January 15-16, 2010: Death Valley Star Party

William Petty

After a long season of frustration with San Francisco’s overcast, drizzle, chill and sloppy ever-present dew, I was desperate to get away, and after hearing the Death Valley Star Party mentioned on the Bay Area TAC list, decided at the last minute to give it a shot. The weather looked a little iffy, but I didn’t care: I was just ready to be somewhere else.

My wife and one of my daughters were in England for a high-school interview, so I picked up my other daughter, 10-year-old Freya, after school on Thursday--our trusty Zambuto Starmaster 7” Oak Classic packed and ready--and we began the long drive. Pea Soup Andersen’s for dinner, and that night at a threadbare motel in a sorry little farm town near Bakersfield surrounded by abandoned subdivisions. At about 1pm on Friday we arrived at Furnace Creek Ranch, at which we had luckily been able to snag a last minute cancellation.

Oh, to be in the dry desert air again! The sky was completely obscured by one of those high winter overcasts that look set to stay for weeks, and this didn’t bode well for this evening’s observations, but we really didn’t care; it was just good to be there. We went out to the airfield (the location of the star party) at about 3:30 pm, where a few hopeful die-hards were standing about wondering if they should risk looking like fools by starting to set up. Since I hadn’t so much as had a chance to glance at a scope for about a month, I was happy to set up just for the tinkering value of it, and took the lead as First Fool.

I got some good tinkering in—and Freya was a sweetheart to be so good natured about it--but that first night just wasn’t fated to be an observing night, and by about 6:00 pm, we’d packed everything away and decided to try again tomorrow.

The next morning the clouds were more broken up, and so there seemed to be some reasonable hope for the evening. Freya and I passed the day by driving to a remote playa called the Racetrack—the most perfectly smooth natural pavement I’ve ever encountered in my life as a desert rat—and I promised her that if she found a meteorite on the surface she could visit Sweet Things in San Francisco and choose any kind of candy she wanted. I kind of knew this was a bet I wouldn’t have to pay out on, but it turned out the joke was on me, because every ten seconds or so I’d hear “Daddy, is THIS a meteorite?” and I’d have to turn back and give her most recent find a good once-over. Progress over the playa was slow.

By the time we returned, the sky was clearing. Wisps of cloud still pushed at the margins of the valley, but the sky above was truly blue. At the airfield, there were about ten scopes set up, and we joined them. As the weather had looked so iffy, the big Dobs had been left behind, but as this was a Las Vegas group, there was still enough glitz to go around, in the form of some big Meade and Celestron SCTs, lots of imaging equipment, and some lovely Televue refractors. The most interesting scope was a beautifully machined homemade 9” f/15 refractor with mirrors that folded its light path four times before reaching the eyepiece. Just to look at it, you’d have thought it was a funky ultramodern Dobsonian. We felt like the poor relations with our little plywood scope—the only plywood anywhere—its retro black sonotube speckled with little green blotches.

Darkness fell, Polaris came out, I lined up the equatorial platform, and got to work. This was a public event, so some polite members of the public were strolling around, and we were happy to entertain them. The Orion Nebula was the most obvious sight of the evening, blazing fiercely in the center of what I will call Orion’s “sword” since this is being written for mixed company. (You can bet that when primitive man looked to that grouping of stars in the sky’s mightiest constellation, it wasn't a sword he saw.) The seeing could have been better, but I could still see the E star of the Trapezium twinkling in and out as a tiny pinprick. Freya saw it too.

But it seemed that about 11 out of 12 scopes were pointed at Orion, so we thought we might try something different. We managed to catch M15, the globular in Pegasus, before it sunk below the horizon, but it was already in the murk, and we couldn’t resolve it into much more than a fuzzball, even with Abbe II’s.

The Crab Nebula was there, looking as good as you could expect in a 7” scope, which isn’t THAT good. The Andromeda and it’s companions were fun to look at, and we could see hints of structure in some of the dust lanes. Galaxies M81 & M82 looked GREAT in a 21 Ethos.

Other fine sights were the Pliaedes (of course) in a 40 Panoptic, the Perseus Double Cluster, and the delightfully asymmetrical double cluster M38 in Auriga. We tried for Jupiter earlier in the evening and Mars later, but they were both too close to the horizon, and combined with the so-so seeing, there was little joy to be had from the planets.

I spent a lot of time staring into the sky feeling confused. It had been long enough since I was last at the eyepiece, and with the change of season since that time, I felt I had lost my grip on the heavens. I didn’t automatically know what I wanted to look at next, and thought that I was surely forgetting some GORGEOUS object that was just waiting to be ravaged. At one point I “discovered” a fuzzy patch and pointed the scope for a lingering glance. It was only the next morning I realized it was the Beehive Cluster, Duh. Ok, it was pretty low on the horizon and Cancer doesn’t exactly jump out at you at the best of times, does it?

Finally I was saved by the arrival of a large church group from Las Vegas. They arrived with huge SUVs that had powerful spotlights on top, just to make sure they didn’t lose their way. There were about 20 grown ups and 50 children, many small enough that they had to stand on your equatorial platform to reach the eyepiece—or at least they tried to.

Initially, my funny little scope held little charm for this group, as the other scopes were clearly SO much more high-tech. But I soon had four sweet giggling Hispanic ladies around me, and I was happy to show them a thing or two. They had listened to a short presentation about the night sky when they arrived, and had been told that Sirius was the brightest star in the sky. So after patiently bearing with me while I showed them a couple of carefully chosen deep-sky objects, one of them said “Can ju show us Sirius? Dat guy he says it’s the brightest star.”

“Well—yeah.” I said, “I mean—it’s a star—just a point of light. But of course I’ll be happy to show it to you.

So I pointed the scope, and adjusted the eyepiece (a 13 Ethos). There it was, sparkling blue-white, with four perfect raiser-sharp diffraction lines piercing it from four directions.

The woman looked through the eyepiece and gasped in astonishment. “Ohhhhhhh, it’s so beautiful! Like a diamond. Louise, you gotta see dis.”

The first woman’s excitement grew as Louise, too, gushed over the eyepiece. “Joey!” she yelled. “You gotta come over here and see Sirius. It’s AMAZING!” Her raucous invitation was heard by more than Joey, and soon a jostling crowd had formed around us, everyone waiting for a glimpse at Sirius. Other scopes were abandoned, as it was becoming clear to everyone that Sirius was THE thing to look at in outer space. A couple of the adults from the church group took on crowd control duties, making sure that everyone waited their turn, and lifting the wee tykes up to get a view.

I stood apprehensively by as one by one they all took their turn, each declaiming more noisily to their friends on Sirius’ awe-inspiring beauty. I felt the eyes of the other astronomers on me and could only imagine what they were thinking. What is that guy showing them? Sirius?

This went on for over 30 minutes. And what could I do but stand there, politely smiling, waiting for them to get their fill. Finally things seemed to be letting up, and I thought I should let my daughter in on the joke. I turned to her and whispered, “Darling, don’t you think it’s funny that all these people have been standing here for half an hour just to get a look at Sirius? I mean, a star’s a star. It’s just a point of light. Don’t you think that’s a little funny?”

“Daddy, can I look at Sirius, too?” she replied. And she did.

I haven’t done many public events, but I think I learned something from this one. It doesn’t matter what you show them, as long as it’s pretty. And I have to admit that hanging there in space, very bright, with those perfect diffraction lines, in a “majestic” (thanks Al) 100° FOV, Sirius was a lovely sight that night, and really, you can’t knock that.

It was shortly after this, at around 9:00, that Freya got tired and wanted to leave, and I was ready to go, too. A good night in all.

The next day driving home, I was daydreaming about some of the wonderful views I’d had that night—as I’m sure all of us astronomers do. I was thinking about the clear wisps of nebulosity in the Orion nebula, and the beautifully sharp view I had had of the trapezium (making allowances of course for the seeing). Also the wonderful views of M81 and 82. I was thinking about the perfection of the little Zambuto mirror and the pure optical simplicity of the little Oak Classic, and it seemed to me that the views had been better in our homely little scope than in any other there that night. The refractors just didn’t have the aperture, and the bigger SCTs seemed to lack in contrast and definition—not to mention a couple of scope owners who needed to learn how to say “columnation problem.”

Driving along, I turned to Freya and told her how proud I was of our little scope, and asked her if she didn’t think the views through it had been the best and clearest we had seen.

“Daddy,” she said, “don’t you think that everybody probably says that about their own telescope.”