03/19/2007 MM, Pluto, Supernove 2007af, Nova Cygni 2007: One Fun Night!

Last night I finally got a chance to do some observing, work has really been taking a toll lately and lots of missed clear skies for me.
The original plan was to head North for the All Arizona Messier Marathon. But I ended up going instead to Steve's observatory. I'm sure the MM'ers had a wonderful time up there and I missed a good party - I hear there were about 140 people there. After "winning" the event last year I was hoping to go back for another one, but for various reasons the decision was made on Saturday morning not to go.
That doesn't mean I didn't have a great astronomy night though. I packed up and made the much shorter trip to Steve's to join him, Victor, Chip, Larry, and Mike for a smaller, multi-purpose event.
The main event was the occultation of a faint star by Pluto, which occurred around 3:30 a.m. Steve and Victor spent about two weeks planning to do a photometry run, using his C14 and one of my CCD cameras (an ST-402ME). The '402 was a good choice because it provides very fast downloads, needed to capture a high number of short images over the 6 minutes or so of occultation. They were successful in this venture and it will be interesting to see the final results of the data analysis.
I was also interested in two very recently discovered astronomical events. Supernova 2007af, in the faint spiral galaxy NGC 5584, was one target. I did manage to capture some data which clearly shows the SN, but I have not had a chance to process it yet (actually I still need some matching dark frames). The other target was a new Nova in Cygnus, also an early morning object, which was discovered just a few days ago. I was able to get some decent H-alpha images of the nova as well as some spectral data. The spectra show a very bright, wide emission at H-alpha. I'm anxious to process this data and share it in a timely fashion but I also need darks for this. The reason I need darks is that the weather has warmed up considerably in Tucson, so the coldest I was able to run the cameras was at -20C; since I have not had much imaging time lately, most of my useable darks are at colder temperatures.
Of course we also spent some time running a mini-Messier Marathon, observing a number of the M-objects visually, although not as many as I observed last weekend. But given the success with the other targets I didn't end up feeling too greatly disappointed about the incomplete MM.
All-in-all another great astronomy night, enough to keep me looking up during the upcoming week which will probably be my toughest one yet of this tax season.
This image shows Chip's C8 in the foreground along with the big C14 (on an AP mount) in the background. The heavy clouds did eventually clear out, by about 9 p.m. local time we were mosty in the clear.