Data: Stellar Quadrant Observations – 8/7/2020

Last night was a few days past a full moon, so without it rising until around 11:30, I figured that gave a good balance of observing while still making it home for some of the B3R Bardic. While the moon wasn’t out, seeing was still poor. Due to the this being the closest weekend to the peak of the Perseids (and next weekend’s weather not looking promising), there were a lot of people out at Broemmelsick. This resulted in lots of flashlights and headlights that prevent me from ever getting fully dark adapted. Similarly, there must have been more humidity than it felt like because the skyglow from St Louis and St Charles washed things out more than I anticipated.

Still, I was able to take about a dozen observations of stars and did a few of both Jupiter and Saturn, hoping the average would give good results for them. The data can be viewed by going to the Google Sheet I’ve set up. Overall, the night averaged out extremely well, with an average error in the RA of 0.18º (the equivalent of ~45 seconds late), and an average error in Dec of 0.02º which is really hard to beat. The standard deviations were a bit high this time so there was certainly some scatter, but overall quite pleased with the results.