by Jane E. Smith
The Saturday expedition to Nevada City was quite the adventure. Jim Ster, Allen Keller, Gene Kahn, and I ventured north to help Vic Maris with his class of 14 students from the Learning Exchange. The drive into the site was reminiscent of the mogul run at Mammoth Mountain. We were rockin'an'rolling and kicking up a lot of dust in the process, but we arrived at what proved to be a great night of observing. The sky was about 5.5 (if I'm any judge) with the light dome from nearby Nevada City showing behind the high Ponderosa Pines to the southeast.
Without a doubt, the high points of the evening were the HUGE, fiery, colorful Pleinids (sp?) that went zooming by every few minutes. The heads were blazing fireballs and the tails were brilliant green and red which lasted and lasted and lasted. The Oooooo's and Ahhhhhhh's emanating from the site were plentiful throughout the entire evening. At one point we all just sat down in our chairs and stared at the sky for fear of missing the "really big one". We were not disappointed.
The evening started with everyone checking out Vic's new equipment which he had bought along to star test. Then, as he gave his pre-observing lecture to the students, we settled into an evening of various activities. There was a lot of experimenting with each others equipment. Allan clamped his 80mm finder on my 12'5" to offer a comparison to my 50mm. My EL became instantly top-heavy and we had to pull the Paracorr to get the scope to balance. But it was well worth the effort. The larger FOV was impressive and I now have added an 80mm finderscope to my "wish list". Then came "musical eyepieces". Round and round they went with the star performer being Jim's Televue binoviewer, the clear favorite looking at the Double-Cluster in Peresus through one of Vic's refractors, and at the Dumbell in my 12.5". The 3-D effect one gets with these things is amazing! Intermixed with all the swapping, the students enjoyed a full menu of fine objects. Jim and Gene WOWed them by zooming from object to object with their GOTO LX200's, while I lagged well behind with my "paper" GOTO. We focused mainly on the showy pieces of M13, M57, M27, M51, M31, etc. with the class members gobbling up every view. It's always such fun to share the night sky with a bunch of novices. Clouds rolled in about moonrise and we started packing up around 1pm.
This could be a promising winter observing site. It's not as high as BC, but it can accommodate a lot of scopes, is easily accessible and close to Sacramento, and has reasonably dark skies. However, we need to figure out what to do with all the dust! A load or two of gravel would be a godsend.