by David Kingsley
I had a great three days and four nights up in the Lassen area for the SSP.
I couldn't leave till about 3:15 pm on Wed. The drive up was miserable with searing heat and crowded traffic in the Bay Area. However, the congestion fell away the further I got from San Francisco, and I arrived at the Shingletown airport site around 8:45 pm Wed night. I thought I would be one of the last to be setting up, but many observers had waited until the weather started to cool before setting up their scopes.
The runway had essentially infinite room, great for handling a large crowd. I was staying off site in one of the Brokeoff cabins so pulled in, set up my scope, and left it set up in the same spot until Saturday, commuting back and forth from the cabin to the airport during the week. The cabin in the woods about 10 minutes from the airport provided a nice setting in the shade and allowed me to sleep well late into the morning and shower throughout the week. I have tried camping before but usually sleep so badly that I'm wrecked after one or two nights. The offsite location was particularly useful this year because of the record heat in the area, and the relatively exposed location at the airport.
Wed night had what turned out to be the best transparency of the four nights I was there. I was mainly observing Hickson groups and Abell clusters from the AL list and observing book I recently described on TAC ( http://www.rca-omsi.org/ggc/ggcintro.htm). I was hitting mag 15.7 galaxies in the 14.5 inch Starmaster, and enjoying a beautiful Milky Way that stretched from horizon to horizon like an enormous arch over the observing site. I turned in about 2 am, but only because I was tired from the combination of a hectic work day and long hot drive up to Singletown.
Thursday was another scorcher so I headed to Lassen park during the day. I explored the Manzanita Lake area and Loomis museum collection, drove all the way through Lassen park, and then headed down to Chester southeast of the park. I had a great lunch at my favorite resturant in tow.n (If you are ever in Chester, drop by the Knot Bumper restaurant and try the "choker setter" sandwich, named after an old logging job of tying choke chains onto fallen trees). I then went in search of a service station that could top up the refrigerant in my 15 year old Toyota Camry. I eventually found the two guys in a garage who were the only ones with the right equipment to work on air conditioners. Despite a parking lot full of other cars to work on they agreed to squeeze me in my car for coolant refill while I was in town. As a result I drove back out of Chester with an air conditioner that actually worked again, a major score given the weather conditions. Back at the airport James Turley could not believe I had found a source of R-12 coolant on short notice without driving into Mexico.
Thursday night was most cloudy at sunset, but opened up for a couple of hours between about 11 and 1 am. Short but good, and even a short night under the dark Shingletown sky allowed me to see many things that would be very lackluster from the Bay Area.
Friday during the day I explored the area North of Lassen park, a region I had never visited before. I was particularly interested in finding attractions with cool temperatures. Subway Cave turned out to be a great stop a little ways beyond Old Station. This is a section of a long lava tube that formed in the area when a giant river of lava cooled on the top side first, with molten lava still flowing underneath the outer crust. When the inner lava later flowed away, the harder outer crust remained, forming a long hollow cave system. I borrowed a flashilight at a nearby ranger information station, and walked through the cave reading informative self guiding trail markers along the way. It was both cool and pitch dark inside, with lots of interesting features including wall collapses, side eddies making meanders and chambers, dripping lava that had hardened into lavasicles on the roof, etc. I particulary enjoyed this visit because lava tubes are one of the proposed mechanisms of forming rilles on the moon. Walking through an actual lava tube really helped think about sizes, dimensions, and how a tube could collapse to form a depression instead of a ridge. For a picture and more information see
http://www.r5.fs.fed.us/lassen/hat_creek_subway_cave.htm
After subway cave, I got some good tips about fishing and eating spots from a local ranger who has lived in the area for 15 years. I fished along a beautiful shaded stretch of Hat creek during the afternoon, and then drove further north to Burney Falls state park. The park has a loop hike of about 1.5 miles that descends into a cool valley. The trail goes by the base of a spectacular waterfall, complete with cool spray from 100 million gallons of water a day that cascade over the cliff each day. It was easy to see a history of layers in the cliff face of the waterfall, including an ancient stream bed that had been overlaid with a thick layer of volcanic basalt from eruptions in the area. Water flows both over the top and through the middle of the cliff at the junction of ancient stream bed and overlying lava, making one of the prettiest waterfalls I have ever seen (http://www.virtualguidebooks.com/NorthCalif/ModocPlateau/HatCreek/BurneyFallsL.html). Markers along the trail pointed out useful features, including the obvious signs of the retreat of the waterfall over time.
The sight seeing had taken me into early evening so I had dinner at the Fireside cafe on 89 south coming back from Burney falls. (Another recommendation from the ranger who lives in the area. She had suggested trying the Mexican burger and shakes at this particular restaurant. Both were great and confirmed my feeling that tips from locals are always the best way to find good food in a new area).
I got back to the Shingletown airport about 8:30 pm on Friday, only to find that I had left my case with eyepieces back at the cabin. Rich Neuschafer graciiously offered to let me use his own collection for the night. This was an even bigger score than R-12 coolant in Chester, ( Rich has a beautiful collection of eyepieces of different focal lengths!). I still had to make the ten minute drive back to the cabin in order to get Paracorr, and correct 1 1/4 and 2 inch adaptors to fit the focuser on my scope. However Rich's treasure chest gave me the chance to compare some Nagler, Pentax, and Takahashi eyepieces during the night. I found I liked the field of view of the Naglers, the eyerelief and adjustable eyecup of the Pentaxes, and the light weight and simplicity of the Takahashi LE 7 mm. Many thanks to Rich for his generosity with a great collection.
Friday night was clear all night, and the first night I stayed up till dawn observing. Lots of great views under very dark skies, though the transparency was probably not as good as it was Wed night. I observed a large variety of objects all over the sky, but the view of the night was a collection of multiple objects far south at the border of Sagitarius and Corona Australis. I had jotted this area down from a recent report on "my favorite globular clusters" in the July or August issue of Sky and Telescope. Globular cluster 6723 is a big beautiful splash of stars that is indeed worth a visit in its own right. About a half degree away from the globular are two adjacent stars each surrounded by separate own reflection nebula (NGC6726/NGC6727). These stars are close enough that the combination of stars and halos makes a pretty figure 8. The brightness of the nebulosity comes and goes as you stare directly at the pair, or use averted vision. The glob and two reflection nebula in the same field already makes a beautiful view. However there is an additional object located a little further past the double reflection nebula, called NGC6729. This was a tiny elongated comet-like smudge at Shingletown, with a faint star intermittently visible at one end when the seeing steadied. According to Burnham's, this nebula undergoes lots of changes in size, shape and intensity over a period of years, like Hubble's variable Nebula in Monocerus. Finally,there is a nice double star with equal brightness components located in the same overall eyepiece field. All five objects (glob, reflection nebula, false-comet, and double star) were beautifully framed in the roughly 1 degree field of the 22 mm Nagler eyepiece. The stars of the globular are ancient ones, having formed more than 10 billion years ago. In contrast, many of the other stars in and around the field of nebula are of the T Tauri, high lithium type. Similar stars are found in M16, the Orion nebula, and Hubbles variable nebula (NGC 2261). Stars of this type are so young they are still contracting to reach the main sequence, stumble back and forth irregularly through a couple of magnitudes of brightness over time, and are still shrouded in the gas and dust of their birth. I like infants so much that on particularly hectic days at work I sometimes walk by the newborn nursery at the Stanford hospital to look at small newborn babies snug in blankets, and full of both innocence and potential. The field of view through the eyepiece Friday night was also like looking into a stellar nursery, with beautiful infants, and ancient adults all mixed together in the same room. Check this one out if you haven't ventured there before.
After happily observing till dawn, I headed off to the cabin and slept in till almost noon on Saturday. I then debated what to do next. Saturday evening was the planned public night at Shingletown, and likely to be lots of fun. However, over the previous three nights, I had decided that skies were very dark at the airport, but the seeing was softer than I am used to from the higher altitude location of the Bumpass Hell parking lot. Since the Lassen star party to me as always meant a combination of dark skies, high altitude, steady seeing, and great daytime hikes and fishing in the park, I decided to venture back into Lassen for my last evening and night of the trip. I swung by the airport and packed up my 14.5 inch Starmaster scope, heading out about 4 or 4:30 pm. I drove all the way through Lassen Park to the Sulfur Springs area, and then took my favorite hike up to Ridge Lakes. It was late enough in the day to be a cool and pretty half hour hike through meadows and wild flowers along a creek. The trail ends at a beautiful and secluded glacial lake where I fished for an hour, and dinner, enjoyed the reflection of surrounding Brokeoff mountain and trees on the mirror like surface of the lake. I then hiked back to the car at sunset and drove back to the Bumpass Hell parking lot. By 9 pm I was setting up my scope along the south end of the parking lot by the big boulder and overlook.
Skies had been partly cloudy all day, but most of the clouds disappeared quickly after sunset. Venus and the several day old moon made a beautiful sight to the west. I swung my scope over to look at the moon while waiting for the end of twilight. I was immediately rewarded with one of the major advantages of observing from the 8000 foot elevation of Bumpass Hell. Even with a mirror that had only cooled for half an hour, the moon was crisp and steady, with abundant detail that held up to magnifications greater than 400x. I glanced towards Scorpio in the southern sky, and found that the entire constellation hung there with barely a quiver, unlike the rapid shimmer and scintillation of most of the stars I had seen when looking this low from the Shingletown airport. I pointed the scope at Antares and saw the widest, clearest split of this double star that I have ever seen. Definitely a much steadier sky than I had seen all week. Over the course of the night I also revisited several objects I had observed over the last three nights, just to compare views from different locations. It was a different night of course, so this is not a head to head comparison. On object after object, however, I preferred the view at Bumpass Hell on Saturday to the view I had had earlier at the airport. The central star was visible in M57, a view that requires very steady seeing and something I had not been abe to manage earlier in the week. A search for the faintest star visible in the field around M57 took me to mag 16.6 through the eyepiece. On Friday night at the airport, I had reached 16.1 in the same field with the same eyepiece, when the view had been limited by noticable flicker in most of the stars. When I returned to the 6723 cluster area that I had enjoyed so much the night before, I was now able to pull out a wealth of additional detail in the beautiful field of multiple objects in the southern sky. All of the stars in the globular, and the double now star now hung there nearly motionless in space rather than shimmering in the seeing. I could now make out an additional IC nebula that surrounded the double star, adding a sixth object to the field. The false comet like nebula of NGC 6729 showed much more detail than the elongated streak of the night before, with clear and steady stars at both the head and tail, and a much more obvious fan shape to the nebula. OC7789 in Cas is usually one of my favorite open clusters at Lassen, because of the beautiful stars and looping dark lanes that extend like kids fourth of July black firework snakes throughout the cluster. These black lanes were much more obvious from Bumpass Hell than they had been at the airport. The same was true of the naked eye view of the Milky Way. As beautiful as the Milky WSay arch had been from Shingletown, it had much more obvious dark lanes and texture on Saturday night, with the pipe nebula in Ophiucus the and dark stuff around Cyngus nearly reaching out of the sky to grab your eye with interesting detail.
I should point out that the disadvantages of Bumpass were also clear on Saurday night. Eight to ten cars drove by during the night, and the ones headed south shine there lights directly into the parking lot for several seconds each pass. There is enough advance sound warning to shield your eyes as a visual observer, but I know this situation is a nightmare for imagers. The parking lot is small, way too small to handle the growth in the number of observers over the last several years. You also can't leave your equipment set up, and this need to tear down during the day and find some place for the telescope was one of the main reasons for my returning on Sunday rather than staying another night. And the most annoying thing on Saturday was mosquitoes. They were buzzing constantly all night at Bumpass Hell. I had to both bundle up and slap them away frequently while observing. .(Temperatures dropped from about 80 degrees at sunset to around 50 at night, but I found myself putting on additional clothes to conserve blood more than heat). This had not been a problem at all at Singletown over the previous three nights, perhaps because of the obvious differences in temperature, vegetation, and proximity to water at the two locations.
Nevertheless, the views were mesmerizing throughout the eyepiece on Saturday night, by far my best observing night of the week. I again observed all night, this time alone with the skys on the side of the mountain. When dawn arrived, I reluctantly broke down the scope and decided to drive home directly from the south side Lassen Park. On the way home, I replayed lots of happy memories from a great week of both daytime and nightime activities. I look forward to this trip each summer more than any other trip I take all year. Many thanks to Mark and Jim and everyone else who put in a large amount of advance work making it possible to come and enjoy the area. I thought the week was a great success, despite the unexpected heat wave.