I ran three stations for this event last night, under (mostly) good conditions.? Almost all went according to plan, and I did get 3 positives from this favorable event.? Quick summary (at least my version of quick, be glad I'm not giving the extended version!):
?
I ran my home observatory, tracking rather than prepoint, as no meridian flip was nearby in time.? The SB MX+ mount tracks nearly perfectly with no meaningful drift--the target stayed centered for the hour and a half between set-up and the event.? The trick for me is I don't trust my dome to rotate on command, as it occasionally binds up (a TI Pro-Dome 10) unfortunately.? I get around this by "prepointing" the dome slot at the correct angle.? This involves all sorts of strange activities which I'll spare you from.? My only issue here was in checking the slot prepoint, I turned the Watec 910's integration up to 8x, and never turned it back down to 2x--resulting in a saturated target.? Still very good data for this long-ish event--so no great harm done.? This was a 4.6 sec positive.
I set up my middle station at the local airport as I've done a number of times in the past.? I'm comfortable leaving my unattended equipment there, and they have very good horizons.? All went well there for set-up, but when I returned 20 minutes after the event to collect the hardware, it was heavily fogged up, and with the airport beacon lighting up the fog I was worried about getting any data.? When I looked at the C-5's corrector plate, it was also heavily dewed--despite using a heated dew cap (running at 50%).? I thought it was pretty hopeless, but I was able to fairly easily see the target star blink out at event time.? The bright target saved me here.? This was the longest positive at 4.9 s.
My last station was at Leonard Harrison State Park, on the west rim of the (Pennsylvania) Grand Canyon.? They greatly enlarged their parking lot last year, taking down many trees.? Their renovation also included responsible lighting, so it has a very dark, completely empty parking lot, with good horizons.? This was the first use of my Astrid #2, also mounted to a C-5.? Stupidly, I had never tried that combination in the dark before (Astrid #1 I tried many times on the back porch before trying a remote event).? When I tried to prepoint, I kept getting no result.? Just as panic was ready to set in, I noted that I still had the gain at 1.? As soon as I changed it to 16, all worked as expected and I was able to get on field with no issue.? This one was 4.5 s.
I was pretty happy with my pre-event time estimates--written out on a note-card in advance.? Set-up at home and the airport took exactly what I allowed, as did the driving (no traffic at 3 AM for some unknown reason).? Set-up at the last station was 10 minutes quicker than expected, but I had allowed extra time as I had not previously used that combination of telescope and Astrid.? Basically I started set-up 2 hours before the event, and I was back in bed after a quick look at the data 1.5 hours afterward.
Since this was only my second attempt at 3 stations, I was very conservative with my spacing of stations.? Ideally I would have put the airport station elsewhere--either further south (splitting Kevin's Westport and my Harrison locations) or north (between Kevin's Main Campus station and the predicted shadow edge).? But that would have greatly increased my driving, and required me to leave equipment unattended in a location that isn't as secure.? Next time we have an event like this, I'll try to be more aggressive with my chosen locations.
Steve C