Josh --

When were you at Kitt Peak? Wes Erickson and I were there for the
nights 5/6 Dec and 6/7 Dec to install and check out my automation
tools (ACP and PinPoint) and to show them MaxIm DL's automation
capabilities, all tied together with scripts. Adam Block was our
counterpart .. he is the main guy for the Advanced Observing Program,
and he is a FANTASTIC person. He loves his job, he really knows his
stuff, and he's very flexible and accommodating. I would highly
recommend next time you plan to go to AZ that you try to book yourself
a night on the 16" there. Adam will be there to assist you, and at a
minimum you'll come away with one or two really fine astrophotos. For
more info on AOP:

http://www.noao.edu/noao/pio/pop/advanced/advanced.html

We had our challenges Sunday night, mainly relating to the inability
of the 16" to take unguided exposures of more than 60 sec. That poor
scope gets the heck used out of it, and its tracking is just not very
good. They have an ST-8E ("blue chip") camera, and when guided, of
course the setup is capable of very long exposures.

Anyway, we re-targeted our run for Monday night to limit exposures to
1 min and successfully imaged *and reduced* a 9 asteroid astrometric
observations (27 images) , totally hands off, in one hour. Then we
spent a few hours taking pretty pictures of NGC2481 and M100. The ST8
is capable of stunning color work -- Adam showed us how to do LRGB
mode pix, and the results speak for themselves. You can see them on
the AOP page at:

http://www.noao.edu/noao/pio/pop/advanced/observers/robserver.html

The seeing was stunning, the big scopes were reporting 0.7 arcsecond!
It was a perfect night, just a bit over 40 deg F, a light breeze
making the airflow over the mountain laminar, no clouds...just
amazing. The thing that really struck me was how clearly visible the
zodiacal light was. The pale ghostly glow extended well up along the
ecliptic. It was clearly visible after sunset and again before
sunrise. And I know what you mean by being lost in the stars!

I highly recommend AOP!

-- Bob

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