Thursday night at Fremont Peak

by David Kingsley

I arrived at Fremont Peak about 5 pm yesterday. The gate to the SW lot was both closed and padlocked shut, so I set up my 14.5 inch Starmaster Dob near Coulter instead. Wind and humidity was low, and temperatures were pleasant (mid 40s to low 50s). There were only two campgrounds occupied in the entire park, and only one or two cars driving into and out of the park all night. Skies were clear and seeing was quite variable over several hours. I noticed quite a bit of twinkle to the stars up to about 45 degrees elevation in the sky, but seeing at zenith was actually pretty good at times. I spent most of the time in Andromeda tracking down more extragalactic globular clusters in M31. M31 was nearly straight up most of the night, which put it in both the darkest and steadiest part of the sky. Using magnifications of 400 to 600x, I was able to track distant globs down to magnitudes of about 16.0 to 16.1. That limiting threshold is just a little worse than what I was getting at LSA back in the first week in October (16.2 to 16.3).

I was surprised that there weren't more people out, given the holiday weekend and discouraging weather forecasts for both Friday and Saturday. My family had the advantage of eating Thanksgiving dinner early in the day with friends, so I was able to get set up early and enjoy about 5 hours of good observing. Andrew Pierce was the only other observer who made the trip, but he couldn't get away until late and arrived at Fremont Peak about 10:30 pm. His few month old 14.5 inch Teleport Dob is unbelievably compact and quick to set up and take down. Unfortunately, he had to both set up and tear down in fairly short order because clouds began to arrive about 11:30 pm in some parts of the sky. By midnight there was high thin crud everywhere, and we both packed up shortly thereafter.

Wildlife sightings for the night included a great horned owl beautifully silhouetted against the night sky while perched in a tree, a fox trotting across the parking lot at sundown, a couple of giant wild pigs trotting down the road on my way out of the Park, and assorted deer, one of which nearly jumped in front of the car on the way home. But the prettiest sight was the arch of the Milky Way early in the evening. It stretched from Cygnus setting in the West to Orion climbing out of the trees in the East, and looked particularly welcome after a busy October and November of bad weather and too much travel.