A game of two halves

Last night was my only observing night, so I was really hoping for some clear skies. I was tutoring a project on binary stars, which admittedly I don't know much about, but the project was pretty straightforward. I had the group I'd had the other night to train, who were pretty good (very good). However the projects are designed to run with 5 people. we had 5 the other night but we've had 1 drop out due to illness, and another had to return home due to an emergency. Hence, we were left with only 3 in this group. eek.

They had got themselves organised though, and had done the project planning before arriving at the observatory, which meant they could get set up and started in the dome pretty quickly. Not that it mattered - wall to wall clouds. So two of them went inside and started working trough some archive data, leaving one lonely soul to watch the clouds just in case.

We decided to give it until 1.30am and if there was no sign of a start then we'd call it a day, but bang on snack time at 12.30, the skies cleared and off we went. They ended up collecting data until 4.20am, which was great. Unfortunately, it meant we had to do some very simple maths very badly at 4.30am, which was not good.

The bus didn't turn up to collect the students on time, which meant we didn't get back until nearly 7am; however today we get half a day off and don't need to be at the observatory until 7pm. I've woken earlier than I needed to so that I can control my sleep pattern a bit - otherwise I will be too tired for Saturday's tutorial in Oxford. Unfortunately it's cloudy again......