by Paul LeFevre
I attended two days of the Riverside Telescope Maker's Conference at Camp Oaks near Big Bear (in the San Bernardino mountains) this past weekend. Had a great time looking at all the cool home-built stuff, browsing the vendor's tents, and getting sunburned. Got to spend some time with Mark Wagner, which is always a treat -- and had fun watching Mimi be the "showgirl" for Mark's collapse-a-scope creation! Played around doing some imaging with Ray Gralak (who had brought all kinds of scopes, CCD cameras, and equipment, but had no mount (!), so we used my LX200). In general, it was a great time.
After imaging with Ray for a while on Friday night, I tried to do some of my own imaging, but had some hardware problems...so I finally gave up about 2:30 AM and just observed for a couple of hours. The seeing at the sight was somewhat soft, but it was very dark and transparency was quite good. I spent quite a bit of time on Mars, and had some good views despite the soft seeing -- every now and then a crisp view would "pop" in, using my 10" LX200 at 160X-300X. Some fun.
I put up some pictures I took at the conference, if you'd like to take a
Next stop: Lassen!