It’s been awhile since I’ve done a post on observing. This is in large part because I’ve been so busy with events as White Hawk herald for Their Majesties, that I’ve either been at an event, or so burnt out that I’ve been staying in. There was one small observing run between my last post and now, at Crown Tournament, but I only took 3 observations, so I didn’t feel it was worth an entire post1.
However, this month, I really wanted to get out for a long night of observing as I missed observing most of last year in November and December, so plugging that hole in my data was important to me. I ended up getting in about 3.5 hours of observing before it got too cold to want to be out anymore.
While it was a fairly productive night, there were still a lot of issues. There was some light fog that limited visibility. I was able to see down to about 5th magnitude using averted vision, but anything past about 3rd magnitude was very difficult to sight using the quadrant. To make matters worse, breathing fogged up my glasses making sighting even more difficult. As such, there’s much larger amount of error in the measurements and I’ve had to toss some of the data because it’s simply so far off.
In addition, there’s a very consistent trend of taking readings about half a degree lower than they should be, and 5-7 minutes late. The sighting lower I can attribute to the stars disappearing unless using averted vision pretty readily. Typically my technique is to place my eye at the near end of the arm of the quadrant, and bring the far end up until it eclipses the star. When the star winks out, you know you’re lined up. Then I can wiggle it back and forth a millimeter or two to make sure I’m really lined up. But last night, the stars would disappear as they moved to the center of my vision before getting to the actual point of being eclipsed.
I’m not sure what’s going on with taking measurements late, but it’s been a consistent problem with the past several observing sessions. Tonight I even took into account the north star being a half degree to the east when I set up and aligned the quadrant slightly off with that in mind, but I was still off.
Ultimately I kept 25 observations out of 36. Data is below.
| Object | Alt | Az | ST | Dec | Error2 |
| δ Aqr | 35.7 | 180 | 23:02 | -15.58 | 0.24 |
| α PsA | 21.1 | 180 | 23:05 | -30.18 | -0.56 |
| α Peg | 65.9 | 180 | 23:11 | 14.62 | -0.59 |
| c2 Aqr | 29.4 | 180 | 23:17 | -21.88 | -0.71 |
| ψ1 Aqr | 41.4 | 180 | 23:23 | -9.88 | -0.79 |
| φ Aqr | 44.8 | 180 | 23:20 | -6.48 | -0.43 |
| b1 Aqr | 31.5 | 180 | 23:28 | -20.78 | -0.68 |
| b2 Aqr | 30.0 | 180 | 23:31 | -21.28 | -0.64 |
| κ Psc | 51.9 | 180 | 23:33 | 0.62 | -0.64 |
| γ Peg | 66.3 | 180 | 0:18 | 15.02 | -0.16 |
| ι Cet | 42.0 | 180 | 0:24 | -9.28 | -0.46 |
| α Phe | 8.5 | 180 | 0:29 | -42.78 | -0.47 |
| β Cet | 32.9 | 180 | 0:45 | -18.38 | -0.39 |
| δ Psc | 58.3 | 180 | 0:47 | 7.02 | -0.56 |
| ε Psc | 58.4 | 180 | 1:06 | 7.12 | -0.77 |
| η Cet | 41.0 | 180 | 1:11 | -10.28 | -0.10 |
| ζ Psc | 59.1 | 180 | 1:16 | 7.82 | 0.24 |
| θ Cet | 42.4 | 180 | 1:28 | -8.88 | -0.70 |
| δ Cas | 69.2 | 0 | 1:35 | 59.52 | -0.72 |
| ο Psc | 60.0 | 180 | 1:45 | 8.72 | -0.44 |
| τ Cet | 34.7 | 180 | 1:46 | -16.58 | -0.64 |
| ζ Cet | 40.4 | 180 | 1:55 | -10.88 | -0.54 |
| ξ Psc | 53.8 | 180 | 1:57 | 2.52 | -0.67 |
| β Ari | 71.8 | 180 | 1:59 | 20.52 | -0.29 |
| ξ Cet | 60.3 | 180 | 2:12 | 9.02 | 0.17 |
| Average | -0.45 | ||||
| StDev | 0.30 |