"If the observations do not agree with the predictions, we will know [...] our power of observation would be poor even by the standards of weather forecasts."
Stephen Hawking, The Origin on the Universe, p. 95
First and foremost, it should be mentioned that Rite Aid ate our homework.
That aside, our observation of Cassiopeia was intermittent, at best. And even when we thought we could see the constellation we were, apparently, mistaken. The photos we took came out as very fuzzy, orangeish clouds (image gallery) above the very, very bright lights of the HCC. From this, we have first-hand knowledge as to why observatories are way up in the mountains...where invisible clouds can't get them. But seriously, we saw no clouds. That night, we saw a perfectly clear, star-studded sky. In the 30 second exposure I took, what little evaporation there was hanging around in the sky overpowered all of the incoming starlight. Funny.
As to the missing pictures. There was an entire roll of 400, 24exp. color film which contained pictures of Arcturus (very prettily twinkling above the CRC), Jupiter with three of its moons (the telephoto couldn’t zoom in enough to tell which ones…) and two pictures which should have been open clusters M52 and M103. Had the competent folks at Rite Aid figured out that the little dots were stars and not simply flaws in unexposed film (as the nasty little note in the envelope implied), the previous two would have showed up as fuzzy blobs with two or three visible stars.
The time-lapse of Polaris above was taken that night on a different camera that also had non-dot-like pictures on it, so happily it survived.
