With the weather finally warming up, last night1 was was one of the nicest nights of observing one could really ask for. The daily high was in the low 70’s and the overnight lows were supposed to be in the mid-50’s. Humidity and winds were both low.
But with nicer weather happening and Easter today, everyone seemed to have plans already so I ended up heading out to Danville by myself. I’ve been wanting to capture some time lapse video of this so I took my GoPro out and tried the night lapse setting.
The video is doing one frame every 10 seconds here, so at this time, it was actually much darker than it appears in the video despite being nearly completely black by the end. Several dozen stars were easily visible when the video stars. Right at the start of the video I’m aligning on Polaris, checking that the altitude is correct so I didn’t accidentally pick another star, and then setting the azimuth wheel accordingly. All of that happens within the first second of the video.
From there, you can see me bouncing to and fro for each observation. It always stars with me aligning on the altitude, clamping the swinging arm to that altitude, aligning the azimuth, turning my phone on to get the sidereal time, recording it, reading and recording the altitude, then reading and recording the azimuth. Rinse, repeat.
This process is very back and forth due to each of the places necessary to do that being at right angles to one another. In this video, I’m pointing at stars while on a ladder to the left. The plum where you read the altitude is on the far side of the quadrant from the camera, and the pointer to the azimuth points the direction you aim, so on the right. Doing this solo is surprisingly physically demanding, especially considering that there’s often some holding yourself at odd angles to get the alignment just right.
I ended up observing for almost $4 \frac{1}{2}$ hours, finally calling it quits around $12:30$ and getting home a bit before $2$am. During that time, I took $67$ observations, each of a unique object, so a very productive night. And with the good seeing, I was able to see stars close to $6^{th}$ magnitude although the faintest stars I was able to target were about $4.5$.
Processing the data today it looks like it turned out as well as the weather. I only threw out four observations because they were several degrees off2. As with last time, I did have to do some massaging of the data because Polaris was near its greatest azimuth west of true north when I aligned. In addition, several times throughout the night, I’ve taken to double checking that alignment to make sure I haven’t bumped the azimuth ring or aligned on the wrong star completely before I was able to see the pointer stars in the big dipper to properly determine which star was Polaris in the first place. In doing so the first time, I discovered that my initial alignment was off by $0.75º$ so I made a correction for that as well.
But in the end, the average RA was only high $0.07º$ and the Declination low by $0.25º$ with standard deviations of $0.26$ and $0.25$ respectively – Quite good and actually somewhat surprising given that I was targeting many fainter stars than usual.
In the end, I made some good progress against closing the winter gap in the data, getting most of the stars in the constellation Hydra, which I’d only had the very tail end of previously. I also added a few new stars to the catalog from Perseus, Monoceros, Canis Minor, and Orion. Of the $63$ observations I kept, $22$ were new objects which brought my total count of objects in the catalog to $401$. Given my original goal was $500$ stars, I think I’m well on the way to the stretch goal of $800$. However, at this point, I’ve gotten most of the bright stars so we’re through a lot of the low hanging fruit. So the climb to $500$ is still going to be pretty challenging.
There are still some easy ones that I’ll need to snag in the first half of this year that are ones that pass within $30º$ of the zenith as they cross the meridian since it’s nigh impossible to contort oneself into a position you can look down the quadrant when they’re that high in the sky. But now that the quadrant is free to rotate and has the azimuth scale added, I can just wait till they’re lower in the sky.
As always, if you want to take a look at the data for yourself, it’s available on as a Google Sheet.