Data: Stellar Quadrant Observations – 12/3/21

The weather so far the past few weeks has been unseasonably warm. While there have certainly been days where the temperature has barely gotten above $40º$, we’ve also had quite a few where it’s gotten back into the $70$’s prompting me to have my windows open… in December.

One of these nice weather nights ended up happening on a Friday with a near new moon so I headed out to Danville Conservation Area to do some observing. This time I brought Mielikkä Koiviston along who is new to observing. As a result, a lot of our time was spent discussing the night sky and how things work and we only got in $30$ measurements in the time we were out.

The night started off pretty well, doing some observing in Aquarius and Pegasus, picking up five stars for which I previously didn’t have any observations. But as the evening wore on, I wanted to jump over to Orion because it’s a fun constellation to go through as there’s so much to do. Unfortunately, something happened around that time (likely the azimuth ring got bumped and out of alignment) because every measurement was suddenly well over a degree off. I ended up tossing a good chunk of the data as a result, but kept $19$ observations.

As usual, the data can be found in the Google Sheet.