Since the weather was continuing to look nice, I decided that I should take advantage and head back out to Danville Conservation Area to collect as many faint stars as possible. To assist, I asked Franco and Quiteria if they’d like to join me and they agreed. Unfortunately, things didn’t go well on several fronts…
When observing, I typically use small headlamps to help when writing down observations. I keep two: one for the observer and one for the person doing the recording. However, one of the headlamps I knew had dead batteries.
So I stopped by the gas station on the outer road off the interstate near the park to pick up some new ones. Unfortunately, as I crossed the intersection to stay on the outer road, I found that the road on the other side of the intersection went down a steep hill and I couldn’t see where the road was. As such, I slowed down in the intersection, rolling until I could see again. However, the oncoming car presumably thought I was stopping for them and did not stop striking me and causing a significant amount of damage.
Obviously, not an ideal way to start the night. This delayed me over an hour getting on site and unfortunately, after getting set up, there was still a pretty significant amount of clouds despite weather reports calling for perfectly clear skies. So another hour was lost there before the clouds started breaking up enough for me to even get my bearings.
Overall, we took 22 readings, but 8 had to be tossed because they were very poor, likely due to seeing conditions. And since we were at a third quarter moon, it still rose fairly early, which cut observing somewhat short.
As always, what I did keep can be found on the Google sheet.