Last night it cleared up enough for me to spend a couple of hours refining my polar alignment. I have never drift aligned before so it was kind of fun to see how it worked. While it was fun it definitely wasn't exciting. :-)

I was also hoping to do a calibration of my SSP-3 but too many clouds rolled in. With the forecast of clouds/rain over the next 5-7 days it looks like the calibration and use of the SSP-4 will have to wait till 2006.

Last night was the first night I was able to spend a couple of hours in the observatory since the concrete was poured. It performed great and I can't wait to spend hours each evening counting photons for the AAVSO.

The concrete pad for the observatory was poured a week ago (12/14/05) and I put the observatory back together Sunday (12/18/05). I was able to do an alignment on Monday (12/17/05) and everything seems to be working GREAT!

It is supposed to be clear tomorrow night so I hope to do a drift alignment and then begin making use of the SSP-4 IR photometer. I would also like to do a calibration run on the SSP-3. But, perhaps I'm being over ambitious. :-) Regardless, I'll keep you up to date.

Full use of the observatory will have to wait another couple of weeks. Next week, we will be laying a concrete pad for the observatory to sit on. I really should have done that beforehand but thought the floor would be ok on the ground. As it turned out, the ground isn't level enough so the floor flexes which isn't good for pointing accuracy. T-Point did a good job of correcting for the errors, so with a solid floor the pointing accruacy should be awesome!

On an exciting note, the AAVSO has been kind enough to send me a SSP-4 infrared photometer for long-term use. I am extremely excited about participating in this program. A big THANK YOU goes out to Dr. Arne Henden, director of the AAVSO, for loaning me the SSP-4.

With any luck (and weather permitting), the Hermitage Observatory will be up and running at full speed by the end of December doing both PEP V as well as PEP infrared observations for the AAVSO. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that things will go smoothly.