Astro 481 Intermission: EvCC visits MRO!

Post date: Aug 01, 2019 12:5:40 PM

Kristine Washburn from Everett Community College came up for a night (Wed 7/31) with six students from the NASA-funded STEM Bridge Program. None of the students had ever taken astronomy or used a telescope. Now they will forever be terribly unimpressed with any other telescopes.

We seem to be interloping between Astro 481 groups that are trying to mess with each other. We reset "the thing" the previous group did. And we also encountered an empty pointing_stars.txt file, which took a while to debug. Additionally, and hopefully unrelated, we had issues with the telescope slewing way too low even though target coordinates were above the horizon. But we did get to learn about that one button on the base that makes the alarm stop so that was educational. After some sleep and coffee we realized we had picked Arcturus as our telescope calibration star and that was, indeed, below the horizon. So turns out this was not an instrument error.

Also, while we like to think of ourselves as smart but actually we are quite stupid. We took a bunch of really awesome pictures of nebulae and galaxies only to find that none of them saved! In retrospect, we should not have trusted that Evora was doing what it was supposed to do. We should have checked that the files were being saved and restarted Evora. Sigh, at least this was a fun trip and not for class midterm projects like last year.

Ok, the housekeeping stuff:

* Water level was 18 inches when we arrived

* We restocked paper towel, paper plates, and hand soap (both bathrooms and the kitchen)

* We did the thing with the Trizyme and lots of toilet flushing

* We verified that the air compressor does have proper attachments to inflate car tires

* We left 1.5 blue jugs of water (one under the sink and one in the instrument room)

There is still a lot of food. See list from previous group but 

* subtract rocky road ice cream and lettuce that we threw out because it was questionable

* add sweet cream coffee creamer (over half full) and a small thing of guacamole that we did not even open

When we got to Ellensburg we realized that we had forgotten to clean out the coffee pot. We lacked the physical and emotional fortitude to go back and clean it. Sorry, next group.

After a night of light observing we all fell asleep outside watching the meteor shower and staring at the Milky Way <3<3<3