prepared in backyard

Set up the observing tent in the backyard. Lovely day. But I positioned it in the wrong direction. Well. It's not wrong. Every time previously I've had it oriented with the observing portion in the east and the "office" in the west. And that put the side door close to the house, i.e. north.

Ironically, the last time I used this tent, in a rush, I forgot to peg the floor down first. When I installed the polls, it started to pull up. Oops. So this time it was high in mind to peg down the corners. That's when I discovered I had it backwards.

Double-oops. Not the end of the world. I'd elected to not use the side door. The end door would now be on the west. That would be the prime portal. Weird how disorienting it was. At first. But in the end I thought it worth a try. Might be better, who knows...

I was very excited to use my new large S-biner clips for first time. In the past, I used little D-shape clips. A little small at night when tired and sore but operable in bare hands. In the winter though, with gloves or mitts: impossible. These new large carabiners, found at last on Amazon, looked promising. Immediately I enjoyed using them. I am confident they will work well with gloves or mitts.

Gah! A tent pole broke! One of the segments split, the outer aluminium part. Dang. I tried to jury-rig it but my effort was laughable. I will need to do proper research to know how to fix this. In the meantime, I let the office pole rest on the ground. Fortunate the problem was near the end, already near the ground, and not in the middle!

1:35 PM. Checked battery level: full. Space left: 7 hours.

Found butane hand warmer! A week or so back, I was surprised to not locate it in the winter gear, with the electric and chemical hand warmers. It wasn't that I needed the heater; I wanted the syringe when I was loading distilled water into a badly behaving SLA battery. Turns out it was misfiled! I found the Restoration Hardware warmer with accoutrements in Bug Bag. Moved all the bits back to proper sack, the winter stuff.

2:09 PM. Checked the Oregon Scientific portable weather station. It was sitting on the portable picnic table inside the office (now east) end of the tent. Relative humidity: 31% ; air temperature: 30.5°C; air pressure: steady; prediction for 24 hours from now: Sunny.

The OS weather unit was showing 2:12 compared to 2:10 PM on the computer. So it was 2 minutes fast to netbook. My mobile phone also showed 2:10.

2:15. I installed the triangle tray/tripod support.

Then I leveled the mount.

I planned to wait until it was cooler before installing the Celestron SCT 8-inch optical tube assembly. Didn't want it to get too hot...