For last night's 2000 AP126 event, I got aggressive and tried 3 stations.? BLUF:? with a lot of luck, I managed to get 3 positives:
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Bobcat Observatory (home):? +31 km, 32%--had a ~0.3 second positive-->used a Watec 910/VTI on the finder scope of my C-14 (prepoint)
Grand Canyon Airport:? +28 km, 74%--had a ~0.5 second positive-->used an Astrid on a C-5 (prepoint)
Cherry Spring State Park:? +9 km, 100%--had a ~1.2 second positive-->used a QHY 174GPS on a 66 mm refractor (tracked), this is where I was in person
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Tom at Martz Observatory:? +4 km, 100%--might also have usable data
It didn't start well--I wondered into the observatory about an hour before I had to get in the car to work the remote stations with no clue how I was going to do this.? Normally, unattended I get the C-14 on field with a go-to and just let it track.? But this time I had to set up 2.5 hours before event time, the target was so low at this time I couldn't acquire it--plus the event time was right around a meridian flip.? I thought about a C-14 prepoint but didn't like the odds with the small FOV.? Then it occurred to me that my finder (80 mm) would be fine given the star was 8.5 mag (even at 17 degrees elevation)--I've never tried this before.? The f/4 finder would have 4x the FOV.? So I mounted the Watec to the finder, and quickly found the c-mount to 1.25" adapters I had were all too long to come to focus.? After a half hour hunting for a shorter one, I fired up the bandsaw and cut a quarter inch of the length of on of the adapters I did have (I'll clean it up in the lathe eventually--looks pretty ugly right now, and yes I still have all my fingers, but my father would have yelled at me about safety if he saw how I did it!).? Dropped that in, and was able to focus--nice images, good enough limiting magnitude.? Used the mount to prepoint at general field, locked down and verified the prepoint by looking at the star field go by and comparing the what TSX showed--then doing the math.? In the end, this worked perfect--the blink happened when the star was near center.
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The second station at the airport was no drama--the Astrid had me in and out of there in less than 15 minutes.
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The last station at Cherry Spring State Park (our PA darksky observing park) had only minor issues.? I had the NextStar mount set-up and aligned very quickly.? Took me a bit of time to convince myself I was on the right field (too many stars!).? QHY's GPS wouldn't do anything but say "Bad Data" initially, but once I cycled SharpCap off/on it came up fine.? Unfortunately, right before event time it indicated "Partial Data" and continued to produce times without location.? Hopefully that won't impact the timing data (my hand calcs show the three stations roughly align in time as you expect with their distances along the path).? My last problem there was as I was packing up a car pulls into the (quite large and almost empty) parking lot, goes all the way around, and parks right next to me.? The guy get out, and wants me to explain to him what you can do where in the park--a potentially long discussion.? It is 2:45 AM!? Hopefully I wasn't too rude to him...
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Anyway, my first triple deployment worked out great.? I would even out the spacing more if I was doing it again, but some of that is hindsight.
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Tonight I'll be trying (14965) Bonk.? Weather looks 50/50.
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Steve
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Steve C
George Viscome