Ok, well, everything seems to be a done deal now.

- Starlight Express SXVH9 camera is sitting on my desk, ready to go.
- Thanks to a timely heads up email from Brian, a BVRI filter set is sitting on the 'will call' table at Anacortes Telescope, and, we will pick it up on the way past when we head off to Table Mountain Star Party next week.

Solstice season is over, and the nights have returned. I was out on the back deck at 11pm last night, was nice to actually see stars again at that time of the evening. We get 2+ hours of 'real dark' each night now, and, that's growing by 6 to 7 minutes a day. We are officially headed back into 'astronomy season' at 49N.

The island star party starts this evening, and the weather forecast for the entire weekend is 'clear'. The folks making the CSC seem to have run out of 'white paint'. Woohooo. We head off around 3 this afternoon, and should have scopes all set up and ready to polar align before the talks start around 7. Talks run from 7 till dusk, and then we will get our scopes running again, first time since late May.

So, I was sitting here contemplating just what I want to do for giving the new camera a test drive, and possibly how to get a good comparison to the dsi. At first, my thought was, at some point tonite I'll have to do a couple test shots with the SXV, then replace it with the DSI, and do essentially the same test shot. But then I got a brainstorm. The 127mm mak is F/12, and I have a 0.5 focal reducer to put in the dsi nosepiece. The SCT is f/10 and I use it with the 0.63 reducer. So, I can put the dsi into a 5 inch scope, the sxv into the 8 inch scope, both roughly f/6, and, I just happen to have the side by side bar for this setup too.

So, for the first light comparison test tonite, the dsi goes into the 5 inch at f/6, the sxv goes into the 8 inch also f/6. The pair rides side by side on the EQ6-Pro, and, by the end of the evening, I'll have a very good solid comparison set for the two. Both will be running unfiltered tonite, I wont have the filters till wednesday.

Sooo, the fun starts tonite. Over the next 6 weeks, chris and I will be attending 4 star parties, 2 of which will be weeklong stays for us. The plan right now, get set up on the malahat at the event location before dinner, then set the artificial star out and tweak collimation on everything. After dinner, there's some talks happening, and after that, civil twilight ends at 10, nautical twilight ends at 10:45, astronomical twilight ends at midnight. Dark till 2:30 then sky glow starts to get bad (nautical twilight) by 3:45.

Plan for tonite, play with the new stuff, point it at lots of 'known things' and just experiment to find out what it can and cannot do. Assuming that goes well, the plan tomorrow nite, gonna spend a couple hours shooting a fast eclipsing binary, and see if we cant get our first real light curve out of this thing....