At the CalStar star party in central coast range in Califorina, there were about 75 telescopes from many parts of California. It was not heavily promoted. Its focus is on observing. It will be interesting to see what happens next year. The location can hold many more telescopes.
The skies were quite dark. The seeing was soft until about 2am when the seeing was quite good until near dawn. It was interesting to see that the GRS is more colorful than it was last year. It was interesting to see Io moving across the disc of Jupiter. There were a number of fine, thin festoons in the EZ, like a series of connected bubbles. The NEB was much darker red/brown than the SEB. The NEB had a number of reddish knots. There also appeared to be darker "barges". The SEB was split. It was fun to see the four major moons of Jupiter as different sized spheres.
I was using 16mm Zeiss abbe orthos in an AP/Zeiss binoviewer, plus barlow, with the AP180EDT. I had the AP barlow connected to the binoviewer with the slim bayonet mount. This lets the whole binoviewer unit slip in the Maxbright diagonal like a giant eyepiece. The seeing was not quite good enough to support using the 10mm Zeiss abbe orthos. The AP 180EDT was on an AP 900 servo mount and a 54 inch AP pier.
I did run into the very annoying problem of the mount not running when my battery got a little low. This never happened so fast with my old 800 mount. I was not using the 900 in GOTO mode, it was only running in RA except for a few minor Dec corrections. I moved it from object to object by hand. I enjoy star hopping. Yes, I did look an a number of deep sky objects as well as Jupiter and Saturn. A friend let me borrow a battery he was not using.
Saturn was very nice. The crape ring was very easy to see. The thinning of the inner part of the B ring was also easy to see. And, the Encke Minima was easy to see in the A ring.
There were fewer APs at this CalStar than at a usual TAC star party. There were at least 4 APs. Jeff's 130EDT, Ray G's Traveler, my 180EDT and my Stowaway (didn't use it, but did show it to one person who asked). There may have been more that I didn't see.
Since it was a dark sky site some people may have opted to bring a light bucket rather than their AP. Next time there will be more notice of the event. If people send an email to one of more of the lists about wanting to see APs at CalStar, I'm sure more people will bring APs.
The last object I looked at early Sunday morning was M42 and the Trapezium. It was beautiful. I use the 25mm Zeiss eyepieces in the binoviewer with the barlow. The 6 stars in the Trapezium were easy to see. M43 was easily separated from M42 with a large dark space. The entire area around the Trapezium looked 3D. It looked like it had high and low areas. I ended taking out the binoviewer and using a single 27mm Panoptic eyepiece. M42 was like a huge flower.
On the positive side... at the AP 900 SMD mount and AP 54" pier performed very well with the AP 180EDT. The damping time was very good. The movement by hand, which is important to me, was butter smooth. The controller worked just fine the few times I used it. The images at high power were rock steady.
Until about 2am Saturday morning and 12am Sunday morning the seeing was soft. In the morning the seeing did get quite good, maybe a 7 of 10. The skies were dark. The horizons were out- standing. The Lake San Antonio park management was very helpful.
I was very happy with the images through the AP 180EDT. When the seeing was soft I selected deep sky objects that look good at low power. We had several children from a local science class. It was fun letting them look at a number of objects and trying to answer their questions. There were also a number of people coming buy the entire night to have a look through a good sized APO. I did get to look through my scope. ;-)
The last object I looked at was M42. Having seen it so many times I blew it off until right near the end. But when I did turn Marj (180EDT) to M42 I was blown away with its beauty. The dark, clear skies were a big help but the refractor gave beautiful sharp star images. The contrast was excellent, showing great detail in the nebula around the Trapezium. The 5th and 6th stars were easy to see. Dropping back in magnification with a 27mm Panoptic the larger view of M42 was again amazing. I wish everyone could have that experience.