I managed to get out and do a bit of observing last night. It’s been 4 months to do the day since my last opportunity to do so and I started off by making a rather large blunder. The location I usually observe at has several pads for observing and I have one I usually use. It’s straight down a path that points generally north which makes finding the north star fairly easy, even without looking for the big dipper to verify which star it is.
Well, last night I looked for the star over where the path met the parking lot, but because I was on a pad a bit to the west of where I normally am, I accidentally aligned on Kochab, the second brightest star in Ursa Minor, and ended up making three observations over the course of a half hour before I realized the error. Fortunately, we still got in 11 observations, and all of them were new stars!
| Object | Alt | Az | ST | Dec | Error1 |
| γ1 Leo | 70.7 | 180 | 10:25 | 19.43 | -0.42 |
| μ Hya | 34.2 | 180 | 10:31 | -17.08 | -0.24 |
| ρ Leo | 60.3 | 180 | 10:38 | 9.02 | -0.28 |
| ν Hya | 34.4 | 180 | 10:50 | -16.89 | -0.68 |
| α Crt | 33.0 | 180 | 11:03 | -18.28 | -0.02 |
| θ Leo | 56.6 | 180 | 11:16 | 15.32 | -0.11 |
| δ Leo | 71.4 | 180 | 11:17 | 20.12 | -0.40 |
| δ Crt | 36.4 | 180 | 11:19 | -14.88 | -0.10 |
| σ Leo | 56.7 | 180 | 11:23 | 5.42 | -0.61 |
| γ Crt | 33.3 | 180 | 11:27 | -17.98 | -0.29 |
| ι Leo | 61.6 | 180 | 11:29 | 10.32 | -0.21 |
| Average | -0.30 | ||||
| StDev | 0.21 |
Overall, it looks like I was shooting about 1/3 of a degree low last night. But this started to fill a gap in my data that’s existed since last year!