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barx1963
06-12-2016, 12:19 AM
The ASV Star B Que at LMDSS Saturday December 3
So I managed to head up Saturday morning. Intended to mainly run an imaging stup and as I was using our smaller car, did not have room for a dob. Luckily Barry C was also going so he took the 20" up with him. (More about that later) Arrived early afternoon, a few about so started to setup on the nearly empty imaging field. Barry arrived an hour or so later so we setup the dob.
Crowd was building nicely by late afternoon so had a bite from the Lions trailer. Had a chat with Dimitry and along with a few others we made up a team for the trivia, fell a point short of winning, but most of the answers were guesses anyway!!
Night was looking really clear so keen to get out. Collimated and setup the dob inly to discover that the Argo was not operating :mad2: any hoo managed to at least set it up so Barry could use it with just a red dot finder. Started to get the imaging kit going and the EQMOD Bluetooth adaptor was not working!!:mad2::mad2:
Luckly I had a cable so fired that up and managed to remeber how to change port settings so was able to get some data on NGC 7293 (Helix) M42 and NGC 3372 (Eta Carina nebula) ended up imaging until sunrise. Had a few chats with Simmo and some uni students who had come up as well as several others, but with my usual propensity for forgetting names I cannot sa who!! The crowd was LARGE. I would have guessed easily more than 200 there with lots of families, groups of students and newbies so very well done ASV. The main field was very crowded, really had to be careful walking around. Only a handful on the imaging field which was interesting?

Thoroughly enjoyable day and night, some equipment issues were not good but totally worth it!!

Malcolm

jamespierce
06-12-2016, 07:48 PM
We were up Friday and Saturday - great to see such a wide range of new faces.... Young new faces too ! The weather was very kind ... kept at it until about 1am on the Saturday before getting to tired and calling it. It's always abit of a zoo with so many far to bright red lights, but hey, gotta get em hooked somehow.

Lognic04
12-12-2016, 08:41 PM
sorry for the late response, i was also up there , terrific night. i was on the visual field, towards the start of the night there were 2 spectacular fireballs. i was going to image on the photo field for the piers (only using an ioptron skytracker :P )but i didnt have the pier plate adaptor thing. i got some spectacular shots, one thing is that the plate with the ball head adaptor on the ioptron came loose (pitch black,turned the wrong screw :mad2: ), causing slight trailing. ah well, lesson learnt.:shrug:
Some stunning visual skies there though.
Pics: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BzE0NKgQOKgtTWpKdDRvd05Lc0k?usp=sh aring
:D :D :D

astro_nutt
13-12-2016, 07:25 PM
The 2016 ASV's Xmas Star-B-Que was a huge success. Almost 300 attended with all the activities in full swing (Hi Malcom). The Lion's Club provided their usual delicious fare for all, and afterwards, the night sky showed it's wonders which I imaged with great results.:thumbsup:
looking forward to Messier night in 2017.:D