Very Short Update

I've been so busy these past couple of days with the data taken on 20 Feb 2014 UTC that I haven't been able to update this blog.  Rest assured, I'll get you fully informed.  That's my goal for Saturday morning (1 March).

Last night I took more data.  Had to wait until about 07:30 UTC for the clouds to completely clear off, and then went at it for about three hours.  This kind of data collection I'm doing is hard hard hard.  I'll tell you why on the next blog post.

For now, here's an image of the heart of M35.  I'm looking at M35 in order to better understand the photometry I'm seeing from the Jupiter data from 19 Feb.

Figure 1 is my data, Figure 2 is a chart of the same region from the very way cool AAVSO chart maker (http://www.aavso.org/vsp).

Figure 1: Center of M35 image from 27 Feb 2014 UTC

Figure 2: AAVSO chart of same region

The orientation of the two aren't exactly the same, but I'm assuming that my readership is smart enough to make the translation.

The AAVSO chart shows stars down to magnitude 14.  My guess is that my image is getting down to 12-13.  Not bad for a 0.2 second exposure, eh?  Focus looks really good and there doesn't appear to be much in the way of clouds.

More Saturday.

One more thing.  I took a couple of pictures of my "observatory" last night.  In the years to come, I don't know if I'll laugh or cry when I see these.  Maybe both.  In any case, this might be a good argument for "anything can be done given the right amount of determination."

Wayaway Observatory

Taking flats and enjoying the sunset