by Richard Crisp
The conditions were about as good as I've seen it at Fremont Peak.
Early on I was getting stars of <2 arc-sec HFD in focus runs using an [OIII] filter.
The seeing remained good throughout the evening.
The transparency was perhaps the only area that could have been improved but even it was very good.
The temperatures were classic summertime temp inversion: low 70s to high 60s all night long. There was dense fog below. The fog was so dense that San Jose was near-dark.
Once the moon set it got even better. I could see M31 naked eye. The milky way looked like high cirrus. Very easy to seen and the great rift had great contrast. It was truly remarkable.
When was first aligning and getting prepared for my imaging around 9:45pm, I was noting that Altair, perhaps at most 30 degrees up from the horizon, was rock-solid in my finder scope. I've seen stars shine steady like that straight up early in the evening but seeing a low one that steady and that early was remarkable.
I continued my NGC6820 project I've been pursuing for almost a week and a half, having set a goal of finishing it. Here it is:
http://www.narrowbandimaging.com/ngc6820_s2hao3_page.htm
Once I processed this beast (9 hours and 10 minutes of exposure), I found some noise that I need to investigate. So I will likely reprocess this data in a day or two. But after waiting for so many days to get this complete I want to sit back and look at it a bit before calling it final.
Posted on sf-bay-tac Jul 24, 2004 15:02:52 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 04, 2005 22:36:03 PT