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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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morgan8981mo 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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mitchell.lee1mo ago
Remember that guy who used to set up on Mars Hill? He had a similar thing happen, but with monsoon season. A surprise downpour hit while his rig was out. He thought the cover was on tight, but water got into the motor drive. He spent weeks trying to dry it out with rice and a hair dryer. The whole unit had this faint, sad buzzing sound after that, like a dying insect. He said it would still track, but it would randomly jerk to the east every twenty minutes.
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