August 1-2, 2008 MAS Campout with the Stars

The Minnesota Astronomical Society along with REI and Astronomy Magazine present ‘Campout with the Stars‘. Onan Observatory is located at Baylor Regional Park & Campground in Carver County, slightly light polluted about 45 miles from Minneapolis with a few light domes it’s a great place close to the metro for some decent astronomy without having to drive 5 hours for dark sky’s. Quite a few tents were setup on the soccer field below as well as some pop-up’s near the tennis courts (versus the actual campground which I did’nt actually visit). I signed up to volunteer at Onan but, brought a 10″ dobsonian telescope to help split the crowds. I arrived a little past 8pm having mentioned I would be late, quite a few MAS members had quite a selection of scopes setup, lot’s of dobs including Onan’s 20″ Obsession setup outside as well. Quite a crowd of people when I first arrived it took 20 minutes to setup, the telescope required collimation and I in preparation for mounting encoders I replaced the Teflon in the rocker box which made things a little too slippery (the scope needs a little bit of friction or it will not stay put when you point it at something). During twilight I had the scope pointed a Jupiter it was pretty crowded, lots of people including lots of kids. As the stars begun coming out many of the kids suddenly disappeared, many of the campers had gone to bed but, things remained pretty busy through 11pm, around 12pm pretty much all of the campers were sleeping, so I went to work checking out others setups, scopes, and views of different objects. I saw quite a few objects, 2 decent ISS passes, a few iridium flares, galaxies, nebulas, globulars, etc. Around 1am I grabbed the camera and started taking widefield’s, my fastest, widest angle lens was a 28mm f/2.8, I should have brought a film camera for it’s full frame but, I grabbed the Rebel Xt with it’s 1.7 crop factor. Sagittarius (central bulge, galactic center of our galaxy & home of one or more super-massive black hole’s) had a bit of a Jupiter problem it’s soo bright I was afraid it would be way too blown out so I went a little higher in the ‘Milky Way’ to Aquila the bright star is Altair.

Not bad, not soo good, a full frame exposure with the 28mm f2.8 (widest/fastest I have) would have yielded a much larger field with less visible trailing. I took a single exposure of Onan, I should have popped on a 17mm and taken a shot from much further away as well as action shots from earlier in the day, tonight won’t have as many telescopes setup due to the weather forecast.

Around 1:30 or so? the dew kicked and not having a dew controller (another case with battery) I packed up and left.

Edit: August 2nd, 2008

No widefields this evening no photos, saw many more meteors (very active), when I arrived it was pretty cloudy but, cleared slowly. We began observing thru hole’s in the sky, I did’nt have a computerized scope and without a fairly decent patch of sky it’s significantly more difficult to find different objects. Lot’s of kids up front looked at Jupiter between clouds during twilight. Eventually everything cleared and found a couple dozen globular’s, galaxies, nebula’s, and open clusters working Sagittarius for about half the objects and the rest of the sky for the other half. Seeing became pretty bad around midnight, left around 2am. Our guests had maybe 70 tent’s setup on the soccer field, we had a couple pop-up’s, and tents and a couple people slept in the observatory (4 bunks, heated).

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