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It was a two-man operation all the way. One person would find
the object in the finder or align the setting circles and keep a
log of the time, object, exposure number, and exposure length.
The other person would climb the fourteen foot viewing ladder,
use the telescope to acquire the object in the camera’s field of
view, and take the exposure. We frequently traded off jobs
during the night.
THE TRIAL RUN
In astrophotography nothing ever goes right the first time.
Knowing this, we had trial run on the night of Friday March 18,
1988 to practice our techniques and to get the bugs out of the
system. It was most fortunate we did this, because we committed
a whole series of blunders, some of which would have doomed us
on an actual marathon night. We first forgot to take the covers
off the telescope mirrors. Then we had trouble rolling the roof
off and forgot to turn on the clock drive. We, of course, also
took a few exposures at 1/30th second rather than on the bulb
setting. Our most serious error was that which is feared by all
photographers; the film was not put on the spool well enough and
did not wind through the camera. Thus, we spent 3 hours taking
21 test shots before we discovered this error. We had to spend
another 1-1/2 hours taking new test pictures. These were exposed
on regular Konica SR-V 3200 film and developed the next morning
so we could gauge the exposure range necessary for the marathon
attempt. In calibrating our exposures for the marathon effort,
we assumed that the hypersensitized SR-V 3200 would be twice as
fast as the regular Konica SR-V 3200 film.
THE PHOTOGRAPHIC MARATHON
The marathon was performed on the night of Saturday/Sunday,
March 19-20, 1988. We arrived at the observatory 2 hours before
sunset and got organized with plenty of time to go before sky
darkening took place. We brought along a backup camera, film,
and a Porta Pac rechargeable battery in case the observatory’s
generator failed. We were also dressed very warmly, because the
average temperature for the evening was 32° F with no warming
facility available other than the car. |
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