August 15, 2009: Henry Coe

Rogelio Bernal Andreo

I finally ended up going to Coe last night, leaving the over 2:30 drive to Lake Sonoma for a nigth I'm more fit (I'm still suffering a bit of jetlag).

Turnout was great. At some point I think I counted 12-14 cars. Bonny Doon being closed (not for the best of reasons, sadly) contributed to making Coe a Star Party of its own.

Although other more experienced TACos will probably chime in, IMHO the sky faired pretty well, especially considering the prospects of a smoky sky. Transparency wasn't great but not terrible, and seeing seemed quite good.

Since for me this was a warmup session, I decided to image something trivial: M31. Regardless, it was the first time I image M31 with the STL11k so I still tried to push the envelope a bit, and hopefully the image will escape mediocrity, we'll see. Everything worked well and although I didn't setup in record time, I felt comfortable with all my gear, shower of cables, etc.

Visually I especilly enjoyed views of Jupiter from different scopes, and I managed to get the best view of the red spot I've seen so far.

Probably the two people who had the most fun the whole night were Ivor Barker's daughter and mine - the two 6 years olds could be heard laughing and playing for hours!! Of course the highlight for me was when the two grils came to my area and Ivor's daughter asked me what I was doing - when I said I was taking pictures she replied: "Well, my dad actually looks through the telescope, he's a REAL astronomer!" :-))) One could feel tempted to answer that nowadays "real" (aka: professional) astronomers rarely look through the eyepiece anymore, but instead I took the hit, smiled and agreed :-) After all "real" astronomers don't spend their time taking pretty pictures either :-)

Overall a good night, glad I went out!
Rogelio