by Steven Caron
I arrived Thursday afternoon to find Albert Highe at the campground. Paul LeFever and Jeff Gortatowsky arrived short there after. Then there were the wild bores. That afternoon a family, with little baby pigs, of about 15 scoped out the baseball field, and wondered around. At sunset two large groups of wild bores took up a possession in the at the camp ground, under the trees. They surrounded poor Albert into the night. I tell ya, trying to observe while your surrounded by angry wild bores is an interesting experience. Albert pushed on observing. The pigs eventually left. To bad the darn pigs didn't return the following nights ;-). I turned in early that night anticipating a longer session Friday night.
I woke up Friday morning to find Kent Wallace setting up his 20" StarSplitter. He turns out to be an expert on Planetary Nebulae. He has seen over 400 PN's with his C-8 and even more with his 20". He had an impressive collection of everything on the internet about PN's. He had written a book called "Planetary Pages". He had only three left so I decided to pick on up. This book is extremely well written and very thorough, I will get much use out of it.
Throughout the day the folks started to arrive. The temperature at midday reached 104. At nightfall the lot was about half full of telescopes. Rich had Marge, the 7" AP out. It was quite the popular photographic choice :-) The large aperture scope included two 25"'s, a 22" and a 20". Mimi wasn't observing that night so Mark let me use the 14.5". I spent fist part of the night tracking down faint globulars in Sagittarius. When the planets came up I moved over to my 6" refractor to check out the view. Michelle and I tried out different filters on Jupiter and Saturn. Yellow-Green works particularly well. The seeing got quite good around 3:30. Saturn still held up at 376X. Transparency was not quite as good as the first night. There seemed to be a light dome around the north-west. I turned in at 4:30.
Friday was baking hot, to hot to sleep. I spent the day in friendly socializing conversation. OTA's left out cooked on field. Jamie Dillon and Nilesh arrived that afternoon. That evening I did some Herchel observing with Mimi. She is really fun to observe with. Mark commented on him having a "Mimi-Go-To" :- ). After things quieted down I set out to work on the Herchel-II with my 6". Orion was my prime target. Later on, the Crab Nebula was in the 25". WOW!! now that is the Crab Nebula!!. I have never seen so much structure. Rich's scope gave astonishing views of the gas giants, even though the seeing was not ideal. It is always a pleasure to look through it. I eventually turned in at 6am, slept for two hours, and greeted to morning sun. By 10am most everyone had pulled out. Jamie and Nilesh offered me over for some breakfast. We discussed last nights observing over some some very delicious, (sorry I don't know the name) Indian tortillas and peanuts. Quite good! I pulled out at 12:30. On the way home I stopped by for the Salinas Air show. It was a nice closing to wonderful weekend of observing and making new friends.