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WEEK 29 2021
Last Week- Sun- Mon- Tue- Wed- Thur- Fri- Sat- Next Week
Saturday - Hot.
Bob sent a couple of pictures of the massive smoke blowing into the Carson City area from the California wildfires. Yuck.
There is smoke around here, but for the most part it isn't too bad. Just hot and hazy and yucky.
I'm supposed to shop tomorrow morning, I really need to get better pads for the swamp cooler.
Friday - Hot.
I was scheduled for a dental cleaning, but the dentist texted and called to say that another tenant of their building had a fire, and that their offices were smoke damaged, so they were canceling.
In the morning it wasn't too hot, and I wasn't at the dentist, so I did some more yard work.
I'd picked up some landscape blocks a while ago, but because of the heat and the heart pains I was getting after my COVID shot I hadn't done anything with them. So I went and finished up the rings around the other three trees: 32 blocks per tree, 23# per block, so 2208lbs, a metric ton.
It was unpleasant, but I did the old lie to myself thing: "I'll let myself quit after half a ring...after a full ring...after the next ring..."
Thursday - Hot.
I had to mail my quarterly taxes, though they aren't very large. Almost forgot!
Observing report: Carried the 5se SCT out to the old horse corral, out of the winds.
Saw Saturn, Jupiter, and Uranus. Uranus was a definite blue-green orb, though I saw no features. I was using the zoom, because I didn't want to be fiddling with expensive eyepieces out in the uneven part of the yard there, but the sky-align was working pretty well, everything was in, or just in, the rather limited field of view at low power.
I didn't see Neptune, again, despite trying. It may be one of the faint "stars" in the field of view. I may just need to use the big C8, though it has issues with it's diagonal that I need to address. And of course it only has a Telrad, though I'm trying to buy a finderscope. For some reason, after being cheap and prolific on Cloudy Night, the moment I decided to buy one they shot up in price and became scarce. Gah.
It was very smoky to the east, by the time Mercury was supposedly high enough to be visible above that it was pretty much full dawn.
Wednesday - Hot.
Chihuahua's are gone, S came by and picked them up, much to their hysterical delight.
Cleaned up for about 4 hours afterwards: they are digging and pooping machines, but it's better now.
No observing, wind gusting into the 40s.
Tuesday - Hot.
Observing report: none, really, it was smoky. There was a nice orange crescent moon though.
"Red sky in the evening,
observers be grieving,"
Monday - Hot. At 1:45am when I went to bed, after doing some astronomical observing, it was 88F.
Observing report:
I
went out for an hour and a half around midnight (well, exactly midnight,
since I checked the time).
I used the little celestron since it was still breezy, and i needed practice with the controller. I aligned it with three bright stars, but it claimed we couldn't get a fix, so I went through the whole procedure - this time giving the city and time and everything else, and it seem to work pretty well.
it
easily found Jupiter, Saturn, and even the Andromeda galaxy in the field
of the 22 mm IP's.
I
told her to search for Neptune, and it did, but there was nothing
visible to me in the eyepiece.
It's been very hazy, you know that sky test where you look at the little dipper? I can only see the two end stars.
Between the winds, and the haze, and turbulence, and even some clouds, I could only get about 125 power out of things. Still it was a fun couple of hours.
Sunday - Hot. 112F again.
I didn't do any shopping.