I thought I'd share my great time out last night with my new local astro group, here in southern Oregon. They're a small group, about 10-15 show up at observing meetings, 70 members total. They called the Southern Oregon Skywatchers. The summer sky up here is unbelievable when it's clear. Last night was like that. What a change from our crummy winter.
I took my Starmaster 20" out on my first astro-club meeting with the Southern Oregon Skywatchers astronomy club last night. They are the Medford area's only club--and the only one in southern Oregon, too. The star party met 30 miles north of the Medford/Rogue River valley at Stewart State Park on Lost Creek Lake. The lake is at 1700 ft. altitude. This neighboring valley is surrounded by 5,000 ft. heavily wooded mountains and is far enough north of Medford to block most of its light dome--only 45 minutes away. The highway drive (Rt. 62) north along the Rogue River to get there is safe and relaxing. Upon arrival to the state park campsite area, there were ten other SOS club members with an array of small refractors, homemade newtonians, mid-sized dobs and an 11" LX already set up in the central grassy area. When it got around that I had a 20" dob, everyone wanted to help me unload and set it up even though my 20" Starmaster is really easy to setup alone.
During the sunset, SOS gave a presentation with a computer astronomy atlas program (MegaStar) via a laptop and projector. This was 45 min. in length of How the Universe was Born, at the camp grounds' outdoor movie screen. Their were about 60 campers seated there to watch. The air quality along Stewart State Park at Lost Creek Lake was refreshing and cooler than the 88 degrees I had just left in Medford. We started off by showing the big Messier stuff to the general public right after the show, at 10:30 pm--the sun sets so late in June up here at 42 deg. north latitude. We couldn't get started observing until after 10:30pm. But, it's so much fun to get the kids to climb my 6' ladder to get at the 20"ers' eyepiece. But when they finally do, it's WoW! By 11:30, all campers had seen many sky objects are were retiring to their own campsites. At last, the 10 of us could now enjoy the very transparent and dark skies above for ourselves. We knew we would only have a good 2-1/2 hours of deep sky observing for the bright last quarter moon would rear its head by 1:30 am above the mountains to the east.
So, by 11 pm, we were looking up seeing 6.8-7.0 mag. stars naked eye with a very bright milky way (I could see the few stars between Vega and Epsilon Lyra as a test for that). It really feels good to be out under thousands of stars in the summer. A few of the spring globulars were easily visible naked eye (M3, M13, M5).
My evening's observing list included:
The 20" Starmaster is a great choice for me to have as my sole telescope, currently. It's portable, easy to set up and take down in the dark, and shows deep sky objects very well.
Peter Natscher
Souther Oregon Skywatchers
Medford, Oregon