The sky was clear most of the night with a few stripes of cloud invading on the horizon. Around 0400 it started to get a bit hazy but that was when we were planning to pack it in anyway.
I took the mortar out. In preparation for the big trip I had mounted a shoe on it dor the Orion EZFinder Deluxe and had taken it out during the week to try to zero it in. The finder is off by about a degree when the adjustment screws are at their limit. That gets the target star very close to the field stop of my 2" Orion 38mm Q70 eyepiece so can be dealt with but at some point I might try some adjustment of the shoe if the epoxy will permit it. I would like it to me as nearly in agreement with the settings for the Mini Mak as possible so I don't have to spend my night trying to align it with the scope. But when I was packing up I forgot to throw in the box the finders live in so had to do all my locating sighting over the centerline of the clamshell.
The Q70 performed well for me tonight. The FoV isn't perfectly flat but it compares well with Peter's much more expensive Pentax eyepiece of similar specifications. It gives me a much more familiar FoV to use for star hopping which is what I bought it for. As far as observing goes it will hold all of Otion's Sword or the Pleiades.
We played a bit with our UHC and Broadband (I think that is what he has) filters. We looked at the Pleiades and could see a glow around all the stars. Custer is where I first saw nebulosity there. I had often seen a glow before but had always attributed it to bright stars lighting up atmosphere. I panned around the sky and found that almost any random star I landed on and other bright stars that are not noted as being in nebulous regions exhibited a nebulous glow so we don't know how much of what we were seeing in M45 was real nebulosity and how much was atmosphere.
As expected, most of my time was spent just looking naked eye. I would have liked to have stretched out on the grass and spent time watching the stars wheel overhead but it was too wet for that. When I got home I found that my kneepad and the feet of my observing chair were covered with mud so I am glad I didn't try. My scope and eyepiece got covered in frost as did the filter on the front of Peter's Camera. I put the cap on the eyepiece and after a while the frost was gone. I guess I should dig that lens out and check on it's condition. Peter is going to supply plans for a DIY eyepiece heater.
Some meteors were spotted but the most interesting site was Jupiter. I knew I was seeing two moons right next to each other and thought there was a third one there which I confirmed in SkySafari. We often see two moons together and sometimes two pairs of close moons, but have never seen three moons lined up before.
Peter saw a few objects that he has rarely seen before and I got a look at some of them in his scope.
I performed another drift test tonight. Peter said one of the belt stars was on the celestial equator but he couldn't remember which one so I used Alnilam rather than getting the iPad out and checking to see which star I should be using. I figured it it wasn't the right star I would only be off by one star and the correction wouldn't be horrendous.
My spreadsheet is not working properly. Now my answer is too far from the values I have previously calclated. I have reworked the sheet breaking the formula down into components to try and debug it but I can't see what I have done wrong. And I am still having the issue of it returning the right value but in the wrong direction (eg. a FoVT of -3.8).
