by Jay Reynolds Freeman
Central California amateur astronomers undertook a second organized star party at Lassen National Park, over and beyond the weekend at the end of July, 2000. I arrived a day early -- on Friday -- and so got to spend five evenings observing at the Bumpass Hell parking lot, on the south side of the mountain, at an elevation of 8200 feet (2.5 Km). On the first four nights, I set up my Celestron 14; on the last, I used a binocular. The first night was excellent -- too bad there wasn't anyone but me there to enjoy it. The second, third, and fourth nights were marred by varying amounts of thin, high haze and cirrus, and the last night had enough of the same that I can at most rate it fair.
One aspect of the weather was excellent throughout. It was warm! Lower elevations in California were experiencing a heat wave, and the high temperatures were reflected in near shirt-sleeve conditions at Bumpass Hell well into the small hours of the morning. In past years, I have often worn all of my winter observing gear during summer star parties at this location.
I haven't said a great deal about my Celestron 14 observing program lately, because I have been working faint stuff with little visible detail. I continued that program, using Millennium Star Atlas as a guide to relatively faint galaxies from 3 degrees north to 45 degrees north, between roughly a line from eastern Canes Venatici to northeastern Virgo, and approximately 18 hours right ascension. I spent the first several hours of each night working this region, then, when it got too low to observe, swung the big Schmidt-Cassegrain to the other side of the pier, to look at bright objects in the summer Milky Way, and at an assortment of favorites farther to the east. I logged over 500 observations in four nights with the C-14, about 60 percent of which were first-time looks at things I had not seen before.
There was a lot of griping about the high clouds -- you may be sure I made certain that everyone knew how good it had been on the night before they got there. Yet for my program, the clouds acted merely to slow things down. In many cases, transparency was varying rapidly; a few minutes' staring at the nominal location of a faint fuzzy was enough for a clear spot to come by and allow a good view. Perhaps the cirrus was streaky, or there was an "apple blossom sky". At other times, broken cloud in one part of the sky required me to work some other area till it moved on.
Saturday night, the first night on which most of my companions showed up, we did a public star party at the Park. I arrived at the parking lot early, and in consequence found myself set up well behind the wall of cars that were later arranged to isolate the observing area from public parking. In consequence, perhaps, I got few customers -- and it may also have helped that my tiny Celestron 14 was dwarfed by nearby giant Dobsons, with apertures to 32 inches. That's the largest telescope we have ever had at Lassen, I believe. Its owner's name was also Jay, which led to some confusion; we eventually decided that he was a Steller's Jay, whereas I was merely the California Scrub model.
Widespread high cloud marred Sunday afternoon, and perhaps in consequence, few of the regular crew showed up at Bumpass Hell that evening. The weather gods must have snickered, for within an hour or two after sunset, the sky was almost entirely clear; that was the second best night. I later found that at least one of our number had set up an 18-inch Dobson at the camp site where most of us were staying, peering up through a narrow gap in the tall pines. He logged over 30 objects that way, and also claimed that he had found 300 more after the fact, using hypnotic suggestion to retrieve them from his memory of star-strewn fields. I didn't think the Park allowed guests to smoke that kind of funny stuff.
Monday was not as good as Sunday, but most of the crew did show up. However, on the next day a rather noisy bunch of campers moved into the site next to the one that most of us were using, and in consequence that whole group left on Tuesday morning instead of staying for the last night. I was sleeping happily in a nice motel-style room in commercial lodging north of the park, so I knew nothing of this development till later.
I had great fun the last night, observing with my new 25x100 binocular. There are adequate mounts available for this behemoth, but I like to use binoculars for impromptu, hand-held viewing, so I have been trying to see if I can make do with something simpler. So far, I have found it a barely acceptable solution to prop the instrument on the top of one of the doors of my car, or on one rail of the roof rack, as I observe, but I hope I can come up with a better scheme. In any case, I continued my Messier survey with this new instrument, and also looked at some other relatively bright stuff, besides. The 25x100 is powerful enough that some Messier globulars begin to show signs of resolution, and its substantial aperture shows great promise for work with large dark and bright nebula, though the sky transparency that evening was not enough to evaluate that potential thoroughly.