While last night wasn’t a particularly good night for observing, with high humidity and a nearly first quarter moon, but as my girlfriend is in town and has wanted to try observing with me, we headed out to Broemmelsiek park last night and did a bit of observing.
All in all, it wasn’t too bad of a night. We observed a total of $27$ stars, mostly in Gemini and Leo, two of which were new to the catalogue. At some point we figured out her eyesight is better than mine if she uses my glasses so she tried her hand at observing giving us a total of $33$ observations that I kept. Many of hers ended up being tossed out as it was apparent she hadn’t gotten the hang of lining things up for the azimuth as she was consistently $\approx 2-3º$ low in azimuth (indicating she was aiming slightly to the left of objects).
Meanwhile, I was consistently about $0.5º$ high for azimuth. However, this falls in line well with the fact that, when we set up, Polaris (which we use to determine north) was $0.75º$ lower in azimuth than true north. Thus, if anything, I was aiming a quarter degree high. To account for this misalignment of the azimuth ring, I ended up subtracting $0.5º$ from all of the azimuth readings for the data.
With that correction made, this ended up being one of the best nights of observing we’ve had data wise. The RA averaged $0.02º$ ($0.08 \; min$) low and the declination $0.01º$ low as well. The standard deviation was also surprisingly low for the small number of observations being $0.49$ and $0.41$ respectively.
As always, the data can be found in the Google Sheet.