Through the day I had received a number of email alerts from CSAC for Fingal. And then one for St Thomas.
Launched Stellarium to simulate the sky. Noted the ISS flying over in the northern sky at 5:28 PM.
Reviewed the blog to confirm the visibility for Mars: it would clear the tree branches around 9:45 PM.
5:00 PM. Put the blind up, took the C8 out, leveled the 'pod, brought the eyepiece in, pointed the OTA level west, removed the objective cap, to start the cooling.
It was cold!
5:08. Started the weather checks.
My portal. Today looked spotty; the CSCs looked good in 2 nights. CO looked OK for tonight. EC showed cloud with stars.
It would be Moonie... gibbous waxing.
Good To Stargaze. Applied a cloud constraint. Not fully clear. Seeing to 1.9.
Astrospheric. Echoed CSC. OK seeing, ISS passes early in evening, Saturday night clear but POOR seeing.
CSC, Fingal (sponsored by yours truly). Average seeing.
Clear Outside. It was very optimistic, zero cloud from 19 to 22, ISS passes at 18:00 and 19:40.
Also checked the US Aviation Weather Service. Possibly it would be cloud free later.
Checked Heavens Above. For Sparta, actually... Two passes tonight. Pass 1 of 2 was the best. Maximum altitude would occur at 18:07:06 in the NNE.
5:58. Completed red light mode setup. This time... I had red film on the 3 office monitors, secured with elastic bands for all. I also used two of the colourful elastics on the Surface laptop. Oh yeah, set the RedDragon keyboard to dull red.
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