Naked eye fu from Catalina

by Jamie Dillon

Yeah, you can see I'm catching up with documentation. While everybody else on the planet was having fun at Shingletown, Liam and I were with our troop, going back to Cherry Valley scout camp on Catalina. You'd think, being over 20 miles offshore, with terrain like high desert, it'd have pristine skies. But no, the lightdomes from Long Beach and LA are amazing. Over 25 degrees of smooth extinction to the East. But due South and to the West, the skies are decent. Limiting magnitude was right around 5.8 every night, which is what we had 4 years ago at the same camp.

Now for the fun. Liam's best buddy, Andrew McCann, is teaching astronomy merit badge all summer at our own council's cool camp, Pico Blanco, in the wilderness on the Little Sur. Jim Everitt and James Turley remember Andrew from when the Scouts did a campout on the Peak several years ago. He's fascinated with the night sky. The kid also turns out to have a raw talent for finding DSO's with handheld binoculars. One night we were down by the waterfront, and Andrew was using my old trusty 7x50's to scan Sagittarius, finding M22, and Lagoon and the Starcloud. This is a knack most seasoned telescope types don't have.

The young man who was teaching astronomy for that camp was Andrew and Liam's age. I got to help him get an old Bushnell DST working, that the camp had clearly had for a long time. And two nights, I met up with him and his class for nightsky sessions. Showed 'em the summer roadsigns. It's amazing how many smart kids have never been shown how to even find Polaris. And that's basic Scout stuff! These boys were riveted by the Milky Way, and Jupiter's moons in the little refractor.

Another cool thing that happened was a launch from Vandenberg just at sunset one night. I think it was Wednesday the 28th of June. I saw what I thought was a fast jet. One of our boys, Jordy Caress, had kept watching it and saw what turned out to be a stage separation. It was an orbital launch. It set up a bright blue cloud that kept slowly spreading for a good 20 minutes, like a big version of the Crab Nebula.

Good fun, day and night.
JAD

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