Mountain Day 1

We have fought but the first skirmish up here on the mountain. Well, to be more accurate there were many skirmishes our first night on the mountain, but who's to say where each started and ended. Suffice it to say it was an interesting night.

We arrived on the mountain a bit before 1pm and got spent a few hours getting acclimated to the dome before moving into the dorm. Amid the at times testy chaos of deciding how to cram 11 people onto 4 beds, we somehow managed to get everything put away before observing time started.

The sun had barely set before we began imaging Jupiter, and we obtained some very good pictures. I'll leave it to the other posters to put up the actual pictures, as the mechanics of the operation interested me more than the result. The major problem with ground based astronomey is the atmosophere, as it will bend/scatter/absorb incoming light, all of which can distort the picture. However, there are brief momments in which the atmosphere will be clear as the atmosphere is in constant motion. By using a webcam to take many pictures in a short period, some of those pictures are inevitably very sharp. By using a computer program to "stack" the images, we combine the many exposures into one high quality picture.

In other words, we're using the strategy of "Spray and Pray"

While our initial efforts yeilded wonderful pictures, the weather had something to say about it. Clouds rolled in about the time Jupiter set. While we could still take nebula pictures, the pictures were not of data quality. Still, we had several hours of learning the machines and the proccess. At least, until the power outage.

Around 3am we lost power as part of a regional power outage. Although we eventually got the generator running, we closed up the dome as the cloud cover was prohibitive to imaging both the nebula and saturn.