Public Star Party 8/6/2016

Last night I went out with the local astronomy club to a club site at Damariscotta River Association land trust. In the afternoon a rain shower must have rolled through as the ground was a little damp. Lots of clouds but weather forecasts said clearing by 10 or 11pm. Got to the site after a stop for dinner in a nearby town. Really, really humid. Like so humid I found it kind of hard to breathe. Lots of ground fog too. Cloud were pretty thick, but watched some sucker holes open up just around dusk. I brought my AD10 dob, another member brought his 80mm refractor on a AVX mount, another member brought a donated Orion XT10 dob, and finally one last but not least member brought an interesting Meade 7″ Mak mounted to a Losmandy mount. Quite the gem. He explained how the rear cell was modified to remove 7lbs of counterweight as it was originally designed for a different mount. Unfortunately I didn’t make time to look through his scope, but other members said it was quite the gem.

You could literally watch clouds form and disappear before your eyes for the entire time we were there. We caught a brief glimpse at the crescent moon just above the horizon. Very orange and boiling due to the weather conditions. I could pick out some nice craters however. When it was clear, I took a look at M57 Ring Nebula which looked pretty good in my 14mm ES eyepiece. One of the club members mentioned that he’s never seen M56 in a scope (neither had I), so after I was pointed to the general location in the sky, I found it in my scope at 26mm, then switched all the way down to my ES 8.8mm. That really made the glob stand out, many individual stars in a compact space, with slight blue-ish tinge if I remember. After that I looked briefly at Saturn at 26mm then it got clouded over. At that point, the event turned more to a campfire-less social event. Discussing a wide variety of topics while waiting to see if the clouds would let up. They didn’t and we packed it in after around 3 hours.

I saw two nice meteors (I think they were related to the Perseid meteor shower going on, including one that left a smoke trail. Other people saw more than I did.


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