Monday, April 16, 2018 - Early AM -
It's 3:00 AM on a Monday morning. It's been a very long time since I added any entries to this blog. I wrote a lot of drafts last year without publishing them. And I have done little to no amateur astronomy for the last several months. No Meteor Observing, no Variable Star work (visual or PEP), not even much Lunar Observing. I believe that this will be changing soon.
This was a pretty bad winter in a lot of respects, compared to the last three winters. The worst characteristic of it, however, is that it has lingered on far too long! We had our worst snow events in late March, and have had accumulating snow into April. In fact, after a very spring-like spell of weather settled in late last week and Saturday, we're going through a brief spell of cold weather again tonight and tomorrow. Snow showers are in the forecast for later today! (Fortunately, it's supposed to be non-accumulating snow.)
But there are some interesting things in the works, and I wanted to briefly describe them here:
(1) I got in contact with Mike Hankey of the American Meteor Society late last November, and I became a paying member of the AMS soon afterward. Mike has designed, tested, and built a system of six cameras mounted together to keep an eye on the skies, and wants to create a network of such cameras around the country for fireball detection. They should also be able to detect meteors to +2 magnitude, so they will record the brighter sporadics and shower members each clear night. I have been messaging him frequently on Facebook for the last few days, and it looks like I may be able to purchase one from him in the near-future and set it up out in the back yard. I'm very excited about this possibility!
(2) I am still planning to try once again to start PEP variable star observing, and hopefully I'll get a clear (and not so cold) morning or evening soon to try to determine the Epsilon-V Coefficient for my SSP-3. I tried last summer a couple of times, but, the issue seemed to be the tracking of the mount for my 8" Meade scope. I was using a 9v battery for power then. I purchased an AC adapter for this telescope last fall, and I intend to try it out with this soon.
(3) It has occurred to me that my visual observing problems with my telescopes may not lie in the scopes themselves, but with my astigmatism in my own eyes, which has been getting worse over the last few years. This sounds like an obvious thing, but I haven't tried it yet ... I need to get out and try observing with my glasses on instead of off! I'm, again, waiting for a decent clear night with a decent temperature to get outside and give this a try.
That's all for this morning. I'm going to try to keep regular blog entries from this point on.
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