Today I woke up very excited, to get the day rolling. We were to start our observing tonight and everyone was excited. I got up early and ate, then sat in the hot tub for awhile waiting for everyone to get up and get ready to go. We all loaded into the vehicles and headed for the mountain. Our first stop was the U of A campus to pick up some parts and then we stopped for groceries. I got to drive up the mountain today and the drive was beautiful. We made two stops along the way up the mountain. One was an old Japanese prison camp that was built during WWII to house Japanese American prisoners. The road that we took up was built by hand by these prisoners during this time. Once up at the observatory we had to load our O3 filter as well as top off the camera with liquid nitrogen. Then we had to wait till Jupiter was up so we could start imaging. As darkness fell we started taking video of Jupiter and then were able to start stacking the frames. Once Jupiter went down we were able to start taking images of NGC 2022 and we took our bias, filter flats. The night was going really well up until we had a power outage on the mountain. This shut us down for the night and we proceeded to bed.
Filling the camera with liquid nitrogen is kind of intimidating. Expecially when it leaks out as the telescope tilts.
ReplyDelete