[Peyton-observing] Observation Night Feb 1st

[Munan Gong]

Hi everyone,
The observing night is unbelievably amazing!
We came up to the dome at 9pm, and enjoyed ourselves with stars and music
till 11pm, before the neuroscience prospectives came. Even with stadium
lights on, we saw a plenty of very faint objects down to ~8.4mag : M81 and
M82, the crab nebular, M40(double star), M106, NGC0869(double cluster),
M94, M51(Whirlpool galaxy), M32(faint companion of M31) even the astroid
vista, and of course, fabulous view of Jupiter and Orion nebular.
There are about 20 prospectives today, and we showed them Jupiter, Orion
nebular and M44 cluster, and they stayed for about an hour till midnight.

Some notes:
1. 20 people is really a big group - we didn't split them in two groups
because it was really late anyway. Some people didn't have time to adjust
the focus, and that was a shame.. Although we have a lot of astro grads to
help, the dome is really packed and noisy with a lot of people. So I think
actually ~<10 people at one time will be much nicer.

2. The telescope was not tracking and directing to the objects properly in
the beginning. Then Chris and Chelsea found out the problem - The local
time is off by a few minutes, and the setting somewhere(can you remind me
Chris?) is to 'ALT**' rather than 'POLAR'. After adjusting that , the
telescope was working well. The east button was working in the beginning
for mysterious reasons, and it broke down again after sometime..

3. It would be a perfect night if the lights of the stadium is closed. We
did send out the email to require that, but somehow they were not doing it.
It's not the firs time for this to happen.. Anyone knows how to solve this
problem?

4. We had a lot of fun ourselves when there were only astro people in the
dome. Sometime we shall find a night as good as this, and have a star
gazing party music and refreshments in Peyton :)

Finally, thank you so much Chris, Chelsea for helping out with setting up
the telescope and organize the observation, I would have been crying with a
not working telescope without you. Thanks Elisa for helping sort out all
details, and thank you for coming, giving help and nice company, Pete,
Alex, Andrea, Manu and Simo. I'm really moved that you guys came to help
and stayed so late at night, even though some had to get up very early
tomorrow. This is the best Friday night I have had in Peyton.

Cheers,
Munan
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