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by Bruce Jensen
Several East Bay TACers took advantage of the new viewing area at Del Valle Regional Park, away from the roadside staging area where we used to set up. As with any new adventure, this one provided an opportunity to experiment and discover the relative benefits and drawbacks of the site, and to see how to fine tune any observing program that we might conduct there.
Friday night had the biggest group, including Paul Sterngold, David Silva, Adam Shiffmman, Greg Zamira and his family, Kal Krishnan, Bruce Prickett and Peter Rathman. On Saturday, Shankar Kumar, Chris Bailey and several of his friends came by. Both nights saw fun conversation and many laughs.
The site is well behind a locked gate, and so it approximates a private site in that few people use the area after sunset. On both nights when we occupied the area, we saw nobody "just wander through," and only on the second night did any Park security people check in on us, just we were leaving about 11:45 PM. It does overlook the main activity area of the Park, which is in a valley, and as a result there are distant views of a few campground lights and a very small light dome from security lighting at the day use area (even the Park believes in useless lighting I guess). The skyglow from the lights were enhanced by the heavy moisture in the air, but even so the light domes did not extend above the rim of the valley and was not objectionable. I suspect that some decent light fixtures would have made them all but invisible, and on a dryer night they would have been minimal anyway. The site also overlooks the road far below, and we do get some distant headlight intrusion, but it is greatly improved over the direct glare of the headlights that used to beleaguer us.
The first night we had about 8 cars there, and after some experimentation found plenty of room to fit with quite a bit to spare. Much of the flat area is grassy, and while it is presently green and not very flammable, we will need to take special care later when it becomes brown; catalytic converters can ignite dry grass.
We discovered that cell phones do not work especially well from this site, although communications are possible, and that having pizza delivered to this site is not an easy task! Having spent some time a bit on the hungry side, next month, perhaps we will bring our own pizza (thank goodness Dave S. brought cookies!).
The night air at this locale is full of sound, and especially from the coyotes, who provided particularly sonorous serenades on these evenings. The local cows are also nearby (in the same field actually), and their lowing can be heard pretty plainly.
Given the rather poor atmospheric conditions of both nights, the cows provided me with the one most memorable event of the weekend. On the first night out, the cows pretty much avoided our area, prefering to stay on the gravel road and nibble at the lush grasses growing from the shoulders. On the second evening however, I arrived first and spent about 20 minutes alone setting up the scope. When I was about half finished with assembly, our new friend Shankar walked in and we moseyed together back to the gate to get his vehicle into the site. As we were walking out, a clutch of about a half dozen hayburners were slowly making their way toward our observing area. After letting Shankar in, we drove back, and found the group surrounding my telescope. Their curiosity was not satisfied by simply looking and sniffing the equipment; they had to taste it as well! I jumped out to shoo them away, and when they had fled I inspected the scope and found cow saliva on the mirror box, the truss tubes, and the upper cage! Yecch! I wiped it away the best I could, and thanked my lucky stars that I had not yet installed the mirrors before I left the scene (I wonder what cow spittle does to mirror coatings?).
Despite the moisture and high clouds, we were able to view a number of more popular deep-sky objects satisfactorily, and the seeing was good enough later on that Mars showed its subtle features fairly well in many scopes. Astronomically, the highlight for me was seeing Supernova SN1999by in the tilted spiral galaxy NGC 2841 in Ursa Major. The little 12.8 magnitude (est) dot proved to be visible in scopes as small as 8" under the given conditions, and was fairly easy in the larger scopes. At 30,000,000 light years, this Type Ia SN (white dwarf host) shone well, and made a pretty image inset against the bright magnitude 9.3 galaxy and the nearby starfield. It is not the brightest "star" in the field nor is it the only object involved with the galactic face, so a photo or a finder chart is helpful to determine which object is the SN. I strongly suggest everyone take a look at this one in the next week or so.
We had two pleasant if undistinguished nights; the drier air of summer and fall should help to bring better conditions to our new observing site.