Nice clear sky yesterday afternoon and most importantly... no wind!
Great! So I start setting the scope up
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Lyn's going to be late home from doing the shopping and visiting a friend in hospital, so I have to cook dinner for the girls, but that's OK.
After dinner I venture out and transparency isn't the best, but the scope is mostly set up. Just need to power up and polar align. I'm not aiming to achieve a heap - I just want to test my fishing line prototype of the Bahtinov Mask and maybe give my Staranalyser its first light - so I'll persevere.
It's really dewy! When I powered up the scope, I turned on the dew heaters and remove the objective cap from the C8, the objective lens was dewed up before it was time to look at my first star for alignment! That's a first for me! Out with the hairdryer...
Part way through drift aligning Lyn comes home so I help unload the groceries. Come back and transparency is worse, but nearly impossible to see through the scope. Hmmm, objective is clear... aha... the EP is dewed up. Hair dryer again...
Start drift aligning on Jupiter... contrast is falling away... objective is clear, EP is clear... uh oh, the sky isn't!
High cloud has come in. By naked eye Jupiter is visible and maybe 4 of the brightest stars in the sky
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I persevere, continued drift aligning on Jupiter. You never know it just might clear...
Had a few problems with the buttons on the hand controller. I guess they haven't been used in a while and the contacts may be tarnishing... must rectify that!
Eventually it becomes clear that transparency is just going to continue to deteriorate, so forget the drift aligning.
I whacked the prototype focus mask on the scope just to see what it looks like, but I can't see anything resembling a diffraction spike...
Transparency was so bad by this stage that I had Jupiter and moons in the FOV so I was only using Jup's moons as point sources... hardly a fair test in the circumstances...
Ok pack it up...
The cloud continued to thicken while I packed up at about 9:30pm, but when I finished packing up, I walk from the shed down to the house and what do I see... clear sky! A trace of thin cloud over the Sydney skyglow, but otherwise perfectly, spectacularly clear!
I stood for 5 to 10 minutes outside enjoying the Milky Way, but couldn't bring myself to set up again!
Time for bed!
Al.
