Sonoma IV

With D, we decided to go back to Lake Sonoma to take advantage of the New Moon and clear skies. With the early sunset, we left a lot earlier than last time. We were on the road by 3:30pm, and got there some time after 5pm.

Not all forecasts were in agreement, but we were expecting hours of clear skies at least. As we made our way North, the sky got completely overcast. We kept hoping for a change but things did not improve. Instead, they got worse, as we drove past Grey Pine Flat, where we observed from last time, it was very foggy. We had lost hope we would do any astronomy tonight, when suddenly we broke through the layer. We were literally half of mile from our destination.

When we got to the parking lot, we could see the sea of clouds just below us. There were tendrils starting to rise up from the valley and even some fog beginning of roll in at the end of the lot. Fearing our unexpected success would be short lived, we rushed to do our setup to at least get a look at the planets already visible in the sky.

I had trouble with the collimation maybe from having cleaned the mirror earlier in the day (was it a mistake??). I got the north alignment wrong initially and did not realize place the platform was not on even ground (I fixed that later). I took 50 frames videos of the planets, but the pictures were not great (bad tracking, poor seeing maybe and also the 294MC might not be as good as the 385MC for planets).

The fog never came up but instead we were plagued by the wind. It made taking stacks practically impossible for me. The shroud on the Dobs was acting like a sail, so after a few targets I switched to visual with the Baader zoom (and a little bit with the 12x70 binoculars). My friend with the Newtonian had more luck.

Some time later, after chatting with another astronomer, I removed the shroud hoping for an improvement. I did the whole setup again (including collimation), tried to stack another DSO but still failed (when 74 out of 75 images are ignored, it's time to stop).

All in all, it was a challenging evening. Also with the new plate solving script, finding objects, although effortless, is in some ways less satisfying. We packed everything and left at 11pm and got home by 12:30am.

Observations: