I had only a few hours' notice that I could make my observing group's annual star party in Lassen National Park, held July 22-25 in 1998. Fortunately, a few 'phone calls turned up lodging in a small towns near the park -- a necessity, in the view of this non-camper, who likes a shower and a warm bed in a dark, quiet room, after each night at the telescope. So I loaded Harvey -- my white Celestron 14 whom few people have seen -- and a new binocular into my Geo Metro, added a sack of munchies and a duffle of spare clothes, and headed north from the San Francisco Bay area. My departure was delayed late enough that I encountered the beginning of rush traffic leaving town, but once I had crossed the toll bridge north of Concord, California, on 680 northbound, the traffic thinned out enough for me to drive at the speed limit. By nine PM I was at my room above a cafe in Old Station, California. The establishment was old-fashioned and very laid-back -- the proprietor had long since locked up and gone home, but he left the light on by my room and a key on the table inside. I hastily off-loaded my non-astronomy gear, and set off for our observing site, which was the parking lot at the Devastated Area, on the north side of the park, at an elevation of over 6,000 feet.

I needn't have rushed. It was cloudy. Well, not quite, there were a few sucker holes passing by from time to time, revealing sky dark and clear enough to log the North American and Pelican Nebulae naked-eye, but between cloud overhead and lightning from nearby air-mass thunderstorms, no one set up any telescopes. I went back to my room, turned in, and slept way late.

On the next day, Thursday, I introduced myself to the cafe owner, signed the credit card slip for my room, bought munchies, and set off for the Lost Creek camping area, where most of our group was staying. I told them all how unfortunate I was not to be able to share the perils of mosquitos, noisy campers, cold, heat, unwanted daylight, and rainfall, and contributed taco chips and some yummy garlic-flavored salsa to the general good will. After an hour or two organizing my observing program, I set off for the Devastated Area again. The weather looked promising, so I set up Harvey.

I had only recently recommissioned my Celestron 14, and had only once before set it up in the field on my new Losmandy G-11 mounting. Nonetheless, the setup went quickly and efficiently, and I had not forgotten any parts. A C-14 will not suit everyone's definition of small, but it is no problem for me to set up, and it fits in my Geo with plenty of room to spare, so as far as I am concerned it is a wonderfully portable telescope.

My observing program for the night was planetary nebulae: I had recently obtained a copy of veteran planetary-nebula observer Jay McNeil's list of over 400 objects of interest, and was eager to begin chasing down some of them. In the course of other observing, I had found most of his listed planetaries accessible from my latitude that have either New General Catalog or Index Catalog numbers, but there is an "On Beyond Zebra" of planetary catalogs that would make Dr. Seuss proud, and the list provided me with more than 300 new objects to look at. Unhappily, the weather did not cooperate: There was quite a lot of moisture in the air, and there were clouds near the southern horizon, blocking the realms of Scorpius, Sagittarius, and southern Ophiuchus, where most of the good planetaries lie. After only four new objects, I regrouped and went to my back-up plan, which was to observe dark nebulae. There are at least scores of these accessible to amateur instruments, and except for a few well-known ones like the Horsehead Nebula or the Pipe Nebula, almost no one looks at them. So I removed my 1.25-inch adapter -- I had been using Meade 20 mm and 15.5 mm Research-Grade Erfles for the planetary search, yielding magnifications of 196x and 252x respectively -- and dropped in a 40 mm Vernonscope Erfle in a two-inch barrel. In short order I had logged fifteen dark nebulae that I had not seen before, including several that are part of the well-known rho Ophiuchi complex.

I spent a little while reviewing some more popular objects, as well. Despite seeing that was at best so-so, I logged nice splits of the double-double and of Antares, but the seeing was not up to separating gamma-two Andromeda, which is well within the capability of the C-14 on a good night. All the double-star work was at 252x, as was a lovely view of M15. At 98x -- the Vernonscope 40 mm -- M31 spanned many fields of view and showed two dark lanes as well as star cloud NGC 206.

Someone counted 31 telescopes in the parking lot that night. Equipment included Newtonians to 20-inch aperture, SCTs to my 14, refractors to an Astro-Physics 155 mm, Maksutovs to six-inch, and binoculars up through one of Vixen's 130 mm units. Dew knocked out most of us by 0200.

On Friday, my contribution to the junk food was a bag of marshmallows, and I found that few people would eat them. I didn't think my observing companions would reject any food-like substance, but I was wrong -- some of them have taste. One of our number got around the lack of a campfire by spearing a marshmallow on a twig and roasting it over a cigarette lighter. I did not ask how much the butane contributed to the flavor.

Friday night was worse. A nearby air-mass thunderstorm provided lightning that was at times almost continuous. Rapidly moving cloud kept about half the sky blocked at any one time, but the areas covered kept changing. High moisture content in the air precluded any serious observing of faint stuff, so I spent most of the evening reviewing bright objects at 98x. At that magnification, M57 showed a doughnut shape with variations in brightness, but no central star -- seeing and lack of magnification precluded seeing it; M51 showed spiral structure as well as the bridge to companion NGC 5195, M107 was well resolved, M108 was elongated and mottled, M97 only hinted of eyes (moisture was the problem here -- it was in a wet part of the sky when I was looking at it), and several other Messier objects were bright and full of detail. I dropped an Orion UltraBlock nebula filter in front of the 40 mm, and had wonderfully textured views of the east and west arcs of the Veil Nebula. I had put on a kludgy dewcap composed of one sleeping-bag sized portion of bright yellow foam and one bungee cord -- remember, I only recently recommissioned Harvey, and had not added all the facny accessories I wanted -- so my optics remained dew-free, but cloud thickened and sent us home early.

The weather Saturday afternoon was even cloudier, and rain fell within the area of the park we were using. I sat in front of the little store at the park's northern entry, feeding mayonnaise from my sandwich package to a cheerful and friendly Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrel, who climbed up my pant leg and nosed into my paper bag in search of supper, while I watched clouds and wondered if I should go home early. (I worried about feeding the little fellow -- human food and human disease are generally not good for wild animals -- but then I realized that the mayo in its foil packet was sterile, and that its main ingredients were soybean oil and eggs, all likely very nutritious for a rodent, and certainly better than the sugar-coated cereal that other campers were distributing far and wide.)

I went to the camping area, and found that many of us had indeed bailed out early. Yet I could not help but notice that as the afternoon wore on, the cloudy sky was slowly turning blue. Perhaps the sacrifice of those who had left was sufficient in its own right, but just to be on the safe side, all the rest of us made loud remarks about how it would be fun to go to the Devastated Area parking lot and do a little bird-watching, even though it was obviously not going to be a good night to set up telescopes. Whatever it was that we were doing right, it worked, for by twilight the sky was crystal clear, dark, and free of moisture: It was a superb night, exactly what we had come for.

It was also our public night, and while I am a great fan of public service with telescopes, I did not want to waste our one good night of the trip demonstrating the bright to the dull, so I decided to cheat. "Everyone else is showing you things that are easy and obvious," I said, "but I thought you might like to see what it is like to push one of these telescopes near its limits." And I may have a first -- I doubt that anyone, anywhere, has ever used fifteenth-magnitude planetary PK 346+12.1 as the subject for a long line of interested laypersons. Yet at 196x, with coaching on where to look and how to use averted vision, about eighty percent of them saw it, and the ones who did not were mostly those who needed glasses to observe with and could not use them because of the short eye relief of the 20 mm Erfle. I logged twenty faint planetaries that evening, all new to me, and none bright or obvious enough to have either an NGC or an IC number. Several were not plotted on any of the charts I have, including the new _Millennium_Star_Atlas_. Frequently I had to interpose a nebula filter between my eye and the eyepiece to verify which object was the planetary -- stars get dim, planetaries less so, and the poor seeing was making it difficult to see that small planetaries were non-stellar. Yet members of the lay public saw several of these elusive objects.

Later in the evening I looked at some brighter stuff. The seeing was nowhere near good enough to support 435x (6 mm Vixen Lanthanum eyepiece), but with many minutes patience at that magnification, there would come instants of steadiness. At such moments I glimpsed the ansae and central star of the Saturn Nebula (NGC 7009), and saw tantalizing detail on Jupiter. I also had a nice look at the Helix Nebula, NGC 7293, with the 40 mm Erfle and the UltraBlock.

After I had taken down the C-14, I wandered about looking through other telescopes. One view of note was through an 18-inch Obsession at 100x, of the Pegasus I galaxy cluster: Even casually, I could count eleven galaxies.

On returning to my lodging I pulled out my new binocular -- one of the last of the Orion 14x70s -- and continued the Messier survey I had started with it the week before. Six more objects brought the total to 90. I will report on the 14x70 later, separately.

The courteous innkeeper allowed me a late checkout, so after a good night's sleep I came back down California's Great Valley, through enough moisture-sucking dry heat that I drank a gallon of water in a five-hour drive. Lassen '98 was a great success.