Friday evening at the Observatory was spent showing some visitors around. As it was clear we were able to look at Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Uranus as well as the Moon through the 20?. Although the planets were all very low and suffering from massive amounts of atmospheric dispersion they went away happy.
After that, it was down to the main business of the night, measuring periodic error on the 20? drives. This shows that we have some more work to do to stop drift on the altitude drive and also that we have about 7 arc seconds peak to peak periodic error on the azimuth axis.
By this time, Jupiter was high in the sky so we finished up putting my modified Philips webcam on with a 2.5x PowerMate for some video images. Jupiter is more favourably positioned for Northern hemisphere observers than it has been for many years and it was nice to see it at a decent altitude with lots of detail visible in the eyepiece.