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My entire astrophotography setup got soaked during a freak storm in Flagstaff last Tuesday
I drove three hours to get to a dark sky site outside Flagstaff, set up my Celestron telescope and camera gear around 8 PM, and got maybe 45 minutes of clear data on the Orion Nebula. Then this wall of rain came out of nowhere, no warning on any app. I had to scramble to get everything under a tarp, but my tracking mount and laptop got completely drenched. It's been a week and the mount still makes a weird grinding noise. Has anyone else had to deal with sudden weather ruining a whole night's work, and how do you even start to dry out electronics like that?
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morgan89811h ago
Flagstaff weather is a special kind of betrayal. I lost a whole night's imaging run on the Veil Nebula to a dust storm that came out of the Paria Plateau. The fine grit got into the focuser gears, and it sounded like sandpaper for months. I ended up taking the whole thing apart on my kitchen table, cleaning each gear with isopropyl alcohol. It never did track quite the same after that.
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