Thanks, Patrick. This on looks so bad I really do need to clean it; it's just covered. There was a lot of gunk in the SLC inversion and that came out with the frost. Pretty ugly. Don't worry, I'll be really careful. Best wishes, Joe --- On Wed, 2/4/09, Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com> wrote: From: Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com> Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] Non-Observing report - Moon passes Pleiades To: "Utah Astronomy" <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Date: Wednesday, February 4, 2009, 4:24 PM Hi Joe, Sorry to hear about your problems. Are you using a dew cap? I use one on my scope year round to keep frost off in the winter and dew off the rest of the year. Nothing fancy, BTW, with my C-8 I used to use a paper grocery bag I cut the bottom out of. For the C-14 I use foam padding material I got in a roll from Sears (they sell it for lining the bottoms of tool box trays). Rule of thumb is to make it at least as long as the scope is wide. But even that isn't enough for all-night protection. Eventually you'll need to use one of the dew zappers being made for scopes or a hair drier (they make 12VDC hair driers for use in the field). If you look at my light curves you'll see breaks in the data every hour or so where I took the scope off line for a few minutes to remove frost or dew. And don't be too concerned about the corrector plate. I clean mine maybe once a year. It's pretty much impossible to keep it clean all the time and you don't want to risk messing up the coatings. Plus you'd be surprised how bad it can look but still be ok. patrick On 04 Feb 2009, at 09:32, Joe Bauman wrote:
I found a good spot on the front yard. But I noodled over my blog until less than an hour before the event was to start, then tore around wildly setting up the telescope on the tripod and wedge. I had a great deal of trouble getting the two secondary bolts in, among those that hold the telescope to the wedge. By the time I finished I had no time to get the camera going before the start of the event. Looking through the finder scope, I saw that the moon and atmosphere were bright and thought they obscured the stars even on the moon’s darker side. (Obviously I was wrong and the finder didn't give enough detail, judging from Kurt's report.) Maybe I should try for the egress, when the sky will be dark, I decided. Cory and I had supper and I went back to work. But when it was dark I thought I couldn’t photograph anything because the moon’s neighborhood seemed too washed out. I decided to relax a bit, then show the Orion Nebula to Cory and, later, take some more photos of that nebula to add to my mosaic. When I went back outside my first clue something was wrong was that my flashlight set off glitters in the grass. A heavy frost had descended from the clear sky and covered everything. My equipment bags were soggy and the telescope’s corrector plate was covered with white frost. I asked Cory if she had a hair-drier so I could get rid of the frost. She didn't. (She has no hair-drier and I have no hair.) For a time I tried to evaporate the rime with my space heater, but that only turned the frost to water. I gave up and hauled everything back inside, dragging my telescope upstairs via hand truck. Now I'll have to clean the plate because the frost left crud all over it.-- Best wishes, Joe
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