It’s been almost three months since I’ve been able to get out and observe. It’s been a combination of assistants being sick, bad weather, bad moonphases, and starting a new job. But just before the holiday this year, we had a nice clear night. There was a near full moon, but as Padraig is planning on moving to Boston in the next year, I’m in need of someone else that wants to help. Fortunately, another member of my barony, Auga, volunteered to assist, so this night was mostly meant to get her trained on how things work and the moon was actually somewhat helpful as it made seeing what we were doing with setup and learning the instrument all the easier.
Unfortunately for the observing side of things, seeing stars ended up being pretty tricky as anything beyond about magnitude 3.5 was completely washed out and even then, stars near that threshold tended to disappear without using averted vision.
Another issue we had was that temperatures dropped pretty rapidly; we barely got in an hour of observing. The handy laser pointer I have ended up dying. It could be because it’s a cheap one from China and when the battery it came with died, I replaced it with another one which is slightly less voltage as I couldn’t find the correct type, or because it was frozen, but this made communicating the sky to someone without much experience all the more difficult.
We ended up observing 12 stars, but the errors on many of them were well over a degree, leading me to suspect that it was sometimes an entirely different star that she ended up targeting. As such, that data is getting tossed. Below is a list of the few stars that I did decide to keep.
UPDATE 6/15/19: Since writing this post, I have worked with Padraig and refined my understanding of how to best use the quadrant. As such, user error is almost certainly the cause for such a high degree of error.
| Object | Alt | Az | ST |
| η Tau | 75.2 | 180 | 3:44 |
| 27 Tau | 75.8 | 180 | 3:46 |
| γ Tau | 66.9 | 180 | 4:16 |
| θ Tau | 67.8 | 180 | 4:27 |
Temperatures are supposed to be much warmer which would make observing much nicer, but alas, the change in temperatures will also be bringing storms. The current forecast is saying it may clear up again by next weekend, but that will be the last chance to observe this year.