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Dragoon Mountain Ranch – day 1

March 3, 2019 – Dragoon Mountain Ranch astronomy

2019 Southern Arizona Astronomy

I get up around 7AM and make some coffee, and others soon join me. This is a day with nothing planned, so we can recover from our travel. After everyone is up and have breakfast, some of us walk around the ranch fence line. It is quite pleasant since the weather is cool, clear, and sunny. I fly my DJI Mavic Pro drone this morning, capturing some nice still photos, panoramas and video of my friend’s property.

Aerial of Dragoon Ranch looking NW from Garry's place
Aerial of Dragoon Ranch looking NW from Garry’s place

Some of the group have afternoon naps, but I stay up familiarizing myself with my new Sony a7 III mirrorless camera, in order to get ready for imaging in the dark this evening. I also get my list of targets for the big imaging telescope ready, since the skies are clearing this evening. When it starts to get dark, we go out to the observatory to start an imaging run using a 20″ Newtonian astrograph telescope, and the visual observers setup with their own equipment and also use a 25″ Newtonian telescope.

The procedure for imaging in the observatory uses a script to conduct the imaging runs automatically. After troubleshooting this system for the next hour or so, we successfully get our imaging runs working, which run all night automatically until dawn while we sleep. My target for this evening is the Jellyfish Nebula – a galactic supernova remnant in the constellation Gemini. My observing report

IC 443 Jellyfish Nebula
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La Ensenada Lodge – day 1

Feb 23, 2009 – Monday – La Ensenada “Star” Lodge, Manzanillo, Puntarenas, Costa Rica

2009 Southern Skies Fiesta & Tamarindo Coast

I shoot a time lapse video of the southern sky from 3:30am this morning to sunrise using my digital SLR camera. It turns out pretty well, so I’m pleased with the result. Our astronomy tour leader Gary Seronik alerted us to a conjunction of the thin crescent Moon, Mercury, Jupiter and Mars happening just before sunrise this morning. The clouds reappear in that part of the sky, but I managed to take a photo capturing all three planets with the Moon.

Conjunction of the thin crescent Moon, Mercury, Jupiter, Mars

Today is “at leisure” as they say in the travel industry. Jorge is leading a nature walk this morning at 6am, so I join in since I’m already up from the night before. We only walk about a hundred metres along the Lodge’s driveway and spot so many birds it takes over an hour! I think the new people on the tour are pretty impressed that Costa Rica is such a rich wildlife area. After having breakfast, I go back to my cabin and process the individual frames from my southern sky sequence into a video. It turns out quite well, and after returning to San Jose where there’s faster Internet, I post the video online. I’m pretty tired, so I catch up on some sleep – first in the hammock on the front porch, and then in bed with the ceiling fan on low. After lunch, I go for a swim in the pool, and then go back to bed for an afternoon siesta.

Gary conducts a tour of the night sky this evening at 7pm. Everyone reclines in the lounge chairs by the pool while Gary reviews the sights in the early evening sky. I return to my cabin after, and decide to have a nap before the night’s observing begins. I wake up at 5am – oh well, so much for observing last night!