by Richard Crisp
How was the seeing was down there? At Coe it was soft to bad the entire night.
I didn't go to FP, but observed (imaged) from my backyard last night in Castro Valley.
The seeing was terrible, some of the worst I have seen for such a clear and cold night.
I had a terrible time guiding with two different systems being used (c14/DM and AP155/ST10).
The transparency at Coe was worse than I expected. There seemed to be a layer of crud that extended up enough to cover the hills in the Santa Cruz
I didn't really do a limiting magnitude comparision but offhand I think the transparency was pretty good here, but the seeing was awful.
It was really COOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLDDDDDD too. I saw a low of 26 degrees F on my Radio Shack digital thermometer.
I have an imaging friend in town that lives in Hawaii and he was totally frozen, and I was pretty close to it too. The worst thing about imaging in such cold weather is that the fingers get really cold trying to type on a keyboard.
My targets du jour were NGC7380 as a "warmup" and then HH34 as the main event. Between the cold and a dearth of guidestars problem after the dreaded equatorial flop, I decided to toss in the towel around 3am and cut the night short. I had a good time nonetheless. I was really happy I did not go out to Coe or other places because there would have been no relief from the cold. At least when I am imaging at home I can go inside during the long exposures and thaw out.
Mts. The theory was that the wood stoves in San Jose affected us.Normally on a clear night like that the eastern and southern sky would have been darker.
I am going to observe from home tonight.
I will probably do the same thing.