04/28/2006 An Astronomy Life

Despite dire predictions of bad weather, including thunderstorms and hail, it has turned out to be a fairly good night of observing. The sky has been primarily clear the entire night, but with some problems, more about that in a minute.
Last night ended without success in finding the dark nebula that I wanted. To make matters worse it got so damp that everything was basically sopping wet by the time we shut down around 5:30 a.m. We had to spend a while blowing a hair dryer on stuff to dry it out.
I only got a few hours of sleep before rising for lunch. Something I have not mentioned yet is how well I'm getting fed here. The meals are all quite good and plenty to eat to I suspect I've put on a few pounds. It's also a fun atmosphere at mealtime since you get a chance to sit down and make new friends at the tables.
This afternoon I decided to attempt to work on the TSP daytime observing program. Unfortunately it was mostly cloudy and very windy, so the only object I was able to locate was Venus. It seemed strange to be slewing the telescope around and looking through the eyepiece in the middle of the day!
Later in the afternoon i attended a lecture about astro imaging and picked up a couple of good photoshop tips. After dinner, the main lecture was by Steven O'Meara, who talked about the art of seeing the invisible. He is well known for his incredible observational skills.
Much to my joy I found mostly clear skies upon exiting the lecture hall. After getting setup and aligning on Saturn and Regulus, I found Dean Salman and asked him to help me with some questions I had about autoguiding my CCD camera. He dropped by and gave me some fantastic advice - I suspect that my images will be substantially improved as a result of Dean's help.
I put my newfound knowledge to the test by taking a series of images of spiral galaxy M66. Unfortunately, during the process a wind began to gradually build up. I think I got enough to make a decent picture, but the processing will have to wait for another time.
So right now I'm back to visual observing, but the image is bouncing around a lot. I had to put on the dew shield since humidity is about 80%, which makes the wind load on the scope even greater than normal. At this point there are clouds blocking the Southern horizon, so it looks like we may not end up catching the elusive dark nebula "Be 157" for yet another night. I sure hope we catch it before the end of TSP since it's the last one on the Eye on the Sky list needed to get the award.
There have also been some lightning flashes on the horizon, hopefully the storm will stay far away, but I can smell rain. Overall, I'm very happy to have had this fourth night of observing fun at TSP. Wayne Johnson joined Larry and I at our scopes for much of the night again, and we've had a lot of fun.