by Jay Reynolds Freeman
I briefly attended the public star party at Foothill Park, in the hills of Palo Alto, on July 8, 2000. I took only a simple telescope -- my Stargazer Steve 3-inch f/10 Newtonian -- since I still have a lingering cold from Lassen and wanted to be able to leave quickly if I was not feeling well. It got rather chill and damp before long, so I did indeed quit at about 10:30 PM.
I have heard that the last few Foothill star parties were quite popular, but this one seemed to have more telescopes than people. That's still pretty popular, for there were a fair number of telescopes. Highlights of the equipment included several Astro-Physics refractors up to six and seven inch aperture, and a slew of SCTs.
The half Moon was well placed, and bright enough to make it difficult to see anything else but double stars. Long shadows showed much detail in the Alpine Valley, but I couldn't quite see the central rille in an AP-130, even when overpowered to more than 700x. The seeing was steady enough that 700x still looked pretty good, though blur from hitting the instrument's resolution limit was clearly visible in the image. No, less magnification didn't show the rille, either.
Someone had one of the new, Chinese, 150 mm f/8 refractors with Celestron's label. It showed quite a lot of color at the limb and terminator, as one would expect from a plain achromat that large and fast, but gave pretty good images even so.
A couple of people were double-star observing with the use of Barlow lenses. It's amazing how much a Pentax XL eyepiece stuck into a barlow looks like a microphone, I was tempted to extract the combination from the focuser and start crooning into it.
My little Sgr-3 must have felt depressed among all that expensive hardware, but I had fun anyway. I have been trying to use only the eyepiece that came with it, a 17 mm generic Plossl, the better to see how well the telescope might serve a beginner on a budget. On this night, notwithstanding the Moon, I had decent views of M57 -- a tiny doughnut -- and M22 -- which looked granular. Several other Messier globulars showed no hint of incipient resolution. At 45x, I could not split Polaris (though I have done so at higher magnification with this instrument), nor the close pairs of epsilon Lyrae (ditto), but Albireo and Mizar separated nicely. The Moon was respectable, too, but the little telescope would have needed more magnification to show it well.