A string of bad nights, full of clouds.

This week we didn't have any decent observing nights.

We had some progress today in setting up the newer computer in the observatory.

I arrived just in time to pull one of the telescopes out of the way to give the four of us Faac members more room.

George showed up with his box of toys, to adjust the telescope and we all worked on installing the software. Well to say we all worked was probably not exactly true. I for the most part chatted and perhaps was more of a distraction than a work helper and George and Tim setup the software. Art was there as well and during part of the time they were working on the observatory I left to grab a late dinner at a local fast food place. Then I grabbed some hot chocolate drinks from Tim Hortons. Not exactly a productive observing night as the clouds covered the sky. We were going to insure we have good secondary mirror alignment in the C14, that's another story. We didn't have a chance to star test the optics, because there were no stars.

Tim was feeling the effects of the cold while we were there and I grabbed the IR heater and turned it on. I was feeling a bit of the effects of the chill of fall as well. Temperatures are supposed to drop down to near 36 degrees tonight.

More software tests and driving was performed. We tweaked the mount and slowed down the slew speed.

We chatted about a new star model and some steps we should take in the near future to setup the mount and test the model and various new models we put into the computer and goto controller.

That was about all there was to it. We have higher speed wifi access to the Internet now and it will be even better within the next week according to reports from Tim Dey.

It's a good thing Leo McMaster didn't call the high school astronomy club out tonight as we didn't have clear skies. Supposedly they would clear later in the evening according to some forecasts, but at 11pm when I was returning home from a late night pizza trip in Dearborn, the skies were still cloudy in Lincoln Park and Dearborn as well. A week without observing, but of course plenty of time to talk about equipment and possible setups in the future. I also showed a couple of short sequences from some interesting shows I've seen on Netflix which involve astronomy. The nice thing about the internet and smart devices, is even if there is clouds we can still search out information on the Internet and find something to talk about regarding astronomy.

Here is another picture from the past week. This one was sent to me by Brian Kutscher who took this with his camera.

The two star like trails in the photo are likely aircraft.



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