FreeLists / az-observing / [AZ-Observing] Cloud Free Observing

[Andrew Cooper <acooper@xxxxxxxxx>]

Taking advantage of cloud free skies and trying to beat the moon, I took
a personal day at work an spent all night Wednesday and Thurday morning
working off a little monsoon frustration.  I used the club's TIMPA site
because of the availability of power.  The CCD's I use are not designed
for field use and 110V is a necessity.  A day of sweating in the sun,
digging and dropping cable into trenches has a payoff!  

A wonderful night!  Sitting back a scanning the skies with binos as the
CCD pounded away at each target.  Lots of meteors, including several
with short lived trails.  I observed what could only be three launches
from Vandenberg late in the evening, two simulataneously and a third a
few minutes later. Somebody know what they were to launch all together?

Some of the results of the night's work can be found at
http://aecooper.home.att.net/recentccd.html.  Don't look for the rest of
the site, it isn't there...  yet.  Doing a little re-organizing and
cleaning house.

Seeing conditions turned the stars into blobs for anything longer than
the shortest exposures, but transparency was good and I had a chance to
work bugs out of the new CCD setup. Unfortunately the order from
Digi-Key with the six contact RJ connectors to repair the motor cables
on the mount didn't arrive until the next day, so I had to put up with a
troublesome dec. drive.

For those of you going out this weekend, clear skies!  I would be out
to, but my wife only puts up with this sort of behavior once a moon.

Andrew


-- 

Andrew Cooper
Tucson, AZ
mailto:acooper@xxxxxxxxx
http://whitethorn.house.home.att.net
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