Coyote Lake Star Party - 01 July 2006

by Rob Jaworski

We arrived at the campground on Friday about 6:30PM and set up. Everything worked out well, including the 12V water pump I retrofitted the weekend before. I was considering going to the boat launch area that night, but I wanted to share some views with my wife, who said she'd be along after putting our two and a half year old daughter to sleep. Turns out, mama fell asleep too. Thus, I was alone at the campsite with my 8XTi and with the sharp pinpoints of light shooting out of nearby Coleman lanterns.

The area behind the tent trailer was blocked from campground light sources, so I moved there. Turns out, I didn't do much viewing through the eyepiece, but rather leaned back in my camp chair so my face was on the same plane as the sky, facing south, and I did a lot of familiarizing with the constellations. Got to know the Boötes, Corona, Ophiuchus, Hercules area.

Saturday was spent playing around the campgrounds with the little one, going to the beach area a couple of times, taking naps and generally relaxing. I also spent time studying the star maps, trying to get a general feeling of what to try to log for my extremely slow pursuit of my M list. Since the area mentioned above was fresh in my mind, and the boat launch area at Coyote has a decent southern horizon, I decided to concentrate there.

I showed up at the launch area around dusk, enough daylight to see Mr Hawley and a couple others finishing up their BBQ. Ranger came by and was pretty excited about public night, telling us he just made an announcement at the campground that there would be scopes set up and all were invited.

My guess is there were about eight scopes out that night, and I had maybe a half dozen or so different groups of visiting public come by and catch some views. I mostly showed off Jupiter, for two reasons: I was getting excited about two of its moons that were gliding right by each other, explaining to folks how we could see their movement over just 10 or 20 minutes. Second, I heard Rob next door showing off more deep space objects, so we had a variety.

There was definitely less of a crowd that night than I saw last year, June of 2005, at a public night at Coyote when it was held in the overflow field area. Main reason, I'm sure, was that you have to drive to get to to the launch area from the campground, whereas it's a quick walk to the overflow lot. Another downside of this is the headlights that flood the launch area as the visitors approach in their cars, then park in the overflow lot next door.

Sky conditions seemed fairly decent that night. I was able to make out pretty clearly Jupiter's bands at 120x. People were counting a couple of nearby stars when counting its moons, for a total of six. I let some folks keep that belief, but others who seemed truly interested and were asking questions, I gave them the real scoop.

Once the public was pretty much gone, I turned toward my target areas and observed and logged in my list four M objects: 10, 12, 14 and 107. All were viewed with an 8" reflector (f/5, 1200mm fl) with 32mm, 25mm and 10mm eyepieces.

M10: My notes, written in the dark with only a dim red light, and with a nearly-dry pen, say that I detected a bit of a concentration of stars on what I believe to be the north end of the cluster. Also, it seemed there was a bit of a halo and a very slight bar going through near the middle of it, not unlike in galaxies. Very nice example of a GC, and indivual stars were not difficult to resolve.

M12: This was indeed fainter than M10, but it was easier for me to find when plotting it against stars in the constellation. My notes indicate I saw six stars somewhat surrounding the cluster that made a rectangle asterism. It was a bit more difficult to resolve constituent stars, and it appeared there were some foreground stars between me and the cluster. Kind of a cool effect.

M107: Down low, south of the enclosed imaginary area that makes up Ophiuchus was M107. It wasn't too hard to find, but it was difficult to try to resolve any of the cluster's stars. I only took it to 120X, but even with that, it remained just a fuzzy puff. I find myself seeming to enjoy noticing patterns in the star field with the object at center, and here I saw a curved stream of stars, comet-like, swirling around the object. This effect was actually quite pleasant to observe.

M14: This globular cluster was a bit more difficult to find. I think the reason is because it's not really near any close, brighter guide stars. I didn't spend too much time with it, as I was getting glob'd out a bit. Also, somewhat like M107, it was difficult to tease out any stars from the object. My notes indicate no more than two stars resolved for me.

It was starting to get late for me, and I was getting tired since we all woke up at 4:30 that morning and couldn't get back to sleep. So even though the moon had set and it was getting nicely darker, I chatted a bit more with Rob before packing up and heading back to camp. Gotta remember two things to bring next time: my observing chair, and my GLP for a public night like this was. Oh well, next time.

Thanks to SJAA and the park staff for organizing these public nights.

-Rob