While shopping for chrissy pressies on Saturday we "accidentially" bought a big tent and stuff to sleep on.
After realizing what we had done
we planned a spontaineous camping trip to Bairnsdale starting chrissy night lasting for a few days (see map below, which is a modified version of steves previous map. What is that wired island steve???)
Day 1: Spent the whole day wishing I had a ZenithStar 66 APO. The ZenithStar 80 is still a little bit too heavy for the manfrotto camera tripod. A lot of cool wildlife around. The camp site had wetlands just like snake vally.
Night 1: Cloudy, hot.
Day 2: Same as day one but now I wanted the Flourite Doublet version.
The whole day was completely clouded over with no gaps, just one big thick cloud layer.
Night 2: Cool ground, clear skies! If it only happens once a year it's a good year! Well this year it has happened twice in one month (see steves thread "anyone see the great seeing in Melbourne tonight"). The clouds completely dissappeared at sunset leaving cristal clear skies. The real advantage being that because the day was thickly clouded over the ground didn't heat up.
Seeing was extremely good, I will not put an over-enthusiastic scaling on it (10/10) that only hubble can achieve, I not sure about the scale thing anyway. The best way to put it, is that Mars at 35 degrees above the horizon had no movement or boiling at 120x. I can't go any higher mag with the setup I have, so that's the best I can do. Transparency was excellent, the sky should have been one magnitude darker than snake valley but the caravan park lights 100m away spoiled the fun. Dew on the car at sunset.
The GoTo nightmare from hell:
If there was a smilie that rolled eyes then shakes head and walks away in frustration then I would use it now.
To make a long story short. Buggger.
To give a bit more detail:
1. The mount forgot it's time and date settings after I played with it too much when I first turned it on. After it pointing in the wrong direction I did a reset and started again.
2. During the next alignment I accidentially used the arrows keys while it was slewing to the first star. The mount got confused again. Switched off and on, started again.
3. Two more alignment stuff-ups. I finially realized that I it has passed 12
AM so I was entering the wrong date and I should be putting AM instead of PM.
4. All went well during the next aligment until the cable must have slightly pulled out of the AutoStar controller. It went blank, the mount stopped. When I turned it back on the RA when out of control.
I hit the off switch.
5. I turned it back on but the RA drive went out of control again, this time trying to kill my scope by bashing it against the tripod. I stopped it just in time.
6. Started all over again but this time managed to stop the RA drive while the controller still had power! I noiticed the Dec drive slewed perfectly but the RA drive would only slewat maximum speed and ignored all settings. I did a "calibrate motors" and the mount returned to normal.
7. Started again and aligned well. I got the date and time right! I used to the two star alignment so I could choose the stars myself. Three star it chooses them for you.
8. Had one more "blank screen". Started all over, but this time was very careful to not pull on the autostar cable. All went well. It only took 1 hour in total to align!
9. Looked at some stars. First light for 15mm pano and 4mm radian. Had fun. Went to bed.
10. Dreamt about having GPS.
