2017 Grand Canyon Star Party South Rim - Day 5

[Skylook123]

DAY FIVE - More Success

Weather: Started cloudy, but cleared out after sunset.  Not quite so hot, or maybe we're getting accustomed to it.  When we left after 1 AM it was decidedly chill!

Seeing and Transparency: As yesterday, the seeing is very stable but the transparency seems obscured.  .

Tonight was pretty much a repeat of last night.  Dean Regas again was the speaker, with the exciting and entertaining tour of the Universe.

I had stowed the system with the previous settings, and it all started with the same alignment.  I will have adjust the polar alignment, however. 

I chose to set up on M57, the Ring Nebula, and it was an awesome show for the visitors.  Over the next couple of hours, the education of about 275 visitors in the evolution of stars was enjoyed by the crowd, with great questions and a sky available to show red giant examples and other stellar artifacts to accompany the beautiful red-blue nebula on the screen.

As the crowd dissipated, the conversations shifted to cultural aspects of the night sky, another enjoyable pursuit.  I was surprised at how fast the time went by, and didn't depart until after 1:30 AM.

There was an interesting/amusing technical experience later in the evening.  Many of us with live video use Mallincam instruments, which use a wireless electronic controller to set the integration times longer than the 2.1 second internal maximum in the camera.  It seems we've all defaulted to Channel 01, so there was a period of dueling imaging.  John Suscavage next to me was doing a star alignment with a short integration time, while I was up at 14 seconds.  Until all of a sudden, the ring disappeared and became a thin, dim red disk.  I used my controller to reset to 14 seconds and the image came back.  Then John's alignment star bloomed out.  We realized what was happening, so tomorrow we have to reset our systems to unique channels.  Actually, he emailed me that he already has reset his wireless channel.