December Update

Winter Break Begins

The first Arctic blast of the winter has arrived and it's time to shut down imaging until spring. I've sent my Losmandy Gemini II off for its Level 6 factory upgrade, packed up all the optical gear and put it in the driest part of the house for winter storage, and have discharged all my lithium batteries to about 50% of capacity. The latter is for optimal battery health during several months of non-use. They'll get a recharge and second draining around February, and then get a full charge whenever spring decides to happen.

This treatment regimen includes the smaller LiFePo4 batteries that I'll probably haul up to the 2025 Northern Nights Star Fest for swapping/selling. 

The endless mosaic

I've decided to do a full reprocess of the mosaic starting from calibrated frames. Three of the panels have new light frames and will need to be re-integrated. So for the sake of uniformity and to improve the processing workflow I'll do it all again. Isn't reprocessing what winter is for?

Getting back into spectroscopy

My last activity of autumn was assessing the use of my AT65 astrograph for spectroscopy. I'm really unsure about using an astrograph for this purpose, as I'm concerned that putting the grating so close to the OTA's internal correctors will lead to smearing of the spectrum. Little did I know this was going to turn into a multi-night struggle as the mount and focuser had issues. Fortunately there were a few clear nights for fiddling with the focuser before the weather got too cold for me.

I had already adapted my old Pegasus FocusCube 2 to my AT65's focuser, but I had done it incorrectly. I had attached it to the fine-focus shaft. This led to absurdly fine focusing precision--and sometimes demanded too much torque from the FC2 causing it to seize. Putting it onto the coarse focus shaft solved the torque issue, and made it possible to rack out a couple of centimeters without having to wait half an hour.

Whether the change results in focusing that's precise enough to match manual focusing is something that won't be resolved until the spring. That's also when I'll configure it for backlash and autofocusing.

Maybe this is why the AT65 never appeared on the FocusCube compatibility list?

Stay warm everyone! Happy Holidays!

Snow.

We had our biggest snowfall of the season last week, and while it wasn't all that much (maybe 12 inches) it brought our snow depth up to a level we haven't seen since 1982. This winter has been unlike others in that the temperature has stayed low enough to prevent the usual gradual melts that keep the snow cover in check. Each snowfall has added to the last and now we're up around two feet of the stuff.

I know for other parts of the country that's not so much, but winter is somewhat subjective. Thirty two years between mounds of snow like this are almost enough to erase it from the collective memory. Almost.

Anyway, with the forecast for continued cold (and I mean sub-zero lows cold) cabin fever is pounding at the door. To do something--anything--constructive is to hold the madness off for a while. So I decided to go dig out my observing platform.

BEFORE

The Pristine Winter Wonderland/Wasteland

AFTER

80 cubic feet of snow and ice later

THE SNOW

The yard stick does not lie.

The depth was 26" on one side and 24 on another, with the average as you see it above.

This was completely futile, of course. March, only days away, is our snowiest month on average. But it was nice to see the wood planking again, and maybe--just maybe--the Sun will do some work and melt it clear before the next snowfall.

---

I did manage to do some astronomy evangelizing the week before last. I volunteered to make an astrophotography presentation to three photography classes at Richfield High School. It was fun, and doing some show-and-tell gave me an excuse to get out my neglected cameras, now three months into their winter exile.

Whining about the Weather

Ah, Minnesota in Winter. Some things that make observing during Winter special:

• Looking through an eyepiece only to have your eye begin to tear. That water sloshing around on your eye hardly helps you see clearly.  Usually it leads to frost on the eyepiece lens, and sometimes the joy of having a drop fall onto your eyepiece lens and freeze solid. Heaven help you if your eye bumps into an eyepiece that's at a temperature of -6° F.
• Snow amplifies sky brighness. Even dark-sky friendly lights can turn against you when their light bounces upward off the white stuff.
• Cold fingers. Which are marginally better than fingers coated with plastic-dissolving DEET needed to fend off mosquitoes.
• Cold feet. They say that the way to keep the extremeties warm is to keep the torso toasty. There's a limit to how many layers one can wear and still have use of one's arms and legs.
• Stiff mounts. The pasty goop that's used to lubricate most mounts can get very grippy in the cold, making drive motors labor duing slews. And they can get noisy too. I had a mount that whined when the temperature fell below zero. (Much like myself.)
• Feeble hand control displays. Some of these can become almost useless as the cold increases the display latency.
• Dead batteries.  Most batteries don't like being used in very cold temperatures, and give up the ghost far sooner than you might expect.
• Deep snow. Planting a tripod or work table in the deep snow can be difficult.
• The neighbors' backyard lit Christmas decorations. Not to wax humbuggy, but really, twinking lights seem much less festive when you're trying to hunt down something that's at the limits of your telescope and observing skills, your eyes are full of tears, your fingers are stiff with cold and the mount is screeching in your ears.  Just keep telling yourself, "Astronomy is a fun hobby."

So what to do, curl up next to the furnace until March?  Aside from earning the derision of the good folks up in Canada, sitting indoors will make you miss the splendor of the Winter sky. Get yourself some hand warmers for your hands and the hand controller. Get some really good winter wear. It's OK if you look like an escaped balloon from a Thanksgiving day parade so long as you're warm. Regrease your mount.

DO NOT use your .22 rifle to shoot out the neighbors' lights. That's both illegal and ineffective, as anyone who has ever watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas knows. (The cartoon version, of course.)

Best advice: Move someplace else. The worst thing about winter in Minnesota isn't the cold, it's the clouds. Take a look at this from the excellent web site ClimateStations.com:

This shows the percent of time the sky isn't clear enough for looking through anything better than "sucker holes," breaks in the clouds that optimists take as a sign that the sky is clearing.  During those long winter nights we generally spend more than half our time under cloud cover. What fun!

OK, enough whining.  The next clear night I'll be in the back yard humming something from the Grinch. Why just humming? Because my face will be frozen.