Aargh!

[DeepSkyBagger]

Last night was one of *those* nights. One of those nights send by the god of rubbish things. It appeared that there might be some promise in the night early on, so I lugged the 12" outside and waited for true dark. As darkness approached, I set up my observing station (on the kitchen table, right next to the patio doors that lead out to the 'scope). My little netbook computer, on which I run AstroPlanner and Guide, was switched on and left to boot. Ten minutes later I came back. Computer remained unbooted. Some fiddling resulted in an error message which said something like "Your computer failed to start up, Windows will now attempt to repair the problem. This may take some time." First 'Aargh!' of the night. The second 'Aargh' came ten minutes later with the message "Windows cannot repair this computer. Report the problem to your administrator." I force-restarted the computer and carried on preparing.

The sky now looked quite clear, with the Square of Pegasus dominant in the south. Nice. Computer stayed blank. Frankly, I don't need AstroPlanner, it's just nice to have. I have my Lifetime Observing Plan printed out in a binder (about 3000 objects). Guide is another matter. When hunting for particularly elusive fuzzies, It can help to know the starfield down to about 14th mag. I don't have a printed atlas that does that. Mrs DeepSkyBagger then suggested that I put Guide on to her netbook and use that. Good idea, I think, and scurry off to my study to put Guide on a pendrive to install on wifey's 'puter. It wouldn't fit on the pendrive I had. Third 'Argh!'.

Wifey then called up the stairs to tell me that my netbook is now showing signs of life. It was, it seemed to recover and then behaved more-or-less normally for the rest of the night. OK, roll back one 'Aargh!'.

Little computer set up now, Mrs DeepSkyBagger withdrew from the operational HQ and I turned off all the lights. Out under the stars! Completely cloudy - 'Aargh!'

I then spent some time waiting for the clouds to go away. They did, eventually. OK, first target was NGC 12, optimistic for someone who still had a big blind spot from watching telly. Right, skip that. Let's look at Uranus. Planet Seven looked rather dim, though the green colour was quite striking. A small, green disc, surrounded by a halo of faint nebulosity, which covered up the area where I expected to see Oberon and Titania. I can normally see these two without a great deal of difficulty. So, what had I discovered? A completely new type of planetary nebula, or just some cloud? I employed Occam's Razor. The sky did look rather murky. As I watched Uranus, it faded from view as the background sky brightened. Yep. Completely cloudy again. 'Aargh!'

Another bout of enforced waiting and wahay! Completely clear! I decided to go for something bright and easy, and as Perseus was by now riding high in the south east, I whizzed over to NGC 1023, a very bright galaxy. Yes, there it was. Bright and easy and yet not elongated. Hmm... 1023 is a very elongated galaxy. Answer? Thin cloud obscuring all but the galaxy's bright, round core. Not so much 'Aargh', more 'Urgh!' As I watched, the galaxy stretched and squashed as virtually invisible thin clouds passed in front of it. 

Alright, got to try something. Just 46' from 1023 is the dim galaxy IC 239. Optimistically, I star-hopped over to the right position. Look, look, look. Something... yes, definitely something. Is that where it is? Check Guide. Yes! I spotted a dim glow in just the right place. Check again. Gone. Not just the galaxy, but all the field stars too. Totally cloudy. 'Aargh!'

Reader, I packed up. 

As I finally trudged to bed a little while later, I checked outside one more time. Totally clear. You guessed it . 'AAAARRRRR............!!!'

[WaveSoarer]

There is nothing worse than a misbehaving computer - other than cloud.

[cotterless45]

Cool, personally, I use a pencil and an A4 pad. Both are easily fixed. I suppose recycling is equivalent to rebooting.

I keep away from the patio , the house gets in the way of half the sky.

The dew however was very ,very bad. Seeing was not good. I found Uranus to be very bright and colourful,

Nick.

[DeepSkyBagger]

I use pencil and paper to record my observations at the eyepiece, but find that inadequate when hunting for exceptionally faint galaxies. I use Guide because 1) The Goto on my scope, as on most of them, quite often doesn't quite hit the mark, so I need to identify star patterns and hop to the target field. 2) Once the target field is acquired, if it's a particularly dim object, it really helps to know *exactly* where to look. Even then, it's often not visible, but at least I know that I've been looking in the right place!