It was a beautifully clear night. I tried aligning the telescope by centering the stars in the ccd rather than the eyepiece, but the field was too small and the finderscope is not perfectly aligned. I took extra care to center the alignment stars as perfectly as I could in the eyepiece, and that seemed to help a little. I started right off with IP UMa. I alternated between 20 and 30 second exposures so that if some of the 30 second frames were smeared, I would still have continuity with the 20 second frames, though with a smaller signal to noise. It turned out that most of the frames were good. IP UMa and its two comparison stars fit nicely in the frame. We got about 3 hours of observations, including the maximum that should have occurred shortly after 12:37 (according to BYU's variable star database). All was going perfectly until we decided to check the oil in the generator. (It has been needing about two quarts every five hours and decided it needed to be checked if we were going to observe all night.) I had thought that the whole observatory was plugged into the backup power supply. This was not the case. (The bottom three sockets go to the battery while the top three are only surge protected.) So the ccd, laptop, and telescope all went down. So I had to restart the ccd, and I had to realign the telescope. Then I couldn't find my field again, and the stars were smearing in even 20 second images. I decided we were done with photometry and just worked on the telescope for a bit. I checked the polar alignment with the wedge align command, and that seemed to be okay. I fine tuned it a bit. I'll see if it made any difference tonight, but at five this morning I didn't feel like doing any more.

One other note: Shortly after midnight I was headed from the dome to the hab when I thought I saw clouds coming up from the east and thought I might make a note in my logbook. As I stared closer and noticed what part of the sky it was crossing, I realized it was the Milky Way! I had noticed a slight haziness before (okay, only once before that I remember, I'm from Houston), but never like this! It was amazing. I highly recommend bringing binoculars and looking at the sky when the moon is not up. It is beautiful!