Calstar 2004

by Jake Burkart

I arrived Thursday at sunset and setup during twilight. I was happy to see a clear, distinct milky way even while there was some blue left in the western horizon. Spent the first hour or so just getting a good polar alignment by drift aligning my wedge-mounted SCT. I took a look at M22 first, a brilliant ball of stars that is truly an all-time favorite. I over-heard some neighbors also looking at M22 and then the Swan and went to check out their view. It was Michelle Stone showing views with a new eyepiece, Nagler I believe, giving nice definition and clarity to the Swan with no filters (you'll have to ask her what the eyepiece was exactly.) I wandered my way to the north end of the overflow campground to find my buddies Turley, Dan Wright, and Marek discussing Turley's new 12" Orion Push-To scope. We looked at some geo-stationary satellites through Dan's Meade. What a cool effect. I tried imaging the Pleiades and M42 later without much success.

Friday night was much better for me, even with it being partly cloudy. I had moved my camp during the day to be closer to the rowdy group at the north end, and found myself camped next door to Craig Colvin (my neighbor from Shingletown). I spent awhile during the day talking with Jeff Crilly about imaging and guiding issues and had just about convinced myself to permanently unscrew my camera from my telescope and step away from the "dark side." I proclaimed, "that's it, I'm through with imaging!" So Friday night I hooked the camera up to my 80mm guide scope mounted atop my Nexstar 11 and decided to only shoot the pleiades and M42 again while manually guiding through the 11. The results are at http://skylovers.org/Calstar2004/. I am so pleased with the relative success of these pics that I've decided to keep trying imaging, but just through the 80mm. I sway more on this imaging topic than the undecideds in this presidential election.

Friday night I also spotted a small fuzzy with a bright central core while swinging around Craig's 18" Obsession. We looked for it in databases, on star maps, everywhere and thought for about a minute that we had discovered the Calstar-Tacos Nebula. Eventually we found it, and it turned out to be NGC 1931, a lame little cluster with some nebulosity in Auriga. Late in the evening we looked at comet discovered by a member of SJAA. It was round and fuzzy. All the details escape me. There were some mediocre views of Saturn rising around 1:00 a.m. One of my favorite objects of the trip was the Eskimo planetary nebula as seen through Craig's 18". It was soft, big, and round, like an angel-food cake. Yummy.

I left around noon on Saturday not having much faith in the weather. It was good to see all my old bay-area TAC buddies. Thanks so much to Dan for the cooking, and thanks to all those that had a hand in organizing Calstar 2004. Good friends, good fun, and mediocre skies.

Posted on sf-bay-tac Oct 17, 2004 20:34:34 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 15, 2005 12:58:18 PT