Fog lurked along the runway and most of the airplanes were immersed in a fog bank about 30 feet high. Encouraged by what we saw, I brought up all of my equipment and we proceeded to set up the Celestron and video camera. I found the moon on the TV screen and after about five minutes, the two hour capacity NiCad battery that powered the TV suddenly died. Luckily I had brought three batteries but only planned to use them in case a car battery could not be found. Due to our abortive situation, no car was available.
NiCads are notoriously undependable.
My polar alignment was slipshod and I had to manually correct the drive motor every 15 seconds or so in order to relocate the moon. We were only going to able to see the reappearance, since the moon had occulted Venus much earlier. We had been successful in a strange sort of way. They vanished forever. The three of us boarded the flight to Houston which was delayed due to fog.