Power fail at 2am on a mountain made me rethink every backup plan I had

I had my whole kit set up on a hill outside Flagstaff on the night of the Perseid peak, about 2 weeks ago. The Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer was tracking perfectly for about an hour, then the lithium pack just shut off with no warning. My phone said it was still at 38 percent, but the mount froze solid and my 3 minute exposures turned into star trails. I tried swapping to my spare battery pack, but the cable was the wrong size, so I got maybe 6 decent frames of the Milky Way core and nothing of the meteors. I ended up just taking a few untracked shots with my wide lens and calling it a night. Do you all carry two fully charged batteries of different sizes, or do you just risk it and hope? How do you handle a power fail in the middle of a clear night shoot?

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luna_wright28d ago

Yeah I keep two different size batteries now after basically the same thing happened to me. Also I tape the adapter ends to the cables so I can't grab the wrong one in the dark. Learned that one the hard way too.