[AZ-Observing] A Slightly More Successful Weekend Trip

From: Andrew Cooper <acooper@xxxxxxxxx>
To: AZ-Observing mailing list <az-observing@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 02 Jun 2003 21:56:40 -0700

This Saturday Gil Jones graciously allowed Dean Salman, Bill Lofquist
and myself to setup in his Three Buttes Observatory
(http://www.threebuttes.com).  I do mean IN his observatory, the
roll-off is huge, room for our three scopes all set for CCD with tables
and computers as well as Gil's 12.5" RC on an AP CM1200 and it's
associated computer gear.  Well, all CCD except Bill who was shooting
film, but I think we were beginning to infect him as he was asking about
good starter CCD's by the end of the night.

Talk about luxury... power, concrete floor, no dust, dark skies, a wall
to block the breeze and good company.

Sunset showed thin cirrus across most of the sky.  The weather service
promised clearing and they were correct, by 2300 the sky had mostly
cleared and by 0100 there wasn't a wisp to be seen except on the
horizons to the far south or north.

The view through the 12.5" at Jupiter was spectacular with plenty of
detail.  Almost as good as Mars the next morning, maybe only 12' but
there were polar caps and plenty of albedo features as well as the dark
feature just at the margin of the cap that someone here mentioned
recently.  Looking forward to opposition!  See Gil's site for his webcam
Jupiter and Mars shots taken that night to see what we saw in the eyepiece.

Spent the night shooting away with a new camera, something I have been
working on for the last few months.  Based on one of the new E2V charge
multiplication chips, I needed to "try" it out under real world
conditions.  So a few good targets, M51, M101, M22, Veil, B86, NGC6522,
NGC6357 and others.  Even shot at the much more difficult LeoII dwarf
galaxy to see what the new camera could do.  Still working on the
results, only 260Mb of data for the night, but then it is a small
512x512 array.

A good night! and thanks Gil!

Andrew

-- 

Andrew Cooper
Tucson, AZ
mailto:acooper@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.whitethornhouse.com
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[AZ-Observing] A Slightly More Successful Weekend Trip

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