August 15/16/17, 2009: Lassen

Rob Jaworski

We just got back from a 2 wk road trip that concluded with a 4-night stay at Manzanita (in a tent trailer with our 1 year old and 5 year old). Like Peter N below says, pick Manzanita Lake and your family will love you for it. I did a bit of site scoping around, and recommend the C loop, sites 28 and 39. Campground host is really nice too, be sure to stop by and chat.

Bumpass Hell is about 33 minutes away just before sundown, about 40-45 coming back due to the darkness and my not wanting to hit wildlife.

Peter N also mentions Reeds in Shingletown. Wow, my kind of store! The produce is next to the plumbing supplies, and the meat dept is next to the fasteners. Incredibly cool mix of Ace Hardware and groceries. But be sure to fill your propane there, since Manzanita does NOT fill propane (like I was told).

Anyway, here's my observing connection from Bumpass for this post:

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 - It was windy, cold, smoky. Jupiter was really red as it was rising over the hill. Conditions got better later in the night, but most of the evening we were just working on getting the alignment on Tom's scope to work right.

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 - We were much better prepared, mentally and otherwise. Conditions were better with the winds carrying the smoke south east over Almanor. Jupiter was much less reddish. I haven't *ever* used the COL (Computerized Object Locator) on my XT8i so much in one night. I just played with it all night, teasing stuff out of the sky, not worrying about where they actually are, finding stuff based on recommendations and ideas from companion Tom. Then we'd find it in his scope and compare views. It was actually lots of fun, ignoring the observing list we constructed during the day. Most of what we found was eye candy material, but we also looked for stuff like the ET cluster and the coathanger. We also believe that we were able to find and view Neptune in the XT8, since it was reaching opposition real soon. (Actually, a 12 year old girl at the campground reminded us of that fact!). We didn't see a disk, but it was a blue-ish tinted point of light. Very fun night!

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 - Windy. Very windy. Couldn't get a steady view of anything due to the wind whipping our scopes around. Tried to watch Europa disappear behind its host, but it was hard to make out the precise moment it disappeared. Wind seemed to get stronger, and colder, as time passed, so we took refuge next to the truck in our camp chairs and studied constellation maps and tried to associate them with what we could see in the sky. That was actually pretty fun, and productive too, as we worked on more of the obscure or confusing constellations such as serpens cauda, scutum, vulpecula and camelopardalis (which we didn't really get). We were back in camp and in bed just before midnight.

-Rob