Brutus ready to rock...

 Winter Star Party (WSP):  42 hours of driving, 12 hours of observing

Summary

After last year’s almost perfect weather, by the law of averages WSP was due for the scales to balance, and they did with a vengeance, starting with rain and winds during check-in and continuing with grayed out nights mixed with moderate to mediocre ones.  Still, a day in the 75 degree Florida heat beat sitting through another Washington area ice storm regardless of the seeing!!!!

Highlights from my personal scorecard include:

The good

 The bad

Assorted images from WSP:

Staking out a prime beachside location in the rain-- using chairs, ladders, and our ground mat

Did I mention that it was muddy? <g>

I battened down my scope, since more rain was imminent.  You can see how close I was to the ocean-- 15 linear feet or 2 feet vertically from high tide.  If we'd had a storm surge, I would have had to move quickly to prevent Brutus from washing out to sea!

This is why I battened down the scope -- if you look closely, you can see the gallon or so of water that pooled between the truss tubes on the scope cover.  The Telegizmos material proved it is watertight!

Here are some shots showing the wonderful panoramic views I had from the beach looking east, south, and west.  Too bad the haze on the horizon kept me from fully exploiting the potential of this site for seeing the southern hemisphere's Deep Sky Objects!

East                      South                         West

A trio of NOVAC members-- Jim, Bryon, and Tom.  We shared a "Chickee" hut built for six girls-- and it was none to small for three guys who range from 6'2" to 6'6" !!!

Coda to the trip-- what I faced when I got home.  (The ice was so thick and slick that I fell shortly after taking this shot-- only the second or third tumble I've had in nearly 30 years!)

Night shots (all taken with the Fuji Finepix 5200 at its maximum exposure time of 15 seconds and ISO 1600)

Brutus pointed at the night sky

Nighttime observing

Orion and Canus Major (I'll try to post a version with image stack and dark frame subtraction to see how much it differs)

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Here are the more detailed notes from my observing log.

It was a 1297 mile drive from my door to the entrance of Girl Scout Camp Wesumkee on West Summerland Key.  Our party of four stayed the night before in Palmers Resort on Big Pine Key, since queuing of vehicles outside the entrance was only supposed to begin at 0600 on Monday the 12^th on peril of police ticketing.  We arrived at 0550 and were the 17^th car in line.  The clouds that had been with us since the night before delivered rain, and we set up our “footprint” (a ~20 x 8 foot mat) in moderately hard rain, on the front edge of the berm about 15 feet above the high tide mark.  When the rain let up I unloaded  Brutus, though the rains resumed and the scope’s rocker box was wet by the time I got the Telegizmos cover on it.  In a break in the rain later that afternoon I put the truss tubes and upper cage on.

Having staked out a prime beachfront observing site, I was somewhat chagrined when a large truck pulled onto the sand behind us and disgorged four pallets of equipment.  Team Meade --the event's largest vendor-- had arrived, and was located a scant dozen feet away!  The huge tripod they erected looked like a post-modern lunar lander module in silver and blue anodized aluminum.  I half expected to see little green men pop out!  They put a 20" RC scope on it-- a true behemoth.  (I'm not sure if folks who looked through it and then Brutus were just being polite when they said the view through my scope was better-- but I did have 4" of aperture on them, and they were handicapped by a 40% central obstruction...) 

 We had considerably more rain Monday night, as well as high winds.  I was careful to tether the scope and tie the cover on with extra cordage, even though the wind could still find ways to inflate the cover.  On Tuesday the 13^th I also went to Wil Tirion’s talk on Uranography-- the history and art of making star charts.  I hadn’t realized that he did every aspect of “Star Atlas 2000 First Edition” himself-- down to designing the cover-- and that every bit of it was created on a drafting table.  I got Wil to autograph my copy of Star Atlas 2000, and heard the tale surrounding the creation of  Roger Sinnott‘s “Pocket Sky Atlas”.

I opted *not* to uncover the scope on Tuesday until late afternoon, to avoid heating it up too much.  When I did, I discovered that the rocker box had about ½” of water sitting it in-- and that, per usual, I had left the Sky Commander controller and the Dob Driver hand set sitting on the rocker bottom.  Both were dripping wet and even though I left them to dry in the sun for the remaining 90 minutes until dark, I opted not to risk running either of them until they’d had a full day to dry out.  My fan connector was also wet, but I was able to dry out this relatively simple connection, and in any event had it blown all it would have required was a one amp fuse to get back to the status quo ante.  (I chalk this leakage up to ‘user error’ in not making sure that the cover was tucked in around some of the protrusions at the base of my rocker box, rather than any shortcoming in the Telegizmos cover.  I battened the scope down later with greater care in the week in anticipation of rain, and would have been very surprised had it gotten wet.)

When I uncovered the mirror about 45 minutes prior to dusk, I discovered that some of  the water trapped in the base apparently had condensed on the primary, which was soaked.  Since I was not confident that this moisture did not contain grit blown from the beach, I resolved not to manually clean the mirror, but rather to just point it near-- but not at-- the sun and let it dry naturally.  This, of course, left many water spots.

I had forgotten that a big scope like Brutus draws an entourage, and even before I had aligned the Telrad and spotter with the scope, I had three or four folks standing in line for a view.  My neighbor- who was imaging through an AstroPhysics refractor, was a frequent guest, as was one of the vendors/principals in the Springfield Telescope Makers and Stellafane.

When the clouds rolled in, I spent an hour talking to Al Nagler and his wife, and exchanging looks through his 127mm scope and Brutus through the sucker holes.  (When Al came over I’m lucky I had the 26mm Nagler in the scope and not my Meade 14 UWA! <g>)

This was a pure star-hopping evening.  Although I aspired to work the band of ~20-25 degrees above the ocean/southern horizon, we had a cloudbank/haze that totally obscured the lowest 10 degrees of sky, and hampered the views up to 20 degrees altitude.

Nonetheless, among the highlights of the southern skies were:

The Sombrero showed some structure, but was a bit disappointing to me compared to the grandeur of seeing it through the 30” in New Mexico in 2005.

In terms of weather, the skies ranged between totally clear and totally overcast.  Transparency and seeing were-- at best-- average. 

Equipment issues:  I had neglected to bring the counterweight for the ST120 over from our Chickee, and hence could not use my Rich Field Scope!  About 0300 I began hearing a crinkling, metallic noise that reminded me of one of my Dob Driver springs being tensioned.  Neither of them were out of place-- but I then discovered that part of the aluminum facing around the ground board had come lose, and was being pulled off as the scope rotated.  With this malfunction, I shut down for the evening.   I got to sleep sometime after 0430, and we got up about 0815 on Wed. the 14^th.

We had plenty of mud (6-8” worth in the car ruts near our hut), and an ant and (I think) rat infestation in our Chickee hut.  Can’t blame them – they were after our food.

On Wed night the 14^th I opted to go for automation vice starhopping, and got my Digital Setting Circles working with 0.1 degree accuracy.  We looked mostly at mostly classic/traditional favorite objects (Messiers, etc.), since conditions were if anything worse than the night before.  I did succeed in viewing and sketching what I later confirmed to be the "G" and "H" stars in the M-42 Trapezium, which was a 'first' for me.

The dew was very heavy, and my eyepieces became unusable early on.  I had to borrow a DC hairdryer (which I’d meant to bring myself but forgot) to clear the eyepieces, at which point my notion of a single chemical hand warmer backed by a piece of camping pad foam proved adequate to keep the eyepieces clear.  The secondary later dewed over, and had to be cleaned with the hair dryer also.  The clouds came and went, and rolled in heavily enough ~0200 to drive me to stop observing-- which was not a bad thing, given my sleep situation (3 hours on Tuesday night).

Thursday night promised to be windy and rainy, so I battened down the scope.  We had plenty of wind but no rain by dawn on Friday.  It was gray and looked ready to rain at any time.  Since the forecast for Friday night was dismal, and staying Saturday night was not an option (would mean getting home too late on Monday), I opted to break my scope down while it was fully dry, rather than risk bringing wet gear home to sub-freezing temperatures where it might take a week or more to dry out.  Once we had broken camp, Tom Kennedy and I decided to start the drive home at 1230, rather than wait for the door prize drawings at 1500.  This proved to be a mistake—traffic was miserable on and off the Keys (it took us five hours to go 200 miles), and I missed getting a nice set of observing books that would have been my door prize had I stayed.  Oh well, another lesson for the future.