OSP

by Michelle Stone

OSP was very nice. I'm glad that I got there early. The event officially started on Thursday. I did some binocular viewing on Tuesday night. Wednesday and Thursday, I used my 15" Plettstone for deep sky viewing. We had lots of wind and spotted rain on Friday and Saturday. Temperatures were in the mid nineties during the days and it was fairly uncomfortable. The nights were very pleasant requiring only a light jacket.

Skies were good on the clear nights. I could crank up the magnification to 300 power and still had pinpoints of light for the stars. I met some new and old friends and had a gander at a new drive/goto system that folks are working on up there.

I had the opportunity to look at some nice Abel clusters in a 25" and 28" telescopes. That was pretty fabulous.

I spent a good share of my viewing sessions showing folks my scope and how it worked. I'm using some new software to log my observations, so I decided to start over on my Herschel 2500 list. I finished it up last year, so what the heck, let's look at them again! I also spent some time looking at double stars recommended by Paul from San Diego. Also, there are a number of IC and other cataloged objects not on the NGC list that I am now looking at.

The computer with wireless to the ServoCat is very nice. I was able to slew to a galaxy, observe it, and create notes in my log. I like the SkyTools software that I'm using for this purpose. It is a bit clunky but has some very nice list creation abilities and tracks my notes very well.

On Friday afternoon, I felt that rough weather was coming, so I closed shop and put all the walls on my canopy. Everyone thought that I was kind of crazy. The moment that I finished covering up everything and tying down, a sudden blast of wind, dust, mud, and rain took out vendor row. With the exception of getting some mud in one of my scopes (it was under the canopy surrounded by 4 walls), my setup held together really well. I really stake that canopy down... but the others didn't fair very well. It was kind of sad to see thousands of dollars of Televue eyepieces, scopes, and other assorted astronomy gear spread out all over the ground. Sun River's two canopies were twisted up and thrown against Hardin Optical's new RV. One of the fellows was sitting on a table and the table was literally lifted up and thrown into the air.

Dan Gray and Mel Bartels were working on a new alt/az controller on Dan's 28" scope. Dan did the design of this thing and it looked like it was working very very well. The way he had it set up, he was getting 174,000 encoder ticks per axis. GOTO functions put every object in the center of the 9mm Nagler he was using on the beast. Dan will be offering the controller for sale. http://www.siderealtechnology.com/

Attendance was down from last year with about 850 people attending. I kind of felt sorry for those folks who arrived on Friday or Saturday. There was no viewing to be had on either night due to extensive cloud cover and periods of rain.

I packed up and was out of there by 7 AM on Sunday and was able to make it back by 9 PM that night.

Posted on sf-bay-tac Aug 18, 2004 10:15:44 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 08, 2005 20:38:34 PT