This event follows two others, on our way back home. We'll get this from Quin Sabe Rd in Paicines
|
|
|
|
|
We set Sandy up first, and I tried to see what was the diffuclties with his equipment. His telescope does show more gear slop than our other 8SE's. Perhaps we can tinker and tighten that up? It is possible to deal with that with deft fingers on the telescope button, but that takes a bit more experience than Sandy has at the moment. The other problem was that he has not gotten a charger for the camcorder, and the battery died. No data
I made a horrible goof in my mad rush to get the charts and sites done before Kirk arrived at my place to pack and leave... I ended up not clicking on C2A on the target star to re-fresh the RA/Dec data shown. So the RA/Dec data was still showing the numbers from the prior occultation 90 minutes earlier - by 2001FC46 and the mag = 8.1 star. I was very late to set up for this event after spending too much time at Sandy station helping him set up. And, I then did not notice until too late that the charts I had (which were correct) did not have the true RA and Dec, and I could not make heads or tails of the star patterns. Only when I finally noticed the tell-tale diamond pattern of very bright stars made by 2001 FC46's target, did I realize what I'd done. There was really no way to recover from that except to call Kirk, but it was too late for that and my iPhone also had no bars. The other problem I had is that the video connection to the Startech was very flakey and mostly dead. I had to struggle to find a good enough connection that the signal showed through. I had not seen that before, and it will require a refinement to my process.
Had no troubles, got set up in time, looks like he got a 1s positive
Dead camcorder battery. The solution of choice is going to be to get him our other Startech cable and future events to record on his laptop. He is still going to need to be able to charge the 14ah AGM battery that is part of my occbox1 which I lent him, and which was all torn apart when I looked at it this night.