by Rob Jaworski
I was by myself, and brought my Orion XT8i Dobsonian, telrad, various EPs and sky charts.
I left the highway 88 and 26 junction and arrived at the site about 40 minutes later. The sun was already below the horizon but it was plenty bright outside.
This site is less than a dozen feet short of 5000' with an awesome view of the south. On the north side, closest to the road, there is a bit of a small hill but I was far away enough so that I still had a decent enough view of the north.
Scouted out the area and found the best place to set up. Overall, it was a bit sloped but not too bad (though I wouldn't want to lay my ThermaRest there). To compensate for the slope, I experimented with placing the Dob on cardboard sheets, then on top of an old comforter I keep in the back of the truck. Realized then that there's too much sponginess under the base for it to be steady, so I placed the base directly on the ground. Reason for the trials was that the ground was not only a bit sloped, but it was very rocky, with bits of dried foxtail weeds here and there.
I got buzzed by a bat two times (that I know about; you don't hear them, you only see a shadow whizzing really close by your face!). Mosquitos were out but a dose of DEET cured that issue. Then I heard one gunshot down the hill a ways away, then about 10 minutes later, six more, in rapid succession. Wondered if they hit any of the flying insects.
According to my Topo maps, this is a small spit of private land within the Stanislaus Natl Forest. Camping wouldn't be allowed on this site (with the rockiness and the slope, you wouldn't want to anyway), but if pressed, you could conceivably camp nearby on NF land. Needless to say, there's no piped water, no toilets, and a whole lotta nothin nearby.
It was said that this site has a really good southern view. Indeed it does. West is pretty good too. I was able to see Mount Diablo across the San Joaquin Valley as well as lights from towns or cities along the base of the eastern Diablo range. It was interesting, looking down with my mid-power eyepiece at these communities and their street lamps, all in neat rows. I reckon it could have been, maybe, Patterson.
As it began to get darker, I checked out Venus then Jupiter. Noticed that one of Jupiter's moons was really, really close to the planet. As I kept an eye on it over the next several minutes, it appeared as though it was going to go behind or in front of Jupiter. Pretty cool! I tried to follow it as much as I could, but as Jupiter sank slowly into the atmospheric muck, it began to swim so badly I wasn't able to keep an eye on it. Stary Nights later confirmed that it was Io that was able to transit Jupiter.
It got darker still, and so I switched eyepieces and decided to continue honing my manual navigation skills, again not even powering up the computerized object locater hanging from the base of the Dob.
I mentioned before I'm still eating up eye candy, with my first target being M3. I stayed playing pretty much in the west and the north looking for specific objects. Those included M51 (I think I was able to make out a bit of the spiral structure; it was certainly more than just a smudge as it is from Houge), M81, M82, and M94.
Working on my manual finding skills this way, without help from a friend or neighbor with a green laser or, of course, the object locator device, was very beneficial. It's amazing how big these constellations are in real life, compared to what you see on paper! For example, Alkaid is really actually quite far away (apparently) from alpha and beta CVn.
In the southern sky, I messed around a bit without any actual targets in mind, and just swept the sky in the direction of the galactic center with a wide angle, low power eyepiece and see what I stumbled across. Like looking out of the window of a space ship. Very nice.
Finally, I tried my hand with so-called naked eye objects. Sure enough, M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is visible. I also saw some naked eye fuziness to the north of M31, which my sky chart identified as being the double cluster.
I've heard that Ursa Minor is used as a gauge to determine either seeing or darkness. I was able to make out the three "handle" stars of the little dipper, and three "bowl" stars pretty easily. With averted vision, I made out the fourth star, or what seemed to be 2 or 3 stars, which are located at the "bottom left" (sorry!) of the bowl. The Milky Way itself was pretty bright as well, though I don't think I'd call it sugary, as others have when describing dark skies.
That was about it. I didn't stay too late, not even enough to see Mars come up. I'd certainly like to go here again, but with a bit of company next time. Thanks again to the AAS for letting me in on the site!
Posted on sf-bay-tac Sep 05, 2005 14:43:26 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Mar 10, 2006 21:54:05 PT