Calstar 2006 Experience Report

by Dan Wright

Approaching Lake San Antonio I prepared mentally for someone having taken my favorite spot under That One Tree.

"I mustn't get emotional about it", I explained to myself.
"I won't waltz into their camp and spread negative vibes, no sir. I'll let 'em have the spot and I won't say anything. Traditions are fun to uphold, but must every Calstar be identical? I'll just find a new place to spread checkered tablecloths."

Despite this mental preparation, the closer I got, the more nervous I became. How could I possibly serve nice meals without enough table space in the shade? While stopped, paying at the gate, I was practically dancing with anxiety. I turned the last corner. There was the tree. It was clear! It wasn't taken!

So I pulled up and took it. "I'm a bastard to arrive early Wednesday every year and snatch this spot", I admitted with satisfaction as I unloaded tables, coolers, stoves, food boxes, and my kitchen-unit.

Wednesday night I set up my LX200 next to Rashad, then I wandered away and stayed all night at Paul Alsing's scope instead.

Paul handed me a large insulated mug into which he kept pouring iced mudslides. He provided superior views of all objects through his 25", consulted his extensive library to announce interesting facts about each object, taught me Argo Navis, and played every bit of music I could request from his bottomless MP3 library (including "Pickin' on the Dead"). We also had Charlie Wicks next door with his famous refractor, reflector, bino mount, wit, and wisdom.

I dropped with a sigh of comfort into a guest recliner at Paul's camp and kicked back facing Camelopardalis. Paul loomed out of darkness and threw a heavy moving-quilt, which pressed down warmly on my limbs. On cue, Charlie arranged his bino mount to overhang.

Reclined outdoors on the open surface of our rocky planet, face upturned to the reeling Milky Way, snug beneath blankets, with massive binos floating weightless in my hands, and Jerry Garcia's "Scarlet Begonias" playing softly -- I was in nirvana! To heck with my gear-grindy old LX200! Where was that mudslide? Close at hand here, yes ...

Next morning Rashad asked, "Why did you even set up your scope in the first place? It was a waste of energy! You know, I was waiting for you to come back".

"I came back once"
"Yeah, once -- to power your scope off!"

Sorry about that Rashad. I got carried away at Alsing's camp. I want to observe with you sometime; we could do galaxies and satellites.

A whole year has passed, but familiar sights and smells let you know you're back at Calstar: teetering outhouses with spring-banging doors and no latches, water trucks spraying dust, unconcerned deer sitting in the shade, majestic oaks hung with moss, massive picnic tables carved with camper's initials, short crackling dry grass with occasional thorns, gopher holes to stumble in, woodpeckers and circling buzzards, and an afternoon dust-devil.

Old friends poured into Calstar and settled into their old camps with a feeling of familiarity. We greeted each other and picked up right where we left off last year.

Conspicuous by their absence were Stacy Joe, Jeff Gortatowsky, Steve Sergeant, Michelle Stone, Jake Burkart, Phil Terzian, Phil Chambers, Richard Crisp, John R. Pierce, Lance Boehm, Rich N, Ray Cash, Steve Gottlieb, and others.

I was reminded it was equinox, and got excited about geosynchronous satellites because they are at "opposition" during equinox -- especially in the moments prior to entering earth's shadow, or just after emerging. Geosats can flare to naked-eye brightness then (where normally they're between mag 9 and 13).

I use Starry Night Pro (SNP) to find 'em. SNP can go online and automatically download Three Line Elements (TLEs). SNP saves TLEs in a file in its home directory named "Satellites.txt" (this is a magic file name).

But unfortunately SNP doesn't retrieve ALL satellites, so some weeks ago I signed up at our government's "space-track.org" site, and now I download my own TLEs, including the complete set of geosats, whenever I want. I sneakily move my downloaded file into SNP's home directory and rename it "Satellites.txt", which tricks SNP into using it, then I can display every geosat.

They stretch in an arc across the southern sky with at least 200 above the horizon any one time. That's right, there are 200 geosats in your Calstar sky any one time.

They can be regarded by geocentric coordinates -- latitude and longitude. True geostationaries hover constantly over one spot on earth: the equator, at some particular longitude.

Some geosats wave up and down in latitude while keeping the same approximate longitude -- these are geosynchronous without being geostationary, and are basically one of three things:

1) Retired geostationaries who performed a final burn to eject themselves from the "Clark Belt" (named after Arthur C. who predicted the orbit) into "graveyard" or "junk" orbits, relinquishing their spots in the Belt to make room for new geosats, or:

2) New geosats occupying "insertion orbits", waiting to perform one last tweaking burn to take their spot in the Belt and become truly geostationary, or:

3) Boosters -- spent second or third stages used to lift geosats into orbit. Boosters have the best chance of becoming tumbling flashers.

Click any little dot on the screen and the scope supposedly goes there, so a person can visit many geosats quickly. Well, my scope doesn't go there because of trouble with goto precision. I must first SYNC on some nearby recognizable object like an NCG or double star, then MAYBE the scope'll put the geosat in view.

The software predicted when earth's shadow would engulf geosats, so I carefully watched three pass into shadow, which they did as predicted -- but I saw no flares.

I positioned the scope to observe two geosats emerge from shadow. They materialized on cue, but again with no apparent flare. What was wrong? Maybe I was seeing them enter/exit the umbra, while flares were occurring near the penumbra instead?

Goto imprecision weighed on my nerves until I got frustrated. Mike Delaney arrived at my scope in time to see me slam my laptop shut and declare I'd had enough goto and it'd be paper charts and star hopping for me the rest of the night.

Carl Larson was 6 years on the waiting list for an AP mount when his number came up; he had to buy it even if he wasn't ready. First light (first slew?) for his new AP 900 was this 2006 Calstar. What OTA did he use? The honor went to a Newtonian he'd home-built years ago, including a mirror he'd ground himself at the budding age of 19.

But that AP mount gave him a learning curve! The owner's manual, the many jacks and knobs and cables, the big control paddle -- these were Carl's occupation during Calstar. I could hear him patiently working away at it each night.

Turley's observing plan one night was to arbitrarily pick a constellation and drill into it. He picked "Scrotum". Throughout the night I could hear Turley drilling with his big refractor and calling out each Scrotum object he scored.

Friday 1 'o clock AM we called a popcorn break and gathered 'round Turley's table. First we burnt a Jiffy-pop pretty bad, then Larson cooked up a darn good one. Now we had popcorn to satisfy everyone (some prefer burnt). Marek cracked us up with his recollection of a Letterman Top 10 List: Amish pick-up lines

"Thy buggy has a bitchin' lacquer job"
"Are thee up for some plowing?"

After more observing, we were off to bed.

Here I'll thank everyone who came to the breakfasts. Mornings might otherwise be sluggish and bleary, especially after staying up late, but coffee, conversation, and laughter around the table brightens things up.

Special thanks to helpers: Jane Smith for bagels and cream cheese and for cooking the most perfect bacon, Mike Delaney for preparing heaps of sausage and bacon and for cleaning up after every meal, Carl Larson for velvety best scrambled eggs, Mike Koop, James Turley, and Marsha for "Turley scramble", and Marek Cichanski for washing dishes in a meditative state of mind. Here I'm forgetting to shout-out several others, but keep in mind anonymous service earns the highest merit.

After breakfast comes the dreamy do-nothing daytime. Off to take a shower, then to nap, or to visit friend's camps and pass the time until nightfall.

Down at the marina, there's an off-season "autumn of despair" feeling: huge empty parking lots, fleets of abandoned houseboats at anchor, and a silent lodge that seems to say "the stories I could tell". They've still got it going on a little, though; there's still a cashier at the store 8 to 5, and rangers welcome us at the visitor's center and let us crash on the green lawn overlooking the lake, and the showers still work.

Turley treated several people to a dinner of Fred's steak, corn-on-the-cob, and bread & butter -- a delicious and successful dinner, and I hope it becomes a Calstar tradition, though it's not practical to extend steak dinner invitations to everyone.

My scope was at the edge of the field where public might first enter, and Saturday I got visitors: a nice Indian (Gandhi, not Sitting Bull) family. Grandma, Mom & Dad, Big Brother, and little Sister. Public outreach is one of my favorite aspects of this hobby (I often do JVN school star parties), so I gave this family a tour, placing the LX200 controller in their hands and letting them GOTO and center and focus each object. Grandma and the little girl became the most fascinated.

I verified it was 8:50 PM (well before 10) so I dared use a green laser. I was conscientious too: not flashing it around, pointing it steadily for only the minimum time. But I understand it bothered Pete and some imagers; I apologize. Or maybe it wasn't mine but another person's GLP that proved bothersome. I guess the 10 PM grace period is out the window now! We'll live somehow. Yes, GLPs should probably be prohibited at Calstar, especially since we aren't *supposed* to have public anyway.

I finally got a tumbling flasher in view. A person must examine a lot of geosats before finding one. It helps if they flash with a fast period (once per second or better) because I tend to give up on slow ones. This one flashed about twice per second:

NEWSAT-1 (PALAPA B2R)
Began life as a telecommunications satellite named "Palapa B2", but the original booster had a faulty perigee motor and the satellite wound up in a bad orbit.

The operators refused to pay for retrieval and asked for the insurance money, but the insurance company financed retrieval. 12 Nov 1984, STS 19 (Space Shuttle Discovery) collected Palapa B2 and brought it home. It was re-launched as "Palapa B2R" (I guess the R stands for Rerun).

Lived out its life in the Clark Belt doing telecommunication transponding. 24 C-band transponders and 1062 watts DC power, with a footprint covering London to Beijing, Moscow to New Delhi.

Retired in June 2005: placed in a junk orbit then "inerted", meaning any remaining hydrazine fuel was "feathered", its batteries were shorted, and its momentum wheels despun. It tumbles now as junk, 2 meters by 7 meters (including panels), 628 kg of mass.

The best geosat eye candy has consistently been XM-1 and XM-2 (XM radio satellites). They were bright at Shingletown, bright at Coe, bright at Lick, and faithfully bright at Calstar. Seems a fellow can't miss, showing these. Easy to get them in the same eyepiece; their separation is about 11 arc-minutes. Nearby (8 minutes away) a dim geosat named "Solidaridad 2" hangs around, so you can get 3 altogether in the same field. They look great sailing past background stars.

Upon seeing the pair of XM's, everyone asks, "why two?" Redundancy I guess, but Koop came up with the best response: "Stereo! Right and left".

Actually Wikipedia tells a somewhat sadder story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xm_radio#Technology

After fussing around, I located the group in Paul Alsing's 25" dob. To my surprise the satellites themselves didn't look much brighter, but the motion was easier to appreciate because more background stars were revealed.

Saturday AM before dawn we had parties going both sides of the field; Wagner's and Turley's. Pete was doing "shuttle diplomacy" -- migrating between the two parties with the idea of merging them. When an alarm went off on Pete's imaging setup, and Pete wasn't there, the whole crowd from Wagner's decided to trek in the dark across the gopher-hole field to Turley's to inform Pete about the alarm. We were glad to see them arrive! We really had ourselves a party. When Turley's Scotch ran out, Delaney brought more -- top-notch single-malt.

I thought I held the record for popping the best Jiffy, but Sterngold demonstrated beyond doubt he knows better. Without wasting time at low heat, yet still without burning, employing the perfect wrist action, he brought it quickly to a steamy engorged climax that drew applause from the crowd.

At Calstar we got dudes who don't smoke tobacco much in daily life, but they're away on an outing and get lubricated with single-malt; next thing you know their resolve melts and they lust after a cig.

Oh, the appeal of a cig while slightly buzzed! Fidgeting skillfully with a small paper stick in the fingers, the vague danger of the hot cherry at the tip, an oral pacifier for pursed lips, an affirmation of man's mastery over fire, a pyro's pastime, blowing smoke and watching it billow skyward, and a chance to play-act the rugged mannerisms of a Hollywood leading man.

I had 3 left but 4 people asking. Wags was the boldest, calling out loudly, "Who's got a cigarette?" I gave one to Wagner, one to Roberts, and one to myself.

We're back home now. So we smoked too much at Calstar; it doesn't mean we must keep it up. We can knock it off. Right Delaney? Right Roberts? Right Schuerman? Right Wright? Right ...

Sunday, the last morning, the final breakfast, then everyone said their good-byes and the place emptied out. A highway accident on 101 halfway between Salinas and Gilroy slowed me down, but I was back home by 4:30 PM.

A great Calstar; one of the best. We should do it again sometime!

Here are pictures:

http://www.fototime.com/inv/C1CC6237829E890

Highest regards from Dan Wright in Palo Alto