Right well I'm going to post my experience
Well, this was my fourth astrofest but the first I actually went up for the entire week. I had to take a week off from school, which was a bit of a pain, had to go around to all the teachers to get work to do while I was away, I didn't really end up doing much of it though...
As I still hadn't got my license (turned 17 of thursday), I had to ask my mum to drive me up, and take me home. She said she would which was great
The plan was to drive up monday, she and her partner(alan) would sleep over till Tuesday, and then drive to malaney and stay the night there, then come back for saturday night. There was a bit of a mix up though and alan couldn't come up for the saturday, but mum luckily managed to get a bed for saturday.
Anyway, we left about 11am, after managing to fit everything in the car somehow, stopped in at carsaldine to grab a few supplies (beer I think). Then hit the road. Then sat in traffic for about half an hour. Bah. Never happened before, turned out to be some pretty nasty looking fires, we managed to get off the freeway though and went through the back of morayfield through the back of the shopping center (?? Why??).
We arrived about 1:30pm, something like that. Signed in, and I began to set up, first time bringing my laptop, and I planned on covering it up with red gel, but there wasn't any avalible to first night, so I made with a few layers of celephane, which worked really well when combined with The Sky 6's ability to go into "Night Vision Mode". I also made sure to set up right on the edge of the visual field and point it outwards, so it caused no problems.
Only problem was that I set up on dirt, but after a closer inspection it looked like everywhere else was dirt, it can't be helped. I'm thinking about a tarp for next time though, cause when the due came, that dirt got a bit muddy, and my Jeens were a bit long...
First night wasn't too duey though and I had a good time just browsing around the sky, getting reaquanted, as it had been a while.
Some time after midnight I noticed some weird glow in the sky, confused me for a while, surly twilight would start much later? Then the source cleared the hill. Ah, the moon. Ah, Bedtime.
I couldn't sleep though, I'm sorry to say, I didn't really think I needed earplugs, never needed them before, bad mistake. I was in the mcdonald house with two snorers. Agh! Sorry guys... but wow! No sleep that night. Tried to blocked it out by listening to my mp3 player, but you know... I had to turn it up too loud to block the bass rumbling of the snore, that it was useless. I had a headache by that time so gave up on that idea, at about 5am I decided it was worth a try to see if tony or something was still up or maybe left the door open to the registrar, where I remembered seeing free earplugs. It was locked though, and I just about froze going there and back in my PJ things. Oh well, I slept a little during the day, and managed to get a little sleep during the night, I assumed.
The next night was much the same, went to bed around the same time, I started logging some of the stuff I looked at using the sky 6 logging thing, I did that the previous night as well, but this time I actually started writing something about each object. I didn't really have a list of things too look at though so just picked out things that I could see on the star charts on the computer (Stary night enthusiast(came free out of a magazine
), and The Sky 6 (Raffle two years ago
).
I just want to say here that using the laptop for star charts is the best thing ever, so, soooo much better then using paper maps! It's so easy to zoom around and pick something to look at, and if I zoomed in to the right level, the target in TS6 would be almost the same size as my telrad in the sky, making everything so much easier. No more torches in mouths, no more insufficent stars, no more dewy books, no more pain. Awesome.
Wendsday night was clouded, I saw Jupiter, and a -7th magnitude iridium flare through the thickest cloud in the region, which amounted to a slight brightening of the cloud, far from spectacular.
So I watched some TV things on my laptop (WIN again for laptop), wandered over to astroron's area and talked with them, and everyone was playing with their lasers. Went to bed around 12am. Didn't look like it would clear.
To be continued...
(My feet/legs/ass are(is) going to sleep on me here.)
