A Dark Night

Last night was cloudy so I took the opportunity to spend a night taking dark frames for image calibration, when I arrived at the observatory at 9 pm I noticed that the computer had crashed since the last time me and Steve were there, we had left the computer updating the Sky X with a star catalogue that Grant Christie had advised us to use, the computer fan seemed to be really labouring so I restarted the computer which seemed to resolve this problem. I then connected the camera and set the coolers on to reach -20 but after waiting until 10 pm the coolers still couldn't cool down the camera past -15, seeing as it was a pretty hot night I figured this might just be as cool as the camera would get, so I then set about taking the dark frames, I collected 5 hours worth of 600 second exposures which was about as exciting as that sounds, after that was finished I took 30 bias frames to go with my 30 Dark frames, it was well past 3 am by this point, so I decided to call it a night, I closed up the observatory but when I came to clamp the observatory dome I noticed the big clamp was stuck it couldn't be tightened or loosened so unable to secure that clamp I had to just leave it with only one clamp holding down the dome, hopefully the clamp just needs some CRC lubricant or something, In the meantime I will look to buy a replacement clamp as we can't really afford to have the dome unsecured. Posted By Jonathan Green