ATM - Oregon Star Party

[Bruce Swayze <swayze@europa.com>]

I enjoyed reading Mel Bartels comments about the Oregon Star Party.  I have
the utmost respect for those who had the guts to drive over there Thursday
in the rain.  They were rewarded with one of those "ten" nights with
excellent seeing, and the rest of us missed out.  <sigh>

However, Friday night was still very good.  Steve and I and two of my boys
arrived after dark, too late to set up the 40-inch, so we spent the evening
going from scope to scope visiting friends and making new ones.  I
discovered something doing this.  I usually become go engrossed in my own
activities, my own scope and my own observations that I miss out on so much
of the diversity that you can experience at a large star party.  Not having
my own scope set up Friday night turned out to be a wonderful experience.
I had a ball going around looking at the sights through lots of different
instruments, and visiting with lots of friends.  I never even made it all
the way around the field before some of my friends were done for the night,
and I missed them.  

The seeing wasn't like we heard about the night before, but we still pushed
Mel's 20-inch to 2000x and looked at the Ring Nebula again.  Wow!  It's so
much fun seeing all the old rules being broken and the envelope being
pushed.  I'm not surprised at the performance of Judy's 16-inch f/4.  It
was indeed excellent in every way.  I found out with my 7-inch f/4 that
short-focus optics can be pushed to very high powers if you pay critical
attention to collimation, use good eyepieces, and of course, if you have a
good mirror.  Jim Reilly's new 22-inch is another example.  Outstanding
views!  Jim always has some obscure galaxies to look at that I've never
seen before, and he came forth with some new ones this time, too.  Page
126, if I recall (Uranometria).  

Howard's newly refigured 20-inch blew me away with views of Saturn.  We
stayed up all night and I had the pleasure of showing John Cart the
horsehead nebula in Orion in his 16-inch just before dawn.  We also saw a
stunning low-power view through John Foster's 8-inch f/4 of a very slender
crescent moon coming up among some horizontal layers of clouds just above
the horizon.  The distortions, orangey colors, and effects of turbulence
near the horizon make for some really beautiful views!

Saturday was fun.  One of the things I enjoy most about a big star party is
the swap meet and visiting the vendors.  And one thing I enjoy about the
Oregon Star Party is the swimming hole.  My boys knew about it and nagged
me all morning until we went there.  A rift in the basalt rocks has
produced a narrow deep gorge that a nice little creek runs down through.
The place we go has bubbling water flowing down the rocks into a small pool
that we call the "jacuzzi".  It's just that size, and bubbling like crazy
(no heat though).  You can sit in there and cool off, and then slide over
the edge and down a 10-foot waterfall into a deep larger pool below.  For
the brave and foolish types, you can climb up the vertical rock cliffs to
dizzying heights and jump out into the deep pool below.  Not to be outdone
by a smart-alek teenage son, I joined my 15-yr old on the highest cliff and
took a flying leap myself.  Wow!!  

Saturday night was frustrating.  We spent lots of time and effort setting
up the 40-inch, my 15-inch and 7-inch, and it clouded up shortly after dark
for the rest of the night.

Disappointed at the prospect of not getting to use our scopes at all the
whole weekend, we decided to stay Sunday night.  What a treat!  We saw a
spectacular electrical storm off in the distance, and had very dark skies
all night.  Highlights of spectacular views through the 40-inch included
the crescent nebula in Cygnus, the Saturn Nebula, and an awesome
barred-spiral that Howard Banich suggested looking at.  One of my favorites
is NGC 891, an elongated edge-on spiral with a dust lane splitting it down
the middle.  But the best of all had to be the Veil Nebula.  Breathtaking
views through the O-3 filter left you gasping in amazement.  You can get
lost moving the scope around studying all the twisting ropey details and
feathery parts of this nebula.  Things not seen in ordinary scopes leap out
at you.  You could spend an hour on this one object alone and probably not
see it all.  Far better than any photograph I have ever seen.  But cries of
"telescope hog!" force you to come back down the ladder so the next person
can experience it.  The dawn always comes too soon on nights like this, and
it's off to bed.

Monday found only a handful of us left, but the excitement still wasn't
over.  Just as we were ready to pull out, smoke was spotted coming out of
some trees down below the telescope field.  We ran to investigate and found
ourselves fighting a forest fire for the next couple of hours!  The wind
was whipping it into a frenzy and it would have become out of control in
moments if we hadn't jumped in with shovels, water, and lots of sweat and
hard work to fight the flames down and contain it to a roughly 50 foot
square area.  I'm sure more will be written and discussed about this, but
I'm now a believer in every person having a shovel on hand and being
extremely careful with sparks or flames.  You feel so helpless if you don't
have a shovel.  Thankfully, we did have a few on hand to share or we
wouldn't have stopped it.  

I guess I've rambled on enough for now.  I hope everyone enjoyed this event
as much as I did.


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Bruce Swayze
swayze@europa.com
http://www.europa.com/~swayze    Swayze Optical Home Page 
http://www.europa.com/~swayze/spider.html  Homemade Spider page
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