We really got dumped on this afternoon. The clouds rolled in and the wind came up, and by dinner time it was raining and hailing all over town. Tucson needs the rain but I must admit that the monsoon season is a bit of a letdown for an amateur astronomer, because it means that the photon collecting will likely be quite slow for the next few months.
My neighbor only a few houses away actually got struck by a huge bolt of lightning (actually not the neighbor, it was his tree and house that got hit). We noticed a thick cloud of smoke and sure enough, the fire department came out to put out the fire. I'm always a bit concerned about my antennas or a tall tree in our front yard taking a strike; I guess this local hit was a wake-up call that I need to start unplugging all the gear. It would certainly be a terrible thing to lose all the telescope equipment to a flash of lightning.
One thing that I will probably do during the monsoons is to catch up on some image processing. I've collected a lot of data recently and hopefully I'll get a few nice pictures out of it. Here's a preliminary image of ic5067, the Pelican Nebula, which I shot over a 4-night period last week using a Hydrogen-alpha filter on the ccd. The scope was a 105mm refractor - see my previous post for a shot of the setup. This is a cropped portion of a 4-panel mosaic. The "Mexico" region of the North American Nebula is at the top of the image. I still have some Photoshop processing work to do on this picture but I'll go ahead and post this for now.
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