Category: Data

The weather this year has been frustrating. Winter held on far longer than normal. While temperatures weren’t freezing in March and April, they stubbornly refused to get into a temperature range that would allow me to open the windows. Then, after a few nice days, it immediately jumped into the early summer. Needless to say, such turbulent weather is not good for observing and I’ve only been out twice this year²

However, temperatures have cooled back off and, should a clear night occur, it would be a quite pleasant night to observe. This past Friday, despite solid cloud cover all day, the weather reports said it should clear by around $8$pm, so I headed out to Danville with the quadrant to do some observing. Although there was some high humidity, an adjustment in how I select what objects to observe made this likely one of the most productive observing sessions I’ve yet had. Continue reading “Data: Stellar Quadrant Observations – 5/27/2022”

With the moon phase nearly third quarter and clear skies, I finally got a chance to do some observing this year.

Continue reading “Data: Stellar Quadrant Observations – 4/22/22”

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.

It has been seven months since I have done any observing. Between unfortunate weather during good moon phases this summer, being exhausted from mundane life things, running an event… it just didn’t happen.

But now that a lot of that is behind me, we had a crisp fall night with daytime temps in the 60’s and lows in the 40’s. Chilly, but entirely manageable. Especially since I purchased a heated vest last winter. I’ve been looking for a pair of heated pants to go with it, but haven’t found any with sufficiently good reviews at a decent price just yet.

Yseult joined me again, and we got through 60 observations. Continue reading “Data: Stellar Quadrant Observations – 11/6/21”

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. Continue reading “Data: Stellar Quadrant Observations – 4/11/21”