At 9:50 PM -0700 8/7/00, Dillon, Dillon, & Kuh wrote:
A crisp young CHP officer was standing by his car with flares across Mt Hamilton Rd, and I got to hear those classic words literally, "You can't get there from here." A verbal epiphany. It might have been worth the extra hour and a half of driving.This was Saturday night, the 5th. So much for meeting up with Steve Sergeant on Halley Hill.
We saw that wall of smoke from the Lick dome parking lot on Mount Hamilton. It was an impressive volume of air pollution.
For future reference, an alternate route would have been Quimby Road, a few miles south of Alum Rock Avenue on either White or Capitol. It's steeper and slower, but still civilized.
The night at Joseph Grant Ranch County Park was nice and clear. Though the moisture in the Halls Valley usually exceeds what you get at Coe or FP, I still think it's an under-appreciated spot for us south-east bay folks.
I felt like I didn't get the memo though: I stood out setting up my 12.5" equatorial Newtonian among a globular cluster of over half a dozen, 5.5" to 11" Schmidt-Cassegrains. Later on I was joined by one newly purchased 8" equatorial Newtonian, so I felt a little less conspicuous.
The campground was closed due to water tank problems, so there were only a few public party visitors. Most of the people there were other amateur astronomers and their families. But there was an abundance of children to occasionally interest in some objects, and to entertain each other, giving the old folks more time to do the boring stuff.
I saw and showed off a south polar mountain on the moon with just it's peak illuminated -- looking like a separate star approaching occultation. I showed park visitors the usual showpieces before the moon set: Epsilon Lyri, Albireo, Mizar, M57, M27, M8, M6, M11, M13, and probably others.
I worked with my visiting 12 year old niece to help her find some of these objects in her Tasco 10X50 binoculars. She was mostly successful, and it whet her aperture appetite. (Today we went to Orion to buy her a small star atlas for binocular users.)
After the moon set, we chased stuff to the northeast: the Blue Snowball (NGC7662), a nearby galaxy with a possible sighting of companions (NGC7331), the Salt-and-Pepper cluster (NGC7654), and the spiral cluster (NGC1039)... to name a few I can remember.
I had a more difficult time finding NGC7320. I thought I might have, but after comparing it to the Hubble Digital Sky Survey images, I am less certain. I'll have to look at that again next month. My family became bored by this futile search.
As M31 rose, all eyes turned to it. My niece was excited about being able to find it in her binoculars. My wife had never seen it in binoculars before, and was similarly amazed at how easy it was to find it and see it with such an instrument. With my 12.5" f4.5, and a 55mm Plossl, I showed it's companion galaxies (M32 & M110) to some of the long-time visitors of the ranch. Most of them had never seen them before. (One guy actually told a child that the companions were too dim to be seen by amateurs.)
I tried without success to track down two other nearby galaxies, NGC147 & NGC185, without any luck. The sky seemed to be getting brighter, and I started to notice some moisture in the pages of my Cambridge atlas.
By that time, M45 was rising. Again my niece was delighted to see it in her binoculars. Does anyone have any suggestions for filters that would better bring out the nebulosity in this object?
I let the Schmidt-Cassegrain guys show off their views of Saturn and Jupiter as I tore down and packed up. The Mount Hamilton road was open when I drove home.
You missed a good time Jamie, but it sounds like you made up for it at any rate. It's too bad the CHP dude misinformed you though, you could have made it up there.