Splish slash I was takin a bath

by James Ster

I joined Dennis Beckley, Steve Gottleib, Alvin Huey, Shneor Sherman and another gentleman whose name I didn't catch at Fiddletown tonight. My main purpose was to test drive the 30" before next week's Shingletown Autumn Skies star party. It was a good thing I did. I need to say a big thanks to Dennis. One of the truss poles for the 30" had lost its 1/2" phenolic ball from the secondary end of it and after the hour and a half drive up, it was looking as though it would be all for naught. Thank to Dennis for having a great box of hardware goodies on hand and Alvin and I were able to jury rig a fix with a 1/4-20 nut and fender washer to save the evening. I was also having some problems with the battery or maybe it was the battery connections (I gave up on trying to figure out which is was) and ended up abandoning the goto altogether and just used the digital setting circles to find what little stuff I looked at.

To say the least, Fiddletown had absolutely the most bizarre skies I have ever attempted to observe under. Transparency was a bit off, maybe a 5.5 or 6. But the seeing was only a 1 or 2 at best. There was sooooooo much moisture in the atmosphere that at times the stars looked bloated even with the nekid eye! Although we didn't seem to have any problem with dew on our secondaries, everything was very damp within an hour of arrival. Steve actually had a drop of water drip off of some part of his scope's secondary and land on his mirror! I had to use the inside of the back of the 30's trailer to lay my books down on just to keep them dry while I looked at them. I've been to Fiddletown many times where it's been moist and come to expect it, but I have never seen it anywhere near this damp before.

As for observing, I couldn't go over 120x and even that was downright horrible. It was like looking through a pond. Dennis and Shneor came by and we hunted down the Perseus Super Cluster which ended up being the high point of the night. With the 31mm Nagler, I could only see about 10 bloated galaxies in the FOV. I recall seeing something like 24 galaxies in the FOV when Mark Wagner and I checked it out at OSP last year. Although I did see color in M42, I could only get 3 - 4 stars in the trapezium. Most bright stars looked like they had a bit of "nebulosity" around them. The rings around Saturn were so wobbly that I swear it looked like they were tilting back and forth about 45 degrees as I watched it! VHSF!!!!

Mars, you didn't miss a dang thing, other than a long drive. It turned out to be more of a social evening which was also cool because I hadn't seen most of these guys since SSP.

Posted on tac-sac Nov 07, 2004 02:25:18 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 21, 2005 00:07:00 PT