April 25, 2009: Willow Springs: lovely but short lived

Greg LaFlamme

I arrived around 6 pm and set up my 22" f3.6 near Richard Navarette and Mark Wagner. After a short time, we were joined by Mark Johnston and Steve Gottlieb. Everyone set up their respective work stations and waited for night fall. It was quite breezy early on but the wind subsided for the most part by 9pm. Last Saturday night was first light of my new 22". I discovered on that night that I had a pretty bad astigmatism. My mechanical collimation was way off but I have made those corrections since then. Last night Mark Johnston and I used his Catseye collimation tools to check if I have it right and I do (thanks Mark). For the first time the sight tube, Cheshire and auto collimator all agree with my Kendrick laser/barlow. Wheew! a big happy, collimated family. Once a star was visible, I swung over to it for a star test. I was surprised to see that I still have the astigmatism but delighted at the nice tight in-focus star images. They're not perfect but good enough for pumping eye candy ;-) I'll post to the list when I get it figured out. This way other atm'ers can all learn something from it. In focus though,,, Wow! I love the views :-) The seeing was good / very good and my SQM reading was 21.69! Kevin and I went over a list of eye candy and and shared the sites with the gang. After using a 12.5" scope for about 9 months the difference in light collection is shocking.

The wind picked up a tad and Mark noticed some dark clouds coming in from the WNW. It only took about an hour for those black clouds to over take our little party. It was only 11:45 so we collectively decided to just pack up and pull out. Today I'll re-assemble the scope here in the front room and get some work done,,, or maybe just stare at it :-)

Another fine night with a great group of friends!

GML