Rich, I would be up for a trip to the gravel pit - Please let me know if you are going. -----Original Message----- From: uvaa-bounces+louis.griffin=hill.af.mil@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:uvaa-bounces+louis.griffin=hill.af.mil@mailman.xmission.com]On Behalf Of Richard Tenney Sent: Friday, March 12, 2004 10:09 AM To: Utah Valley Astronomy Association Subject: Re: [UVAA] Impromptu Star Party Thursday night Jim, Nice report, wish I had the time last night to join y'all; had a previous appointment I couldn't break, and didn't get home until 10pm. I can't go down to St. George next weekend, but I may try the gravel pit in a week (Friday) if the weather is favorable. Rich --- Jim Gibson <jimgibson00@yahoo.com> wrote:

The impromptu little gathering we had last night turned into somewhat of a bigger event. Mike Bailey and Bob Taylor decided to go out Thursday night and 7 additional people show up. Two of them are new guys, and one of the two is taking a telescope making class from John Zeigler and is building a 10" Dobson.

I didn't really want to take all of my stuff but I ended up taking my bino/parallelogram combo, the Orion ED80, and my Dobson. Bob Taylor was interested in the parallelogram and wants to build one himself.

The sun had just gone down as we arrived at the Pit 'n Pole. There was a slight breeze from the north so we lined up our cars and mad a wind break that worked really well. Tom Watson set up his Celestron NextStar 11GPS scope. Next in line I had my 12.5" Dobson, with bions and Orion 80ED behind. Mike Bailey set up his 15" Dobson truss tube mount that he just finished over the winter and although he set it up in his driveway a couple of times, we didn't count that, so he had "first light" at our little party and we all got to check it out. Bob Taylor set up his 10" Orion, and John Zeigler set up I think it was a 12.5" truss tube Dobson. John Lundwald and a fellow named Jeff (forgot his last name) didn't have scopes yet. So that was the layout.

The evening began with collimation duties. We showed John Lundwald how to find the concentric circles through an open focuser. After we tweaked every thing as best we could we followed up with the laser collimation tool for good measure. By the time we got through with collimation of all the scopes it was good and dark.

The only trouble I had during the evening was finding the eyepiece I wanted only to find that it had been pressed into service on the Orion. I kept the 9mm in my pocket but I was left with going from 22mm to 9mm a jump I had not anticipated.

I had the 13mm Nagler on the 12.5" Dobson for a while and while looking at Jupiter I thought I could see the red swirl in one of the bands, but when I went to the 9mm I couldn't see it.

The Cassini division was very crisp on Saturn with the 9mm and the small shadow on the ring behind Satrun was very apparent.

...

From there things were really fun. Tom, Mike, Bob, and John were finding all these great objects and we just went from one telescope to another gawking at things.

Tom Watson helped me locate NGC 2392 (Eskimo) nebula. Tom punched in the NGC number in his hand control and before I could walk over to his scope it was on it. Tom Grinned. Since I didn't find it right off in my own scope I checked to see where his red dot finder was pointing and even at that it took me an inordinate amount of time to locate it. I chalked it up to winter rustiness.

I asked if anyone had ever seen color in any of the deep sky objects. John Zeigler commented that he could detect a very slight greenish tint in M42, the Orion nebula. We all looked at it in his Brent Watson class truss tube Dobson. Other people could see it, but I didn't either recognize it for lack of comparison with other objects or I just couldn't distinguish it. We all paused to see how many stars we could see in the spiral asterism west of Polaris that goes in magnitude 4.2, 4.7, 5.2, 5.6, 6.2, 6.7, and 7.2. I could only see down to 5.2 but Lisa Zeigler's young eyes could see at least down to 6.2 if not better. So we could say that the seeing was good, but Tom Watson noted that it wasn't especially steady.

One of the things that everybody seemed to enjoy was the green laser pointer. It saw heavy duty all night. Even when John Zeigler got lost trying to find the road out in the dark, the laser pointer seared a line to the spot. I don't know Lisa Zeigler's background, but she displayed an amazing knowledge of the sky and traced a line around many of the constallations. John Lundwald doesn't know the sky yet but he knows the mythology behind each constellation.

We thought that the moon was going to be the limiting factor due to come up after midnight, but as it turned out the dew did us in. By about 10 O'clock the temperature had dropped into the 20s and dew started forming on everything. People started packing up and leaving, but Bob, Mike, Tom, and I held out tell 11PM. We were engaged in trying to locate M104 when the dew just got to bee too much. We did find NGC 4565, which is always a treat.

All in all it was a really fun evening and all the excitement for the first outing of the year after a long cloudy winter was apparent. As they say, a good time was had by all.

Jim

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