This past week, I started a new job which allows me to sleep in a few hours later. This has meant that doing a bit of observing on work nights suddenly became a possibility. So when Yseult messaged me noting that the weather would be ideal for observing and it was a new moon, I was happy to observe on a Sunday night.
Since the SCA is going to be restarting in the next few months, I’ve been trying to get back in shape for when fighting resumes. Quarantine hasn’t been kind to my waistline. As such, Yseult and I did an $8$ mile walk through Forest Park that morning which left my legs unhappy. They protested mightily when I climbed the ladder to align the quadrant on Polaris but since Yseult was in better shape, I let them do the observing for the night.
However, there was a small hiccup. While I’d printed the maps for that night, I accidentally grabbed the wrong ones. Typically, I print two or three maps for the south sky and one or two for the north since the sky rotates and there’s been several times I’ve stayed long enough that an entirely new portion of sky is visible. So while I’d printed the maps for last night’s sky, I accidentally grabbed the later ones from last week’s observing session.
This ended up being an interesting experiment. We tried to get through several stars in Canis Major, Orion, and Taurus, all of which were already set on the map I had grabbed. So instead, I tried to sketch the constellations as best I could which wasn’t easy for me to do. With my eyesight1, I could not see many of the stars Yseult was targeting that night. So they did their best to describe the positions to me and I sketched them in with the expectation that between the sketch and the ultimate RA-Dec that we’d end up with, I could figure out which star it was to add it to the catalog.
By and large this ended up working fairly well. It was only when we came to Taurus, which is a fairly crowded field of stars that we started having issues. However, I think part of this may be due to Yseult’s eyes getting tired as the values we ended up with didn’t match any existing stars.
Ultimately, we kept $43$ observations, four of which were new additions to the catalog. As usual, all the data can be found in the Google sheet.
I also tried a longer exposure setting for the GoPro and it’s slightly better. I’m still wondering if the headlamps are throwing off the auto ISO adjustment.