Observing Report: G.W. Helipad 5/29/06

My observing buddy Tom Kennedy and I caravanned from Northern Va, arriving at the site ~1945 after a dinner break in Timberville.  To my chagrin, for the first time in my dozen visits there was a tent pitched on the main ridge-in fact, in my preferred observing location.  Tom and I decided to make the best of it, picking a somewhat less level spot 50 yards down the ridge.  The camp was occupied by a couple and their ~four year old daughter and dog, so I thought we were probably in for a less disruptive evening than from the typical underaged drinking crowd.  (Mistake #1)  We set up, but since we were pressed for time and not planning on doing serious deep sky work, opted not to try to set up my two light tarps as darkness fell.

The atmosphere had been hazy as we drove through the foothills, and as the sun set high thin clouds covered most of the sky and kept the visual limiting magnitude down to ~4 (Mistake #2, but this one was the fault of the weather forecast.).   The views were truly wretched (nearly every star brighter than ~9th magnitude had a halo of haze), and Bubba and his wife contributed to the poor viewing by making their campfire so big that he needed to go harvest more wood about 2230.  This entailed driving across the road and backing his vehicle into the woods so that he could both use his chainsaw and load his pickup without having to walk more than two feet.  His headlights (and extra fog lights) were perfectly positioned to illuminate us-- he couldn't have done it better if he'd tried!  Bubba and his wife stayed up all night, tending their fire and randomly lighting up the forest with their Maglite when they went walking.  They also had a free-ranging dog that decided we were the most interesting thing around... and which turned out to be a "sniffer". <g>  For all of these reasons, Tom and I were getting ready to break down and head for home -- when the transparency improved.  By 2300 viewing conditions had risen to average for the site, which meant LM ~6 (probably a bit less) and reasonable transparency.  (Previously the light dome of Harrisonburg couldn't even be seen through the haze.)  

Tom and I were both somewhat limited by equipment we'd forgotten to bring (I threw my kit into the car after ten hours working off the "Honey do" list!), but were able to get by fine with some improvisation.  Tom acquired a fine set of 3 minute images of a number of deep sky objects, mostly Messier objects.  Since even single exposures looked great on his computer monitor, I could only imagine what the stacked sets will be like! (See right, for some of the processed images.)  I was intent on testing out the latest round of modifications I'd made to Brutus, rather than knocking off new DSO's, so I opted to star hop my way through all the visible Messiers and some of the more spectacular NGC's.  Leaving aside the two hours I lost to a nap from midnight to 0200 (it had been a looong day of manual labor) I concentrated on the "usual suspect DSO's" in Sagittarius, Scorpius, and Ursa Major, plus had fun bagging some of the "outliers" like M-14 that are a bit more challenging to locate by pure star hopping.  

The jury is still out on some of the modifications I'd made to the scope (like the Teflon coated steel mirror sling that should stretch less than a nylon one under changing temperature and humidity), but the mod I made to the rocker box to permit the scope to go below 25 degrees of altitude --now all the way down to nearly horizontal-- was a clear winner.   While these low look angles are obviously not the best windows of performance for a large Dob, not being able to access them at all prevented doing everything from Messier Marathoning to looking at the inferior planets with the scope, so I'm glad I made the change.

Conditions rivaled or exceeded the Winter Star Party in Florida for darkness, so this is probably the darkest skies I've used my 24" f/4 "Brutus" (Brutus Main Page) in yet.  Highlights included seeing the bridge between M51 and M52 with direct vision, seeing M27 look less light a dumbbell than an M1 style ovoid (the gas between the wings was that prominent!), and seeing lots of detail on Jupiter at 400X (sunglasses wouldn't have been out of line for that view-- a 24" draws a LOT of light on the gas giants).  Seeing was pretty good-besides the good views of Jupiter, the Double Double could be split at 90X, and there was lots of dark sky between the companions when I pumped the power up to 400X.   After 2300 transparency ranged from good to above average, but was never spectacular.  (On outstanding nights at the Pad, I've been able to see the North American and Veil nebulae with my 16" scope without a filter; tonight I couldn't match this even with 24" of aperture.)

These two pictures show the abundance of gear I brought along-- three chairs, three ladders, and a table.  Almost an "astronomy safari".  The scary part is I used all but one observing chair during the course of the night!!!

The previous versions had the sky colors suppressed to show the gear-- this one shows the actual pink hues of the sky

This is an stack of 3 minute images of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulae taken through Tom's 80mm Williams Optic refractor.  This is a fair approximation of the view we had visually through my 24" scope, albeit the Dob showed less color in the gas clouds.