Last time I went out observing, I met a Will Day, an photographer with quite a bit of experience in astrophotography. He asked if he could photograph Yseult and I as we worked and it ended up with one of the coolest images to come out of this project. But as cool as it was, it didn’t feel quite right since we were using the red headlamps and wearing mundane clothes with the period instrument.
Fortunately, Will was game to try something more planned to really capture the period feel. So Yesult and I went out last month, putting on our best late period garb. The results were beyond what I expected.
If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to do this observing, this is it.
A fair amount of the night was taken up for the photoshoot, but with lovely weather, we ended up getting quite a bit of observing done, going pretty late into the evening, having Yseult do nearly all the observations (as they have much better eyesight) and myself recording. While often when we both go out, we trade off, not doing so allowed us to speed through more targets.
We did switch back to our mundane clothes and headlamps after the photoshoot was over, but I did make sure to experiment a bit with trying to observe by candlelight. One of the things I often use the headlamp for is to be able to see the dark sights against the dark sky. I thought I might be able to use the candle for this, but it did not work well as the candle was sufficiently bright to ruin my dark vision. So I’m still left somewhat confused on precisely how astronomers in period were able to make their observations.
We ended up keeping $32$ observations, and the data was quite reasonable. The average RA was off by $0.37º$ and the Dec averaged $0.17º$ high.
As usual, the data is available in the Google Sheet.