Last night I travelled South to attend the Huachuca Astronomy Club meeting with Dean and Larry. It was a clear night but we decided to postpone any observing until after the meeting. On the way down, we did get a nice visual view of brilliant Venus on the Western horizon.
It was an excellent meeting, with lots of good info for amateurs and friends to catch up with. The speakers were Mike Shade of Sonoita Hills Observatory, and John Gross of Sonoita Research Observatory. Both of these observatories are located on Mike's property and both use a farily high level of automation. Mike's focus is ccd imaging while John is performing a significant amount of research in the form of photometry. John is part of a team that includes Arne Hendon from the AAVSO and his work is being used in published scientific papers. It was great to hear from both of them and pick up a few tips that I can implement here at Xanadu.
Here's a picture of John at the start of his talk. I didn't get home until about 11:30 and then I began aligning my telescope for some imaging. But fate wasn't kind to me last night, because a multitude of glitches combined with the freezing, wet weather made me give up at about 1:30 with zero data. I did get a good polar alignment though so maybe tonight will work out a little better.
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