by Jim Ster
It was a blast, of wind that is........
Randy and I had a good night on Wednesday. It started off a little breezy, but around 1:00am, the wind calmed and the skies became quite transparent and steady. To give you an example, for the first time ever, I was able to discern the central star in M57 through VB with my 9mm Nagler (380x). Randy confirmed my observation. An hour and a half later the seeing dropped and Randy was unable to see it in his 18. But we stayed until 4:00am and I considered the evening quite a success. Randy bagged a Hickson too.
In lieu of Her Worship's presence and so he wouldn't feel unappreciated, I made sure to equip HRH KS with a fresh box of genuine Barnum and Bailey animal crackers (none of those off brands, i.e. Safeway imitation animal crackers) (also, the reality of it was that I primarily gave them to him as chupacabra chum, i.e. better him than me!). Unfortunately, I must confess that later in the evening I found the empty box discarded in the parking lot, which leads me to believe that I may have been mistaken about the recent SSP animal cracker incident.
Thursday evening, Evan Garber and I went to Bumpass Hell while the rest of the guys stayed at Devastated. Unfortunately, the winds at BH never decreased below 10 mph, as it had previous evening, and we ended up calling it quits around midnight, but not before we gave a very cute park employee named Denise a little intimate outreach. Because the wind was a bit troublesome on higher powers, I put on a couple of OIII filters, one on AL and the other in VB, and we made the rounds of the brighter nebulae. The Ring, Swan and Veil were all spectacular. I was especially proud of the view of the Veil where I had the 35 Panoptic with OIII in AL and my 31 Nagler with OIII in VB. In the wide field view you could make out the entire Veil and in VB, I had the witches broom blazing. Going back and forth between the two views was fantastic to say the least. The best of both worlds if you ask me.
Friday evening, we met up with the entire group at BH, only to bail en mass and head to Devastated as the sun set due to winds. I don't know what it ended up being like, but the skies at Devastated were pretty nice. For me, the quality of the skies didn't matter as I finally figured out how to track satellites with VB and I spent the entire evening grinding away at the clear skies. It was a kick in the butt to see the satellites staying fixed in the FOV while the stars raced by in the background. This will be a very fun thing to do while were all sitting around waiting for twilight to end. As a matter of fact, tonight I finally accomplished one of my goals, and one of the biggest reasons I bought VB in the first place, and actually saw the ISS as it flew over around 9:33pm at 380x. I set up in the street out in front of my house this evening and was able to track the ISS across the northern sky. WOW! What a view. I could clearly make out the silvery-white cylindrical shape of the modules and the huge gold plated solar panels could easily be individually distinguished. I can't wait to see what the Shuttle looks like docked to it.
As for my Saturday plans to drive to Monitor Pass to observe and also help out with a lunar impact study, I did drive down directly from Lassen, but when I got there, there was a slight breeze and it was quite smoky. I was also quite exhausted from my 5 hour drive. I waited until for Sandy Baumgartner to arrive, but he never showed. Feeling as drained as I did, I ended up leaving just after 7:30 for home, Mags, and my own bed.
Other than the disappointment of not having Her Worship's company, overall, it was a pretty typical, fun, TAC-SAC trip.