected since my deck is easily 9-10 inches above the ground.  But, the table was serving it's purpose.  All my accesory cases fit, including the laptop, and all the bits for the thermacell mosquito repellent.

Finally back on track, I decided to re-align the mount, since I had bumped it and jostled it alot when I was mounting the guidescope.  After an hour screwing around with it, I realized two things.  First, the Dec axis had to be swung 90 degress to let the polar scope 'see'.  Second, it was necessary to remove the polar scope's cover.  Oops.  Regardless, the mount did have to be adjusted, since it was off by about one half degree.

By this point the mount was up and running, but the GPS module was not.  Normally the GPS acquires in about 90 seconds, but tonight, even after 5 minutes it wouldn't acquire it's signal.  So I took it off, and manually set the date, time, DST and Lat/Long.  While this was all happening, I can report that my guide scope has seen first light, and so too has my Starshoot Autoguider.

So now that I had the scope running and the mount slewing, it was time to 3-star align the mount.  Turns out, my scopes weren't aligned to Polar North when I started the 3-star align, so everything was WAY off.  In the end, after another 20 minutes messing around with it, I re-parked the mount, restarted it, and without aligning the mount, told it to slew to Jupiter.  From there, I manually released the Dec and RA clutches and centered Jupiter myself.  While there I got to peek at Jupiter and the Galilean moons.  I wish I had my camera.  it was a nice view.

Anyways by this point, I did some test slews to Vega, Altair and Arcturus, only to find that each star was winking out behind the clouds that were starting to roll in.  I slewed back to Jupiter, got one last view, and packed it in for the night.

A productive night?  I guess that depends.  Did I get any observing done?  Nope.  Did I get any imaging done?  Nope.  Did I get the bugs and kinks worked out of the scope?  Yup. 

1 out of 3 isn't a good exam score, but it's not bad for baseball!