ahh that feeling again!

[iceman (Mike)]

I'd almost forgotten what it felt like..

You know, the feeling you get when you know you stayed up too late when you have to get up early for work the next morning, because you were out imaging in the cold??

Gritty eyes, wandering stares.. It's all coming back to me!

After over 2 weeks of nothing thanks to a broken platform, I finally got my platform fixed and went out imaging last night! The seeing was ok, slightly above average, transparency was quite good. Rather mild too, about 11-12° until about 11pm when it started getting colder.

I used my mirror fan for the first time, and it was able to bring the mirror temp to within 0.8° of ambient, which isn't too bad because I only had it running for a short time before and the temps started at 2° different. I actually left it running while I was imaging too, will need to do some experiments to see if it makes a difference.

I'm looking forward to seeing what tornado33 and Paul Mayo and others did last night - I bet they got some very nice DSO's. It was clear ALL NIGHT too, so I imagine they have that blurry eyed feeling right now too

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Yep know the feeling Mike I was hoping to have it this morning, but gave up at 22:00. Lovely and fresh at 12 deg, crystal clear, hardly a breath of wind and the seeing about 0.1/10. Some of the worst seeing I've tried to image through. It got so bad that Jupiter looked like I still had 2 sec to go on the motorized focuser before it was focused.

When I first set up I took a look through the ToUcam and Jupiter looked very promising (19:00) even though it was still so low. So I thought I'd play with the Sac 4.2 to get the gist of it for a while, while the seeing settled a bit more. Big mistake. I should have grabed the few images I could have in that half hour or so.


I'm glad to see you finally got out and had some fun. It's been a while. How much work was needed to get you mount up and running again?

[iceman (Mike)]

I know what you mean Paul.. when i first set up around 8:45pm, Jupiter looked nice through the eyepiece.. but it got worse as the night went on.

[janoskiss (Steve H)]

I know that feeling too, minus the images. How nerdy is that though? Being hung over from staying up late doing astronomy, instead of drinking or other substance abuse like normal people. Sometimes I even need to pop some headache tablets the day after a long night out under the stars.

[davidpretorius]

whats with the seeing. i have never seen the stars twinkle sooooo much. some of the brighter ones seem to be changing up to a degree of magnitude.

the jetstream looks great, but the last three nights really have not coincided with nonexistant jetstream?

wierd

[ving (David)]

i am like that every morning regardless of how long i stay up
i am just not a morning person

[joe_smith]

Thats why I like night shift, its like sleeping in all the time you get up and you have about 5 hours to kill before you start work- down side not much time for viewing

[h0ughy (David)]

Yep stay up late, get up early - eventually the two merge and your a walking zombie

[astroron (Ron)]

Stayed up till 04:00 , looking at Jupiter was like having Cateracts, but did lots of deep sky observing,only got to 2degs, woken up by the phone at 09:00 but had a great nights observing all the same, Comet looked great through the 7x50 bino's.