VLO: Hamburg, NY/Sparks, NV July 9-10, 2009

Below is a post I started to do months ago and forgot about it. I never did finish it but I thought I might as well post it for the pictures. SUG and I had a great time on our first official Virtual Lunar Observation(VLO). Our lunar email banter transmitted via our laptops went on until about 3 am EDT. It was a thoroughly enjoyable evening and we have repeated it many times since. We have since started to use Instant Messenger for greater ease. Lately its been SUG at his laptop, charts and telescope at hand and me and my blackberry and chart and telescope for a fun filled virtual observation from each others cities. I think live webcams are in our future.


VLO Hamburg, NY : Sparks, NV
Well it took me some time to get back to this post but I wanted to get something up because this night was too much fun. Richie "SUG" Smith was 2100 miles away in Spark's NV and was all set up near his beautiful backyard pond and at the time with his trusted Rukl lunar atlas with the broken binder. The Rukl has since gone missing! (Did the Rukl take the deep six into the pond?) Below you can see me preparing for our second VLO in the backyard of my office. The VLO was scheduled to begin around 9 PM but due to some technical difficulties- running my internet connection from my office to my distant site in the backyard as well as an email glitch pushed the start time to around 10 PM. Waiting patiently was our girl- a 17 day old waning gibbous.

First transmission from SUG at 9:45 EDT.
"High Altitude clouds over Sparks. Coulter with plumbing piece focuser ready to go... Where do we start?"
I race to various objects before the moon rises 10:12 EDT
Drive-by : "How about the Asterism "Napolean's Hat in Aquila?"

Sharing a Virtual Coffee with the SUGster.



A somewhat ghostly Drive-By and silly redlight art.