Carrizo Plain Selby Campground - 4/3/05

by Darrell Lee

I drove down to the Carrizo Plain National Monument near Buttonwillow off I-5 Saturday night. It's another 45 minutes from Buttonwillow past McKittrick to the Carrizo, which has two campgrounds. They are KCL with 8 picnic tables and 8 firepits, and Selby with 5 tables and 4 pits. We were going for the wildflowers, and my traveling friend had an afternoon wedding and didn't get home until sunset. So it was about 1:00 a.m. when we rolled into Selby Campground, and only 2-1/2 hours before moonrise. We were shocked to find 30-40 vehicles in this little 5 table campground. Everyone was out to see the wildflowers. Fortunately, almost everyone was asleep, and there were no Coleman lanterns to interfere with my imaging.

I dutifully set up my 8" SCT while looking at the skies. Nice mag 6 skies with a good view of the summer Milky Way. Scorpius was up, and Sagittarius rose before the moon did. The west, northwest, and southwest views have high horizons - maybe 20 degrees - due to 1500' hills rising above the campground. The eastern horizon is good, with some light glow from Bakersfield/Kern County cities, not as bad as the western sky glow from Fiddletown.

I only looked at M81/M82 and M51/NGC 5195 before turning the scope to imaging and trying to catch some sleep while the camera clicked away for the next hour at a time. Views of those galaxies were tremendous - nearly as good as through my 18". Unfortunately, the skies were so bright and I was so tired, I misaligned on a different star than Polaris or didn't have the tripod leveled, and every picture had star trails.

The wildflowers weren't great. I've seen better Goldfields displays in non-rainy years earlier in the year (February). The Baby Blue Eyes were done, and the only spectacular displays were Hillside Daisies and some mixed Goldfields/California Poppy/Lupines.

It's a nice place to break up a late drive between the bay area and SoCal.

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Posted on tac-sac Apr 03, 2005 19:35:21 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Apr 05, 2005 21:09:01 PT