The documentary film features beautiful, high definition scenic and astronomical photography. The film is about the joy of observing the night sky with telescope and camera. It starts out with Ferris’s reminiscence of observing from a Florida beach as a teenager in the 1950s. It has interviews with a number of amateur astronomers such as Robert Gendler, the Bisque brothers (who were in attendence at the LTO screening), and shots of the 2006 Stellafane ATM convention. It is a beautifully done, extremely interesting film.

The film is being prescreened by PBS at various planetariums. The next showing in the Denver area is at the Fiske Planetarium in Boulder on Wed. Aug. 29 at 7:00 pm. It will air on PBS stations on Wed. Sept 19, check your local listings.

Just after midnight I abandoned the scope, put a tarp on the ground and got out some cushions and blankets from the RV. Laying on the ground next to my wonderful wife, looking up into the blackness at the incredible Milky Way and the numerous brilliant stars from a dark sky site was a great experience. It gives a much different perspective than our normal (vertical) view as you can see so much more of it (highly recommended).

My meteor counts early Monday morning Aug 13 were:

0:30 to 1:30 am : 57 total (54 Perseids, 3 Delta Aquarids)
1:30 to 2:30 am : 77 total (73 Perseids, 4 Delta Aquarids)

These are pretty close to the typical peak rate for the Perseids (60 to 80 per hour).

I arrived around 5:30 pm to have time to set up my scope and tent. John had arrived the night before and was already set up. Gary was up on a tall ladder putting the cage on his 30″ dob. It was quite pleasant, clear blue skies, about 70 deg F, with just a few clouds on the western horizon. Unfortunately, the mosquitos were numerous and hungry so we all had to put on bug spray and wear jackets and caps. Nearby areas had lots of standing water yet, spring snows probably melted only a few ago weeks making excellent breeding grounds for the pesky critters.  About 20 minutes after sunset, around 9 pm, the temperature had dropped quickly into the low 50s and mosquitos weren’t a problem the rest of the evening.

The first object for the evening was the very young crescent moon. John spotted it first with binoculars a minute or two past 9 pm, just above the trees and a low cloud bank. I was able to see it naked eye as soon as I lowered the binoculars.  It took a few minutes to locate in my scope and set up the camera.  I managed to get off a few shots (see last nights post) before the cloud bank to the west covered it over.

We all took a few quick looks at Venus. The quarter crescent was quite sharp and clear. It will be fun to watch as the crescent grows thinner and larger over the next weeks before it disappears near the end of July.

Jupiter was great to view, turbulence was quite good  7/10 Pickering at times but then would change to maybe 5/10 with minutes. The bands were sharp and festoons very apparent.  I opted to image Jupiter the next night so I could capture the GRS crossing (turned out to be a mistake, the turbulence was not good the next night).  I wanted to concentrate instead on logging some galaxies in Virgo and Coma Berenices before they get too low to view this season.

Fox Park is a quite dark site, one that you have to experience to really appreciate.  Clouds look like dark black ink blots, there is no light pollution to illuminate them.  The twilight in the west seems to last longer than normal. Even places we think of as dark the twilight glow is not very apparent an hour and 15 minutes after sunset. Not at Fox Park, it was so dark the glow was very noticable until the end of astronomical twilight, about 10:50 pm.

Around 1:30 I stopped logging galaxies for a few minutes and set up the Xti camera on the counter balance rail. I had forgotten to pack my good camera mount for the top rail. Here is a quick 30 second exposure of a favorite summertime pastime, the constellation Sagittarius. There is much to explore within its borders.

Not a great shot, I carefully focused the camera and then broke the rules adjusting balance by sliding it along the rail, I apparently jiggled the lens as stars weren’t sharp when I processed it.  (Standard Xti 8-55 mm  lens at 24 mm, ISO 1600, and 30 second exposure. Cropped and enhanced with Photoshop Elements2).

I spent the rest of the night on Gary’s ladder looking through his 30 inch dob at the Ring Nebula, the Trifid, both Veils, the Lagoon, the Swan, the Dumbbell, and many, many others. So many great objects, so little time!  We put the scope covers on about 3:30 am to get a few hours of sleep.

I got up around 9 am as it got a bit warm in the tent.  Beautiful blue sky and sunshine overhead but there were dark clouds in the west. By 1 pm there was wind, lightning, rain, and some small hail.  The clouds hung around past sunset. I got a few images of the two day old moon even though the sky was about 80% overcast. Around 11 pm it cleared off in most directions. I took some shots of Jupiter around 12:30 Sunday morning to capture the Great Red Spot at the center. Turbulence was quite bad around 4/10. I haven’t processed them yet, but I doubt they are very good. Clouds returned around 1:30 am but it looked to be mostly clear to the south.  I wanted to capture some faint globulars in the south of Sagittarius so I set up the  StellacamII.  Unfortunately haze was readily apparent on the screen so I gave up on that project. We called it a night around 2:30 am. One good night out of two isn’t bad odds for  us amateur astronomers. We’re looking forward for to more visits in July and August.

(Cactus and flowers picture by Gary Garzone). 

Early in the evening, the Moon and Venus were a pretty view, much more so than the below image shows as the glow from the western sky doesn’t show here.

Unfortunately, clouds moved in and the transparency was poor for the most part. There some were holes in the clouds here and there that allowed occasional views.  Turbulence was quite good so I took some Saturn shots which I’ll post later.  Around 1:30 am or so Sunday morning the sky cleared so we had a good night visiting galaxies in Ursa Major. The Whirlpool Messier 51, Bodes galaxy M80 and edge-on M81 were particularly spectacular through Gary’s 30″ dob.  We also had to look at some of the  summer stuff  the Dumbbell  M27, the Trifid, and the Eagle. Around 3:30 am I tried for a couple comets. I haven’t processed them yet. I fairly sure I got 96P Maccholz as I could see it on the monitor. I’m not sure about C/2007 VZ13, I verified the star field but couldn’t identify the comet.  Stacking and processing may bring it out but I have doubts.

I changed my position so that the limb of a distant tree was just below the crescent to see if I could see it without the binoculars. I was able to see a small light point that matched with the binocular position. I switched between binoculars view and no binoculars several times to check. I was only able to spot the faint patch only twice out of 5 or so tries though, so it was at the muddy edge of visibility.

I also shot a number of images of the horizon with a Canon Xti but used too wide an angle. I suspect high magnification is needed to increase contrast between the bright twilight and the scarcely brighter thin crescent. Sky was mostly clear, no wind, temperature was 47° F, transparency excellent, turbulence fair or better.

Unfortunately, weather is turning rainy for a few days here, so the prospects for seeing the new crescent Tuesday evening and breaking the crescent moon bracket interval aren’t looking good.

Update April 17

The skies cleared late in the afternoon, so I packed up the cameras, scopes, and other equipment and set up at a trail head on Davidson Mesa just off nearby McCaslin Blvd. Unfortunately there was a band of clouds over the mountains to the west which was in exactly the wrong place. It was clear to the south, north, and overhead. Maybe next year..

Last evening 14 of us in the Boulder, Longmont, and Fort Collins astronomy clubs met at Crow Valley Campground north of Briggsdale, CO for a very enjoyable night under dark skies. Conditions were very good — one of those evening we all hope for but only rarely experience. Excellent transparency, a cloudless sky, no wind, and even fairly warm temperatures for this time of year. Temperatures were in high 40s and 50s early in the evening so most of us were in light jackets until 9 or 10. Turbulence was only fair, about 5/10 most of the evening. It got a bit frosty around 4 am with temperatures in the low 20s. In Colorado you soon learn to bring your cold weather gear along year round, so it wasn’t a problem for most.

I spent most of the evening checking off spring objects in Ursa Major and Canes Venatici. I held off imaging until just before 4 so I could catch Jupiter’s red spot and comet Lovejoy. I tried for 96P Machholz as well, but it was behind the trees to the east.

I managed to get in some practice shooting the crescent moon at dawn in preparation for tomorrow morning and Tuesday evening this week. The shot above was not the best. I had better composition in some earlier shots which I lost due to an incorrect setting in my focusing software — it deleted all but the last image taken. In early shots the moon was lower and the wind mill wasn’t against the tree in the background. Darn… It makes a fairly nice desktop wall paper though, despite the obvious flaws. Here is a 1280×1024 version.

It was a fabulous night! The sky was clear all night, turbulence was 6/10, no wind, the transparency was excellent, and humidity was low. We were in shirt sleeves until about 8pm (temperature in high 50s) and we didn’t have to put on much winter gear until the temperature dipped to freezing around 1 am.

I succombed to Messier madness for the first time. I cheated and used the Nexstar 11 “goto” to locate most of them. Except for M74 and M55 all 109 objects were trivial to locate. The scope performed flawlessly and put most objects within the middle 1/3 of a 30 arc-min field. Only a few were off a half a field — and it did it all night long without even a resync. I’ve recently had problems with “goto” accuracy. A few days ago I located a loose connector going to the altitude sensor micro-switch .

While waiting for some Messier objects to rise in the early morning, we had time to visit some favorites like the Veil nebula, blue snow ball, blinking planetary, NGC 4565, ghost of Jupiter, and many others. Saturn was excellent and even Jupiter was looking good in the steady air despite being low in Sagitarius.

I didn’t try for the 110th object, M30. We had a tough time locating globular M55 shortly after 6. M30 wasn’t due to rise for another 20 minutes. I’ve read that M30 is extremely difficult, and maybe impossible to locate unless the date and everything are just right if you are north of 35 degrees latitutde.

Only downside was that I had planned on doing a couple comets and the Pluto occulation with the Stellacam2. Unfortunately, the driver for the video card I use crashed the notebook and removed all the other video drivers in the process. The video card is going to be reassigned to the trash shortly.

Compare this to one I took on Jan 29 — excellent transparency makes a difference!

I set up the 300D to take some time exposures, but was quite dismayed when I remembered that the batteries were still in the charger back at home! Fortuanately, I had brought along the Stellacam2 so I set it up on the Celestron Nexstar11 with a 0.33 focal reducer. I was quite pleased to discover that I could set the gain very high (12/14) and still not have much background noise. Normally I can only set to about 8 or 9/14.

Around 00:30 I took this image of M51 and its companion to the north NGC 5195.

At the same time I was imaging this, my friend Gary was looking at it in his 30 inch dob nearby. It was really cool to compare the views. M51 is an awesome object in his 30 inch. The spiral arms are absolutely amazing to trace and dark lane extending below NGC 5195 is very apparent. The image on the notebook from the Stellacam2 is pretty stunning as well. The image is much noisier, but the same structures can be seen. Still though, it just can’t compare to the view through a large scope at dark site.