SummerHaven, Mountaineering, and Craters.

Today I awoke at 1 PM, this is much too early. I rushed through a bowl of Cap'n Crunch and suited up for another day of adventure. We made our way to the mountain town Summer Haven and during our brisk walk through the town I couldn't help but notice the unique arcitecture, it was picturesque. Once through Summer Haven we began a trek from the town up to the peak.

The peak we climbed is behind the two circular houses in this picture:

Surprisingly I made it all the way up with no pain in my ankle! The view was amazing, if you look closely just below the top of the mountain on the left side of the picture you can see a white dot. This is Sterward Observatory the observatory we have been staying at.

The way down the mountain my muscles began to fatigue and my ankle was on the verge of pain but I made it down with no accidents. Our reward for making it to the peak was pizza and fudge from the local shops in Summer Haven. The pizza itself was well worth the trouble after 2 days of cereal and pasta! At around 4 PM we left and drove back to our observatory to begin preparations for our last night of imaging Jupiter, Nebula's, and Saturn. We filled the telescope with liquid nitrogen to keep it the proper temperature then aligned the telescope with Jupiter. This 3rd night we flew through our imaging due to all of the practice we had the previous two nights. After about 2 hours of imaging we stowed the telescope so the Nebula group could prepare for their imaging. Next it was on to video analysis and image stacking, this proved to be a tedious effort with the images we captured tonight.

As you will see by this next image it was difficult to come up with a good image.

We also took some of our leftover observing time to image some craters on the moon, these stacked up pretty nicely after we analyzed them. It was a cool recess from all of the serious work we have been doing.

Here is the final image of one of the craters:

I am thoroughly exhausted from these past three days but it was definitely a highlight of my life thus far. It put a lot of things in perspective for me and I hope to have another chance to do some observing later in life! The next few weeks will be rewarding to perfect these images and show them to all of our followers, to say that I am excited is an understatement!