I've been off the dex for a couple of weeks now, and this is mostly a Very Good Thing. Still, I used to schedule telescope activities for dex nights, which was pretty convenient since I needed to stay up all night and that's exactly what dex did.
So how would I do without the dex? Last night was my first test, and the answer is: Boy am I tired. Driving home at 4 am was no fun, and I flopped into bed as soon as I got home. Now I'm up, but my 64-year-old body is not happy at getting only two or three hours of sleep.
And that was only for a night at Palomar, which is relatively close to home. I don't think I could make the 3-hour drive home from the desert—not safely, anyway. I'm not sure yet what the solution is.
Why not make your astronomy nights a two-day affair? That's essentially what we did when making birding trips to the desert from the Bay Area: Drive all afternoon to Mojave or Indio or wherever, stay the night, bird the next morning, then drive home.
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This is the absolutely perfectly bullshit spambot reply for Kevin. Immaculate.
Motel 6?
See Walter White for some of his products. Motel 6 may be a better solution as suggested above.
Camper van.
You could try renting something on RVShare.com. Having something with a bed would let you get to your destination and sleep before and after picture-time, then drive home in the morning. It's $$, but it's less $$ than buying even a teeny teardrop trailer and towing it. That said, if you like the idea, buying a used teardrop trailer wouldn't be so bad.
Caffeine.
A few weeks ago one morning I had the genius idea to dump a caffeine capsule into the pot I made coffee in. Haven't slept yet.
Meth? You could stretch you trips to 4 straight days! Over that 4 day trip you could craft 174 blog posts about 16th century watch repair. By night you could photograph the entire Messier catalog and then create oil paintings of each one. And as an added bonus lose a ton of weight!
Do NOT allow yourself to become sleep-deprived! I was that way for over 40 years until I retired. When I started getting 7 to 8 hours of sleep, a whole mess of nagging health problems went away. It made a bigger difference than I expected.
I've tried a variety of things. Reclining the passenger seat lets me at least kind of drift and doze. The Outback's load area is just big enough and flat enough to stretch out if I dump all my astro cases out into the night. We have some great reclining camp chairs now, will be trying that once it gets warmer.
But at best it's pretty rough. Having reliable guiding and sequencing at least lets you get a little rest, but the next day is usually pretty evil. My Bortle 7 back yard gets pretty appealing after awhile.
Pssst. Hey buddy. Do you have a need? I can help with that.
Seriously, this is why speed is so dangerous. It is actually performance-enhancing, if you're very careful with it. Too bad it messes with your risk analysis after a while...
I know! A Tesla in Autopilot mode!
NOT!
I guess there's nothing left but the meth then.