by Phil Terzian
I went up to Shingletown on Wednesday and returned today (Friday). So I got two good nights in.
As James mentioned, the operative word was HOT. When I arrived about 4:00 on Wednesday it was over 105 even at 4,000 feet elevation. The sun was blazing and I eagerly erected my $30 Target canopy and then sat under it with my feet in a bucket of ice water until the sun went down.
But we were fairly rewarded with incredibly dark skies, no wind and shirtsleeve temperatures. The naked eye view of the Milky Way was just astonishing. It stretched all the way across the sky like a colorless rainbow. The transparency was excellent and dim objects were easy to see, even with my Tak 102 which I was using for both visual and CCD imaging. The seeing was not great, but if wasn't terrible either. I conked out about 2:30.
Thursday day was another scorcher. Temps in Redding set a record, 116 I think, and we were only about 10 degrees cooler at the airport. The site pretty well emptied out by 10:00 a.m. and a splinter group happened to reconvene at a local swimming hole nearby. I think this thing was fed by recently melted snow because the water was as cold as the air was hot. The highlight of this event was seeing Mark Wagner swing on a rope and drop into the water. He later reported that the ice water took his breath away, most likely an understatement. I pretended that I didn't know how to swim and was able to avoid the experience. Just wading in that water was deliciously refreshing though.
The "all you can eat pizza party" at the local pizzeria was a lot of fun. The pizza was very good. There seemed to be a lot of stunned locals around there. Where did all these star people come from anyway?
Thursday night was cloudy at sunset but as it got darker the sky cleared up and we got in a few good hours. The transparency was inferior to Wednesday, but the seeing was actually better, I think. It started to cloud over at about 1:00 or so.
Mark and Jim did a wonderful job organizing this star party and I and the others who were there are very grateful. The local community of volunteers were also impressive in their support for the inaugural Shingletown Star Party.