October 16, 2009: Deep Sky Ranch (Willow Springs)

Rogelio Bernal Andreo

I left home around 6:50pm, heading to Henry Coe... I usually stop at the Morgan Hill 'landmark' gas station to pick last minute items (snacks, etc). As I parked I recognized a couple of faces standing right in front of my car, literally: Mark Wagner and Richard Navarrete. "What the heck are you guys doing here? Aren't you supposed to be at DSR by now?"

It didn't take them long to convince me to go with them. Considering I had been talking to Kevin earlier in the day and I had decided not to go to his place because I knew I'd be arriving after dark at a place I haven't been before (big no-no in my book), these two, otherwise normal looking guys (give or take) almost looked like angels :-) Ok, normal-looking angel guys.

Not a bad decission at all, since I'm after some rather faint dust between M45 and NGC1499, and the darker skies at Willow Springs came quite handy.

Although I've been at Bob Ayer's site once or twice before, and so I was familiar with the bumpy road once you enter Willow Springs, the sky I could expect, etc. it was my first visit to Kevin's DeepSkyRanch. At Kevin's, the area where we setup is comfortable but certainly limited to the number of cars that can be parked.

I setup in front of Steve Gottlieb, who probably wasn't thrilled of having an imager right in front of his southern sky :-) I'm hoping however that, other than the unavoidable buzz from the fan of my CDD and the click of my DSLR here and there as I was doing panos and timelapses, my presence was inconspicuous :-)

Conditions, etc. have already been described by everyone else.

Besides carrying on with my current project (I won't be done until at least a couple of more sessions, but it's looking good so far), I took a quick timelapse of Orion moving up from Kevin's garage (I'll post it when I put it together), and this panorama of the northern sky, around 3am:

http://deepskycolors.com/pics/astro/2009/10/mb_2009-10-16_DeepSkyRanch.jpg

Around 4am, when everyone but MarkJ were already asleep I started packing. Left at 4:25 and arrived home at 5:55. Guess what I did the moment I arrived! The same thing I'm about to do right now :-)

Thank you Kevin! Rogelio