[Peyton-observing] Log for Oct 5, 2016

[Munan Gong]

Thank you so much John, Atirath and Rui! Sorry I didn't realized that
things can be forgotten pretty quickly :P
I'll work on the website. Thanks for the suggestions!

Also, for next time, if anyone is feeling a bit shaky about the process
before he/she needs to run the observing session, I'm happy to give a
one-to-one warm-up session about how to set up the telescope :)

On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 12:37 PM, John Hoffman <jah5 at princeton.edu> wrote:

> Last night was a bit....challenging.
>
> I started to setup around 7:30, but there were a couple of early arrivals,
> and that, combined with my forgetting completely how to even turn on the
> telescope (!!!) lead to a longer than usual time to calibrate. It was just
> me for the first ~15 minutes past 8, followed by help from The Amazing
> Atirath and much later by Rui who was caught up at the Colloquium dinner
> until 8:45ish. We *finally* got a successful calibration on Altair (or was
> it Alberio?) at around 9, after which we breathed an enormous sigh of
> relief and focused on the fuzzy blob that is M31.
>
> About 15 or so people came throughout the night, the youngest being a
> post-doc from neuroscience. Around 9:15 or so Atirath gave a nice small
> tour of Peyton, after which there were only about 5 people. It was a good
> group, minus a very talkative conspiracy theorist who went on about the
> planet Nibiru and how she had seen it, etc., but she was nice enough :).
> Atirtath tried nobly but unsuccessfully to provide some light
> counterarguments, but alas it was a lost cause.
>
> Wrapped up around 10, telescope has been turned off, lens caps for both
> the viewfinder and the telescope are on (along with the lens cap for the
> viewfinder eyepiece and the bit of plastic for the telescope eyepiece).
>
> Seeing was pretty decent; you could just barely resolve the 4 beta lyrae
> stars. No cloud cover that we encountered.
>
> Some suggestions for changes to the website (these might be on there
> somewhere but I couldn't find it):
>
> 1) a more complete list of Meade stars/objects
> 2) Step-by-step guide for new-comers and old-timers who have completely
> forgotten everything
> 3) Meade codes for the objects in the "observing list" database, when
> available
> 4) More detailed instructions for operating the telescope
> 5) The username/password for the "Internal" section written somewhere in
> the observatory, since I can never remember it (though I know it's
> something simple)
>
> Signing off!
>
> John Hoffman
>
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>
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