Hogue Park, 08/14/2009

Friday night it was time to give some time to our new (and first!) scope, a Celestron 120mm f/8.3 refractor. So we went out to Hogue Park, for the SJAA party to meet some new friends and start learning the night sky. Although we tried to read up on star party etiquette, we learned numerous new lessons during our first night. We parked far away, dome and headlights off, brought red lights only; just to learn our first lesson that none of this matters at Hogue Park, since the light conditions are so bad anyways :)

We spent the first hour settling in, getting to know our neighbours, and setting up the scope. Then we certainly dropped a screw on the ground and lost it. I thought our night is over, but at least three people instantly came to our help with headlights and replacement screws. Second lesson: never underestimate the helpfulness of astronomers. In no time our scope was back up and working. Then, to offset the previous experience, Daniel S. turned up claiming that the place where we set up was actually his since his car was parking right next to it ;-) Third lesson: a car parking conspicuously with it's back to the pavement, there is probably a Dob waiting inside to be set up.

After moving to a different spot, we set our scope at Jupiter. We expected to spend the night just hopping from one object to the other, but had to quickly realize that queues were building up behind us, so we yielded the view to the visitors' hungry eyes. It was a great turnout, many people came with a lot of kids. It was heartwarming to see them enjoying the view of the planet, even when it was so low on the horizon that the atmosphere made it hard to see any bands at all. But time passed fast, and Jupiter rised high enough that the bands showed nicely.

My most memorable visitor was a boy, who, after looking through the scope, asked me where the zoom was. I had to disappoint him. But he kept looking, and apparently had some problems with the view. I've encouraged him to try to focus it for himself. He happily started to turn the focuser knob inwards, and would not stop, and seemingly enjoyed the view of the growing off-focus bright spot in the middle. Only when he mentioned something as to 'how great that you can get this close', did I realize, that he was still trying to zoom. I did my best to convince him that if he'd turn the focuser in the other direction, he could get a clear picture, but he lost interest, and moved to to the dob next to us.

After Jupiter, we were recommended to look at Albireo. Its astonishing color difference through our scope satisfied many eyes. But a few much smaller instruments split it perfectly, too. I especially liked the cute roughly 2'' tube that was self-built by a young girl after she went to an astronomy camp. It even had a finder.

Later, as the visitors subsided, we had more time to talk to the gathered astronomers. Finally, Daniel, maybe trying to offset what happened earlier :-), became our guide to the sky for the rest of the night. We were shown many eye candy objects with laser-pointers, and then we went to our scope to find them. There is clearly much observing skill we have yet to learn, since most of the fuzzies are just the same for us yet, but some were still unforgettable. Our favorite was NGC 457, the E.T. Cluster. Another Wow! moment was when Daniel put his own 7mm Nagler into our scope, and it resolved one of the clusters around Sagittarius with amazing detail. We also found Neptune based on the Xephem starmap on my laptop, but unfortunately with our stronger eyepiece at 80x it still showed up only as a star for our untrained eyes.

When we were packing, around midnight, Daniel asked us if we wanna go to Henry Coe next night. Since we met many great people and the whole night was a very pleasurable experience, we decided to go, and give a chance for some more serious observing next night.