Dents in dome part 2 / Astro SIG Meeting in Ypsi today

This will be a short entry, there may be more tonight, but I'll be pretty busy today. Hoping to make it to the Ypsilanti meeting of the Astroimager SIG group. For those of you interested in the Astro Imaging SIG group it's meeting this Thursday at Riders Hobby Shop in Ypsilanti Michigan, not HFCC. HFCC is closed for the week.

Riders has a lot of telescope stuff, so it should be a fun visit.

Let's see my short shopping list: I'll need to pick up a cable or two, an adapter perhaps for the little Celestron I bought and maybe some other items that I can use even at the observatory, something as radical as Celestron binoviewers or something. I've even thinking about a GPS for my scope that would work with the Hector J Robinson Observatory's mount as well, but I'm not sure about that yet. You'd still have to find guide stars to realign a cold started mount apparently, the GPS may not do to much to help in convinience with the Losmandy mount.

I have a break a lull at work so I need to get this post finished.

I found an interesting and somewhat disturbing object near the observatory a few nights ago and forgot to log or mention it but will mention this to the club and Leo. It was a golf ball. Perhaps people are playing a little golf near the observatory. Maybe on the field, which is probably not allowed, but being done anyway. It's possible that someone could be even be targeting the dome with these, but I don't have evidence of this. Still there are a lot of dents in the dome, maybe it became some kind of hobby golfers target.

Should we have a procedure in the manual in the event a golf ball crashes through the corrector plate during viewing by some errant golfer? I'd say it would have to read something like, don't touch the golf ball and try to preserve the fingerprints, or something to that effect. We might have to treat it like a crime scene, because it would be a kind of accidental vandelism.

Are we going to need to develop a process of having a lookout watch the football field for golf fanatics or crackpots? Let's hope it doesn't come to that. I suppose that might be one good reason to have more people staffing the place when it's open, to have someone outside checking the surroundings for possible problems.

I'm not living in the observatory or something like that (although last week I kind of felt like it there for a while.) So I can't say what has dented the dome in the past. I put the golf ball in the trash box inside for now. Something to keep in mind.

OTHER LATE NIGHT VISITORS
Of course the property is public property and people are bound to wander in the unfenced areas. I was surprised last week when early in the morning, we are talking about 3AM or so some young man was out playing with his dog in the parking lot near the observatory. He was throwing a large rubber ball in the lot and the dog was happy to be out and playing. He saw me and I saw him. I didn't wave or welcome him or start a dialog, because we were closed and not open of course for an event or something. As I was leaving, he and the dog wandered off. Who knows when the late night golfers might be out and about?