Happy Winter Solstice to all. Despite wanting to get out at solar noon today to get an observation of the sun, I was asleep at that time as I have a cold that’s sucking all my energy despite not making me feel all that bad.
However, tonight was also a late moon phase so doing stellar observations was on the schedule. Quieteria helped me with these observations, but as it was very cold tonight, we called it quits fairly early. And because we’re in a rather blank patch of sky with mostly stars well past 4th magnitude, that only led to a fistfull of observations.
| Object | Alt | Az | ST | Dec | Error1 |
| ζ Cet | 41.0 | 180 | 1:51 | -10.28 | 0.06 |
| β Ari | 72.2 | 180 | 1:54 | 20.92 | 0.11 |
| α Psc | 54.0 | 180 | 2:02 | 2.72 | -0.04 |
| α Ari | 74.7 | 180 | 2:08 | 23.42 | -0.04 |
| ξ2 Cet | 60.1 | 180 | 2:26 | 8.82 | 0.36 |
| δ Cet | 51.4 | 180 | 2:37 | 0.12 | 0.45 |
| γ Cet | 54.3 | 180 | 2:42 | 3.02 | -0.22 |
| η Eri | 42.2 | 180 | 2:53 | -9.08 | -0.18 |
| Average | 0.06 | ||||
| StDev | 0.24 |
Overall, a very good night. While I could see stars down past magnitude 4.5, I didn’t end up shooting for any much past 4th magnitude as they tended to disappear too easily.
Over the past several observing sessions I was starting to worry that things were out of alignment due to taking observations notably late. However, things seem to have turned around as this time, the readings were either taken right on time, or a few minutes late. This only underscores how important it is to the long term project to get a larger number of observations so the errors will hopefully average out.
The error in declination was pretty good as well. There was a bit of scatter to it, but it averaged out quite nicely for the night.
This helped close a bit of the gap in the data I had still from last year, and I’m hoping to get in another night of observing before the new year in order to close it the rest of the way, getting the tail end of Cetus2 through Taurus and back to Orion.