Commander's Note: During our stay at MDRS, my friend and colleague Bob McGown visited to the MDRS with a fellow astronomer, Sean League. During their stay, I asked Bob to check out the Musk Observatory and offer his observations on its condition. Additionally, Bob is a licensed electrician, and I asked if he could do a critique of the Hab's electrical system's current state. Below is Observatory report. The electric report was forwarded to the MDRS Engineering Team.

After we survived 16-hour drive from Portland, Oregon and arrived at MDRS, Team 28 Commander Gus Frederick introduced us to his crew. At approximately 15:00 hours on 4/16/04, Sean League, owner of Sean's Astronomy Shop, and I set up the solar H-alpha Coronado telescope and the C-5 telescope with a white light filter. We noticed large solar flares and sun spot activity that afternoon. The wind was gusting up to 45 km/hr and we were skeptical about observing that evening. However we set up for the night's observing hoping that the dark lenticular clouds would disappear. We also planned to trouble shoot the mount at the C-14 in the Musk observatory, which was not operating properly.

As we waited for the skies to settle down that evening, we checked out the Musk observatory electronics and equipment. The biggest problem with the observatory is the blowing dust storms. The dome is orientated to the southwest where the 45km/hr wind was coming from. Although the dome was taped down, the dome slit was allowing dust to filter down into the observatory.

The narrow rock ridge that accesses the dome is quite precarious. It is especially tricky for the crew when exiting the dome at night especially if they are tired and slightly disorientated. The CCD STV controller was not covered and saw no evidence of any cover. Everything else was in order and the C-14 was covered up with a thick cotton blanket. We cleaned up the STV controller and the next morning Gus cleaned the controller with liquid air. Sean had brought a new paddle from his Astronomy shop and we tested it with the C-14. Unfortunately, this paddle received the same error message as the original. We recommended taking the power head off the pier and sending it to Celestron for repair.

That night the weather finally cleared up and we set up our Alt/Azimuth 10'' Newtonian telescope on the south side of the Hab so we could observe with the crew. At about 10:30 it was getting very dark and there were just a few clouds hanging on. The sky was about 75% clear with very little wind. It was a warm evening, above 60-65 degrees, and occasionally a slight breeze would wiggle the scope. We had two observing chairs and a selection of eyepieces from 13, 25, 32, 40, and 50mm. We tried some spectral filters and diffraction gratings on observing planets & stars. The lower atmosphere seemed to be turbulent, while the upper atmosphere was steady. The wind died down and the seeing conditions improved to about 3-arc seconds seeing. The darkness was excellent on a Bortle scale of 1-10. The rating on the Bortle scale was about a 3. The seeing ranged from a 5 low on the horizon to about a 7-8 on a 1-10 scale. The transparency ranged from 6 to about an 8.5.

Our first observation included Venus, which was about 18 degrees above the western horizon. Venus was in a crescent phase and interesting to look at. Whenever we observe Venus we look for any bolides entering the atmosphere on the shadowed face.

The 6 members of Crew 28 came out to observe in shifts. We first toured the planets. Mars was low in the atmosphere and unsteady. Saturn was quite striking in a 90-power 13-mm eyepiece. The Cassini division would come and go. Jupiter was very distinctive as usual with clean banding, displaying four moons spread out on the Ecliptic. We were especially interested in Jupiter because of the new blue methane band, which just became visible this month in the Southern Temperate Belt region near where Shoemaker Levy-9 comet hit in 1994.

After our customary planetary tour, we observed a few deep sky northern objects and spent the next 3 hours observing the southern sky. It was a rarity to view the southern sky and observe some of the southern Caldwell Objects, galaxies and globular clusters that include C-66, 60, 61, 59, 53, and 48. We compared the galaxies for differences in our two-night observation for glimpses of possible super nova. Sean and I also spent some time observing the Virgo Cluster, M-83 (the southern pinwheel) and Leo galaxies. The sky was very black. Over all, the observing was very good despite the occasional cloud. We were able to locate deep sky objects rapidly so the MDRS research team enjoyed a good star party overall.

Submitted by:
Robert McGown