This week a thin crescent moon set early along with clear skies and pleasant evening temperatures set up another another promising night of observing. I was joined again by Their Excellency Yseult and we headed back out to the Danville Conservation Area. While a bit more of a drive, the impressively dark skies are certainly worth it as it opens up opportunities to add stars that we couldn’t see elsewhere to the catalog. Surprisingly, the nice night didn’t attract many other observers, but an astrophotographer named Will Day stopped by with his wife and child who had never been to the site before. He asked if we minded being included in pictures and we happily agreed. I think the results turned out well.
Overall, we took observations on 36 stars and the three visible planets that night, most of which we took turns observing as we could then use each of our results as a quick reality check against one another and hopefully produce better results.
Wherein last week I really tackled the western sky, this time we decided to tackle the north-eastern sky which I’ve I’ve mostly skipped previously. As a result, 26 of the stars were ones that hadn’t been added to the catalog before.
Overall, the data came out extremely well. The average error in RA was 0.27º with a standard deviation of 0.69º. For Dec, it was -0.15º with a standard deviation of 0.77º.
As usual, if you want to check out the data, you can find it in the Google Sheet.
Also, I went ahead and updated the map:
