by Jeff Crilly
Pictures not up yet.. maybe tonight..
Got out of palo alto late 7/9 monday (3pm) and grabbed a room in Redding at 10pm. Arrived at Devasted around 11:30 or so. Dark Dark Dark. Blazing Milky Way. A bit cold. Stayed till 1am or so, doing mostly bino observing, and some limited observing with the 4" mak.. I didnt feel like doing much setup at this time of night. I also stopped at the airport on the way down.. much warmer.
Got up late tuesday 7/10 (around noon) and got out of the 105-degree Redding-oven around 1pm. At the last minute I decided to take the Klammath Falls turnoff and stop in Crater Lake.
Arrived in Crater Lake at exactly 5pm. Snagged campsite, setup tent and headed to the rim. Grabbed dinner at the Rim Buffet, and the nice manager didnt charge me (maybe cuz I was doing takeout, and the buffet looked like it was recycled lunch... but the food was mmmm good, especially while enjoying the Crater Lake sunset view.)
After driving around the crater looking for a decent spot to setup, I chose the first big turnout on the east side of the lake which was only about 5 or 10 minutes drive from the campsite. Car lights are an issue at this spot, but there were only four cars the whole night and only the southern travelling cars were an issue... if I only had another vehicle, light would be less of an issue. I setup the G-11 and took a bunch of photos. The sky was about the same as Lassen... Blazing Milky Way But being a bit northerly, it did seem to get dark late, and get light early. A warm wind came up after sunset, but only for about 30 minutes. Around 1am, it got fairly cold, followed by warming around 2pm. Odd weather. It started getting light around 3am; at that time I was pretty beat and headed back to the campsite.
Got up early wednesday 7/11 and headed up north on 97 at about 8am. This is mostly (95%) two-lane-65mph-trucks-coming-the-other-way kinda road. But very manageable, with passing lanes, etc. Not a bad drive.
I arrived on the mountain at TMSP at about 4pm wednesday. The place was getting packed. Table Mountain is a nice site. Very large, mostly grass, some dirt.. nice dirt that comes off easily. Temps were hot in Ellensburg, but on the mountain temps were very reasonable. I setup near the top -- outside of the scope field with the astrophotographers.
By thursday the top was full, and the "corral" below started to fill. My understanding is that there was eventually about 1000 attendees, and maybe 500 (or more) scopes. My brother (skip) arrived with his daughters and the violin quartet (which everyone seemed to enjoy.). Later, his friend John arrived by plane, and they took some arial photos of the site.
Wednesday and thursday nights were good... not as good as Crater Lake or Lassen, and there is some light dome from Ellensburg. Tuesday was the Really Good night, and I suspect sunday night would have been Really Good also. Friday and Saturday nights, were, well.. lets say we had a really good time socializing (and watching the forest fire start.)
The fun of this star party really was not the observing -- though we got a bunch of that in -- but the socializing, the talks, the hiking, and all that other stuff. Not a boring minute. Everyone had a really good time. Lotsa stories. Btw, Skip got a big kick out of John Dobson -- he hasnt seem him since the 70's when John did the SF sidewalk thing.. we had a nice chat with him on a variety of rambling subjects on saturday. (I told John that the reason the Earth has magnetic poles is for navigation, isnt it obvious? -- he liked that.)
The drive back was a bit quicker - I left the mountain around noon sunday and rolled into palo alto at 6am monday morning. Ooof. I was going to stop for some observing sunday night, but the one decent spot I found was inhabitated by black bears.