Re: (SNES) Observing near ponds & lakes

["David Aucoin" <graywwoolf@msn.com>]

Greetings,

Well, I have been silent lately, working on my new scope project, making a new
rocker box and awaiting the delivery of my Dob Driver 2 which should arrive by
middle of this upcoming week. I have been working on my database objects,
getting them programmed into a user database for the Roboscope.

Does FDO have outdoor AC outlets? That would help greatly with my Laptop when
I am using it with Roboscope and will save needed amps on my battery with all
my other accessories plugged in.

I should have this running by end of week and the bugs worked out, ie backlash
etc by the weekend. I will bring it down some evening and give you guys the
nickel tour of the sky. Til then, just let me know about outdoor ac plugs.

Thanks guys!

Dave

----- Original Message -----
From: Albireo54@aol.com
Sent: Sunday, September 02, 2001 3:43 PM
To: snegazers@brainiac.com
Subject: (SNES) Observing near ponds & lakes

Hi Barry,

Local bodies of water can be a problem, not so much because of the moisture
associated with them as because of the effect they have on radiational
cooling. There is no water within a couple of miles of my house, so we cool
off quickly when the air is dry like last night (it had fallen from the mid
60's to the upper 40's just while I was outside observing). However, if
you're looking over, or even near, a pond or lake, especially just after
sunset, there can be a lot of extra turbulence, as the air over the land
cools much more quickly than that over the water. Near the ocean (as at FDO)
somewhat different things happen.)

The weather up here last night was great. Just a bit of turbulence right
after sunset, but by about 9:00 PM it had really settled down. I think the
front was slow to clear the SE coastal region (closer to your area). I could
see clouds hanging in to the SE of Fenway Park during the late afternoon.

The air grew quite steady, so although I've been happy with the general
collimation of my C8, I decided to tweak things a bit. Before doing so,
however, I did some observing of a few double stars for comparison sake
later. You can get some rather remarkable improvements in resolution with
just some very minor corrections to your optics. And this may be even more
critical in an SCT. I was using the difficult triple star 1 Equulei as a test
object, and noticed a substantial improvement after only about 5 minutes of
collimation work.

Anyway, it might be interesting if I brought my C8 to FDO one night so we
could compare how the two 8" systems perform on identical objects. SCTs tend
to get a bad rap in the sharpness and contrast area, but you couldn't prove
it by my experience with my C8.

See you soon,
Doug
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