by Jeff Crilly
From:OK, I got lazy and bailed on any observing last night. The sky looked great at 10 and nary a hint of dew. How was it on the mountaintops?
FP was ok. There were 6 scopes on the pads, and another down by the shop. Actually kinda busy for a non-public night. I rarely setup on the pads due to the wind exposure but did last night as the wind was negligible at sunset.
At susnset the transparency looked iffy, but the sky seemed to improve after 9pm or so.
Joe-Bob had a really detailed view at like 300+x of saturn around 2am or so. Amazing detail. So I suspect the seeing was pretty good.
Also, early in the evening the autoguider was correcting in dec, which was a bit disappointing since I thought I had really really good polar alignment. Around 2am, I was getting much better guiding with no dec corrections, hence I suspect the dec corrections in early evening were due to seeing conditions.
As others mentioned, the dew was quite fierce early in the evening. Everything was instantly soaked. Btw, the Dewbuster w/ kendrick heaters totally kept the optics dry, even the quite exposed guider camera lens.
However, around 2 or 3am the dew subsided substantially. In fact the windows on the car become dew free.
After a mass exodus by others around 1am or so, I stayed for a few more images, but didnt get going down the hill until about 6am. There was some fog in the valley -- at the 152/101 interchange the visibility was down to about 75 feet.
The pictures are still in the camera. It will be a few days before they are presentable, if at all.. we'll see.
Posted on sf-bay-tac Nov 14, 2004 22:32:51 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 21, 2005 20:20:35 PT