We had a weather front come through on the 9th of March and it dumped 2.2 inches of rain in 2 hours with wind gusting to 15mph. No rain made it in the observatory so it appears that the last re-seal of the dome skirt was successfull. I consider the event significant enough to prove (to myself) the weather tightness of dome and I feel more confident about it protecting the equipment that is installed.
I have moved the weather server into the observatory; it has been in the house up to this point. I still need to mount the cloud monitoring equipment. Future plans call for a web cam for the weather page and an all-sky camera.
The camera cooling plumbing has been installed. There was a minor leak that was fixed and I wired in a 24vac power supply. The sprinkler valve has been tested allowing me to turn on and off the cooling water remotely.
As you may have heard, the full moon this past Saturday was within an hour of perigee. Perigee is the closest position in an orbit of the earth. This makes the moon appear larger and brighter due to the proximity. As you might guess, the brightness interferes with any deep sky imagery so I took this opportunity to reconfigure the telescope for my Nikon D50. I took this image Thursday night; two days early. I set the camera as fast as it would go and took 60 exposures. The software registered each exposure as taking 0 seconds. This is a full color image as can been seen by the bluish cast to the Sea of Tranquility.