Lassen Report

June/July, 2000

by Jay Reynolds Freeman


A few dozen San Francisco Bay area amateur astronomers held a star party at Lassen National Park over the weekend preceding the Fourth of July, 2000. I spent five nights observing from the Bumpas Hell parking lot, 8200 feet (2500 meters) up on the south side of the mountain.

Weather was almost shirt-sleeve the first night, but colder thereafter. Dew was no problem the first few nights, though later I used a Kendrick anti-dew system and a dew shield on Harvey, my Celestron 14. Clouds threatened during several twilight periods, yet the night sky was clear on June 28 and the next four evenings.

Conditions otherwise were very good. Sky darkness near the zenith appeared as good as at the Onizuka Visitor Center on Mauna Kea, at the 9000-foot level, but Lassen had rather more haze near the only visible horizon (which was south), over the great valley, and also slightly more light pollution there, probably from Chico, to the south. I didn't work much at high magnifications, so cannot report definitively on seeing. Both halves of epsilon Lyrae were well and cleanly split at 98x, on the several occasions when I looked at them, but the Double-Double is loafing for Harvey.

On the one night I counted telescopes, there were twenty-four, from 70 mm to 25-inch (64 cm), as well as at least one mounted binocular and one wide-field camera setup. People came and went as the weekend progressed; there may have been more telescopes on other nights, and there were certainly different ones.

Several telescopes were doing imaging. I was working fairly far south and west, so I set up at the southern edge of the lot, for the best view, square in the middle of the imagers. I am at least as concerned as they are about too much light, and my car and equipment emit only red light when I am working, and not much of that. So I don't think I made any enemies, except possibly when the person set up next to me was boiling hot water and mentioned that he had brought a pound of Starbuck's, and I asked if he had any coffee: I myself had brought expresso...

The main part of my own program was intense, but does not lend itself to interesting description. I was working faint galaxies, and had observing lists for an area from 12 or 13 hours to 16 hours right ascension, from -33 to +3 degrees declination. That is more or less the southeast corner of the Virgo galaxy cluster.

My lists were prepared by going through Millennium Star Atlas, one double-page at a time, with an eye to efficient star-hopping. If you were to zigzag through my targets in the order listed, you would find a connect-the-dots pattern that emphasized clumpiness, looking at lots of objects close together sequentially wherever possible, and in which the long jumps tended to be north/south or east/west, with a bright star or an obvious pattern of stars at their far ends, as a landmark.

With this kind of planning, observing goes amazingly fast. (And it helps that most of what I was looking at was too faint to show detail in a Celestron-14 -- all I usually recorded for each object was a check-mark by its identification on the list, to indicate that I had seen it). In this part of my program, I worked at an average rate of about one object per minute. Even with breaks, with the difficulty of finding the first handful of objects in twilight, and with extra time spent on other parts of my program, such as looking at bright or favorite objects, I logged more than two hundred observations on two of the five nights, and over eight hundred in all. That was a lot of fun, but my main program was so faint that there isn't much to write about.

Yet there were a few highlights. The most interesting was the most unexpected. On the evening of June 30, as my C-14 was pointed relatively far south, something very bright and rectangular flashed through my 98x field. It was Mir, and even when it was very far off, I could see shape -- I was evidently looking at near specular reflections off its array of solar panels. I was so delighted that I forgot to make my standard Mir comment about alien spacecraft in the skys above -- them rooshans is furriners, ain't they?

Not all of my targets were galaxies. I looked at a number of faint globular clusters. I had been through the Terzan and Palomar globular cluster lists and seen all of them, but I rechecked a few, using a print-out of Barbara Wilson's excellent web article for finder charts for the Terzan objects. I took advantage of Lassen's wonderfully dark sky to stare at a swarm of Barnard dark nebulae along the Scorpius / Ophiuchus border. I also found a few planetary nebulae in this area, that I had not seen before, but the bulk of my summertime Milky Way exploration will have to await the second Lassen star party of the year, held at the end of July.

On my last night, I did not set up the Celestron 14. Rather, I used a smaller telescope, the Stargazer Steve Sgr-3 3-inch f/10 Newtonian that I have previously reviewed. I completed a Messier survey with this telescope -- my 25th -- and looked at a number of spectacular non-Messier objects with it, as well, all using the 17 mm Plossl eyepiece that came with it. The Messier objects were all a cinch for the little reflector, and it gave nice views of the North American and Veil nebulae, too. Stargazer Steve's entry-level telescope is inexpensive enough to make a reasonable choice for folks who already have a binocular, and whose budget won't allow a 6-inch Dobson. Furthermore, it is small and sturdy enough to be good for kids. The Sgr-3 is a lot more telescope than I started out with, way back when.

On that night I also used my 14x70 binocular, one of the last of the run of large Orion binoculars that preceded the current light-weight versions. I logged some familiar objects, and spent a lot of time just cruising the Milky Way, looking at large-scale features. I also spent a while looking for Messier objects with the naked-eye. Ones I found included M92, M21, M10, and M4. I have to keep reminding myself to look at the sky with my glasses on -- I am nearsighted, and usually take them off and stash them in the car, out of harm's way, for the whole observing session. Yet there is a lot of pretty stuff up there, that I am forever missing out on by doing so.

One of the fun things about observing at Lassen is the wildlife. Tourists are *not* supposed to feed the critters, but there was a red fox hanging around the Bumpas Hell area who was very adept at mooching. You never saw such a woefully appealing expression as when this poor, frail, starving creature wandered wistfully up to you, looking for something, anything at all, to ease the pangs of hunger. The fox was willing to come to within two meters of me, and seemed in good condition and very well fed.

Many of my fellow observers tell me how much fun it is to camp out, then turn around and say how little sleep they got while doing so. I have always stayed in motels or in cabin-style "resort" accommodations on ventures like these. Perhaps I should mention a few tricks that make this kind of operation run more smoothly.

A basic secret is to have plenty of hot water for foods and for beverages. I bring a hot plate and a humungeous tea kettle for use in my lodging, and have a couple of thermos bottles which I fill with fresh, hot water before each evening. I have a 12-volt thermos-shaped hot pot, that holds about 600 cc of water, and will bring it to a boil in 45 minutes off my car's electrical system -- or will boil enough water for a cup of coffee in 15 minutes. With hot plate and thermoses, I don't usually need the hot pot, but it is handy as a back-up.

I eat some canned goods and lots of stuff that is prepared simply by adding hot water. Commercial dried foods in a cup have proliferated in recent years -- besides soups, there are many hot cereals, pastas, and even rice and bean dishes, and mashed potatos. Hearty hot cereal is wonderful late in an observing session. I buy fresh stuff and munchables occasionally. I take plenty of good instant coffee, and have a container in both room and car, so I won't have to get dressed and go out to the vehicle to get my morning, er, late afternoon, coffee.

I am careful about getting dehydrated and maintaining electrolyte balance when it is hot and dry. I think stuff like Gatorade tastes wretched, but I carry a jar of the powdered product, and drink lots at half or a third strength. That makes a difference in how I feel.

I carry some laundry soap for washing clothes, and a few plastic coat hangers to hang wet laundry on. The warm, arid, mountain breezes will dry fuzzy cotton socks in a few hours.

My don't-forget list includes matches, because some places I stay in have individual gas-fired space heaters or hot-water heaters in each room, and it is useful to be able to relight the pilot when you run out of hot water while taking a shower at at 0400. Don't ask how I know...

I caught a little cold during the last few days, so went home early, but my primary observing list was completed, and the evening of the day I left had partially cloudy weather, so I was not unhappy. My cat was very attentive, even after I had put out fresh cat food, and I am still cross-indexing all those observations. I hope I get done in time for the next Lassen star party, at the end of the month.