Frost in the Everglades
The skies were perfectly clear and reasonably stable and the turnout was
more than adequate, with a total attendance of twenty people and 16
optical instruments, including 2 pair of binoculars on tripods. Not
all twenty people were present at once, since some of the early-birds
departed before the final group arrived. Keeping in line with what
is becoming a tradition with me, I set up my scope for imaging and
loaned out my eyepieces to a few of my friends.
The seeing started out a bit tough, but it improved continuously
throughout the evening until shortly before midnight when the
temperature dropped precipitously to well below freezing and a
chilling north wind developed. The small amount of dew on things
quickly turned into a whole lot of ice. By 4 AM, the entire sky
was churning with thermal eddies, so most of us packed up our
equipment and headed for home. Two hearty soles doing wide-field
photography were seemingly unaffected by such hardships and remained
on site till sunrise.In spite of the cold temperatures and the gusty wind and the atmospheric turbulence, I was able to capture reasonably good images of NGC891, NGC1232, NGC7331, NGC2024, and IC434. Several other objects were lost to the less than perfect seeing conditions. Fred Lehman, December 20, 2003.
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