by Paul LeFevre
The one-hour drive from my home in Escondido to Little Blair Valley in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is a study in microclimates. Climbing out of Escondido through Valley Center, you pass through orange and avocado groves, which give way just outside the Rincon Indian Reservation to scrub oak and manzanita. Passing along the base of Palomar Mountain, the terrain of the Cleveland National Forest is awash with oak, aspen, and pine -- earning the name "forest" and feeling like a little piece of the Alps plunked down in Southern California. As you round the mountain and pass Lake Henshaw, the forests give way quickly to grasses and open, rocky terrain. And just few miles later, there is little doubt that you're encountering the High Desert, as the only remaining vegetation is cactus and Joshua Trees. All of this in a 45-mile or so drive...
Little Blair Valley sits in a natural bowl just inside the boundaries of Anza-Borrego. As the crow flies it's less than 25 miles from the summit of Palomar, but is a whole different world. At about 2600 feet the air is crisp and clean, and bone-dry -- 12% humidity when I arrived at 4:15 PM, never getting above 23% during the night. Wind can be a problem in the high desert, but the last temperate new-moon outing of the year lived up to expectations, with almost no wind save an occasional cool flutter after sunset, mild temperatures (low of 48 deg. at 4:30 AM), and good seeing in dark skies.
I brought along my next-door neighbor Randy, who's still in the "wow" stage of astronomy with a relatively new 10" Discovery dob. My own setup was for imaging, with a 10" LX200 carrying a TV-85 piggyback. This was an OPTAS (Oceanside Photo & Telescope Astronomical Society) night, and the dirt setup area at Little Blair had 35-40 vehicles and roughly twice as many scopes by sundown.
While pursuing my imaging program (all film this night, and all autoguided, leaving me time to roam), I helped Randy locate targets with his 10" dob, taking it over completely for a couple of hours when he crawled into his camper for a nap. I also shared views with Bill Dean, known to some of you TACos, in his excellent Celstron 9.25" SCT.
I started out by helping Randy locate some "showpiece" objects in his 10"
NGC 6946 in Cepheus is a small 8th mag. spiral galaxy that showed barely perceptible spiral structure in the 10" scope. With a 32mm eyepiece, I could also detect a wisp of nebulosity at the edge of the field of view -- firing up SkyMap Pro confirmed that NGC 6939 was in the field -- a sparse open cluster with associated nebula, though I could not quite make of the full extent of the nebulosity.
NGC 7023 was obvious in the 10" -- a compact, somewhat dense nebula that showed few features other than a bright core.
I wanted to see how much of IC 1396, the huge nebula complex in Cepheus, was visible...the answer? Just a bit :) Trumpler 37, the open cluster at its center, easily stood out from the background, but I could only catch hints of the large surrounding nebula at low powers, and lacking an OIII filter that was the best I could do.
I spent some time exploring the complex near NGC 896 in Cassiepeia; 896 itself showed as a bubble-like nebula with one side of the curve much brighter than the other. As it fades out you can make out the open cluster Melotte 15, with just a hint of the vast IC 1795/IC 1805 nebular complex that surrounds the faint cluster. At the North-East edge is the NGC open cluster 1027, easily seen but hard to break out of the rich stellar background. A short hop away I found the overlapping clusters Crumpler 34 and 35, but could not see any sign of the surrounding IC 1848 nebula complex. This interesting area has been added to my imaging list for future reference -- I'd love to pick up the nebulae in a long-exposure image as they wind around the grouping of open clusters.
Hmph -- chasing down open clusters. Richard Navarette would be proud of me :)
I reluctantly handed Randy back his scope after his nap, and he turned to the now risen gas giants in search of planetary detail. I ambled over to Bill Dean's Celstron, which he had trained on Saturn, for one of the best views of the ringed planet I've ever had. With a 7mm Tak LE eyepiece in the 9.25" scope, Saturn was rock steady and full of detail. It seems to me that Saturn is currently showing more disk banding than it has in the past couple of years, as several differently-colored bands were obvious, and the open positioning of the rings makes more of the planet cloudtops easier to see. The seeing held up well, and the view was spectacular.
A crescent moon near Venus (which shows a very "full" phase) ended a great night, and I packed up and hit the road just before the sun peeked over the desert horizon. Passing back down through the varied terrain, the sun was glinting off the dome of the 200" scope on Palomar...that place still seems magical to me no matter how many times I see it! The final descent down into the valley below gave a hint of why we had such a good night: thick marine layer was covering everything from the coast to about 1200 feet, blocking out city lights at night, and providing a cool, moist respite from the night in the desert.
Thank goodness so much of the San Diego backcountry that I love is National/State Parks and forests -- hopefully that status will let the area remain as it is, a varied and unspoiled world just a short drive from the bustle of civilization!