[Chaos-l] Observing At SRSP Saturday Night

[Robert Nielsen]

Well, it seems that if you are persistent (and lucky) you can grab some decent observing in the midst of all this rain ... at least that is what Jayme, Allen Davis, and I did Saturday night at Staunton River!

After the session was rained/clouded out on Friday night, I noticed that the forecast for Saturday wasn't nearly as bad.  And as the day wore on, and storms didn't develop, Jayme and I exchanged e-mails and wondered whether we should drive up to SRSP and try to observe Saturday night.  Jayme checked with the park personnel, and set things up.

For the first hour to hour and a half, the skies were partly cloudy.   But it was possible to show folks Saturn in the low western skies, and everyone was impressed who got to see it then.  During the beginning of the night, we tried to show people interesting objects in the sucker holes. It was tough ... because just as we figured out something was visible, the clouds would cover that target over and we would look up and figure out another target, just to have IT cloud over.  One time Allen remarked that the clouds moved over in between the time he chose the target and the telescope stopped slewing!

But then sometime around 10 PM, the sky started clearing!  I was surprised (but shouldn't have been ... the Clear Sky Clock said it was supposed to be clear).   My first clue was when I could see a major part of the Milky Way overhead ... and at Staunton River the Milky Way is impressive when the skies are clear.   Saturday night was especially nice because we were viewing the MAIN part of the Milky Way, from Sagittarius through the Great Rift all the way to and through Cassiopeia.   

Jayme had a Duke scope, Allen had his Tak FS152 refractor, and I had my Tak FSQ106 refractor.  About the time the skies cleared, the movie was over in the visitors center and people walked by on the way back to the campsites.   We got to show the Dumbbell Nebula, Albireo, M71, M5, M4, the Coathanger, the Lagoon Nebula, and even some objects that I didn't think would appear as good in smaller refractors - like the Trifid Nebula and other globular clusters, like M13.   I especially like the wide field view of the Lagoon AND the Trifid I got to see in my FSQ.

After the visitors left, the skies stayed decent.   I got my first view of the Andromeda Galaxy this season.   And Allen showed what a great scope he has when we viewed the Veil Nebula through his Leitz eyepiece.   About every half hour, a band of clouds would come in from the west and we all thought that was the end ... but in about 5 minutes ... the clouds had blown off to the east and we had clear skies again (although I think the transparency dimished just a little with each of these cloud bands).   I just sat there looking at wide field views of the Milky Way ... of the North American Nebula, of the area around M71.

We had a visitor from Norfolk stay with us until pretty late ... probably 11:30 or midnight ... who was very interested in astronomy.  I sure hope he's able to get a scope soon.  Jayme talked to him quite a while, showing him where things were in the sky and showing him targets in Jayme's scope.  I suggested he check out the Back Bay astronomy club over where he lives.

Around 1 AM, with the skies still clear and Jupiter rising in the east, we packed up our scopes and headed home.   Allen had mentioned that *eventually* rain was supposed to show up, and we didn't want to push it.  But we still got quite a nice night of observing, in spite of the nasty weather we've been having.   I felt especially lucky when I awoke the next morning to the sound of rain ...

Robert