We could really feel the cold and Art and Brian went out and picked up hot chocolates for many of us who were staying late and in need of a warm up.
Below is a photo of many of the visitors at the observatory. I missed getting a picture of Jennifer and her son who were visiting earlier in the evening. We had ten visitors in all. More details will be out possibly in a newsletter clip in the Faac newsletter later.
We didn't see comet Garradd and m92. It was too low while many were there and when it finally rose up high enough at nearly 2am, Art and I were the only members left to try to view the comet and star cluster. A cloud bank and haze obscured the comet and cluster and we could not see through the cloud bank and make out either one of them by that time.
Most visitors saw the moon, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, m42, m45, and the andromeda galaxy. We looked through the C14, Meade refractor, the vixen bt80 binocular telescope, and Big Bertha a ten inch Schmidt Newtonian reflector. At times I had to aim big Bertha fairly unconventionally because I'd didn't have the wrench to move the tube and rotate it for comfortable viewing.
We didn't stay up late enough to see Saturn. I doubt the comet would be visible by 4am because of more clouds moving in.
I think we felt more of the effects of the cold because we were outside on the cement and our feet would get colder. We turned on the IR heater and had a heating pad on one chair. That helped a little, but we still grew cold, many could have dressed warmer and perhaps with warmer boots. The IR heater didn't seem to affect viewing badly at all and we didn't notice problems with viewing from the IR heater. The shutter of the dome was often not over the chair and heating pad so that caused no thermal viewing issues. Not a bad night, considering the cold. Conditions were not horrible but it was frigid out. Later heavy frost started to coat the instruments we had outside the observatory.
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