by Evan Garber
I wish to thank all who made my 4 days at Shingletown a memorable, educational and all around great time. Given the reports on Sunday night, I'm sorry I left Sunday morning - but was worn out from 4 days of little sleep and lots of heat - pulled two all nighters - that's a first for me.
The imaging was great - have 6 keepers that will show up on my website. Visual - I saw portions of the Milky Way I've never seen before and sugar like granularity to the north of Cassiopeia - Turley pointed this out to me at 2 AM - while he was giving the gravely important late night interview with the Sacramento Bee - Did anyone see the article??
Jim and Mark - made a great effort to get the political and tactical problems worked out so we were very welcome and the event went off without a hitch. There were many trips taken over the past year to get things working - a labor of love, I am sure. I hope we spent enough to make this worthwhile to the town.
Unless people get the wrong idea - the heat was truly an aberration - record temps never before felt by the mountain people (sounds like a KQED travelogue) are probably not going to be repeated next year - we'll probably have record cold and be prepared for the heat (a pool and showers?) - who knows? What will be repeated is the hospitality of the locals - there were a number of local events including barbeque and Karoke --- Paul Sterngold and Stacy's Karoke duet - (Paul turned off her mike I am sure) and Mark's total embarrassment of Mimi (aka - "wild thing") - which he will certainly pay for.
The local star party, Saturday night was well attended and I had my last
visitor at 12:30. I was impressed at how interested people were at the intricacies of imaging. (at one time I had over 15 people staring at the screen and losing their night vision en masse).( One late night obserer said my shadow on my tent looked like the phanom astronomer.) I used the images from the night before to explain why when they looked through the scopes they would not see the images as bright and intenser - this was something people were very interested in understanding and I think made it easy for them to adjust to the fact that even through an 18" Dob they were not going to get the resolution and intensity of a photograph but were getting the personal contact with the objects light which makes observing so appealing, addicting and worth the effort.
Anyway looking forward to next year and will attempt to make LSA.