Rocky Mountain Star Stare 2001

My notes from RMSS 2001:

First off, a star party of this size (300-400 people) is more a social event than an astronomical event. You spend a lot of time looking through other people's telescopes, you spend a lot of time letting other people look through yours. And that's just at night -- in the daytime, you just hang out, mostly (I'm surprised I didn't gain weight, people kept feeding me, and that doesn't even take the donuts into account).

The weather was pretty good this year. It was cloudy on Wednesday night, but RMSS didn't officially start until Thursday, so every night of RMSS was pretty good. We got some clouds and rain in the afternoon (the only significant rain was Friday), but the latest it cleared up was 10:30 on Thursday, and considering this was the shortest night of the year, you couldn't really do much observing before then anyway.

I did get a kick out of the signs saying "icy roads" on Park County 77 out there. The days got up to 60 or 70, and it mostly stayed around 50 at night (which is quite warm). I ran back home during the day on Thursday, I tried coming down 285 from Denver instead of the usual 25 to 24 route. It's slower that way (even with all the construction on 25 and 24), but it is more scenic, and I have to admit that with my recent introduction to rock climbing, I wanted to climb every rock along the way.

Of course, the reason I went back on Thursday was because in all my careful packing, I'd forgotten my BP meds, which sucked. Originally I'd planned to return to civilization of Friday, and get my shower in the middle of the camping, but that didn't work out. On the good side, I took up three dozen Krispy Kreme donuts (hey, I like the short spelling) to the CSAS folks who mostly hadn't had any before. One dozen for the folks working registration, the rest for people camped out near me.

Anyway, I took both the Pronto and the C11 up. Spent most of my time looking through the C11, don't think I used the Pronto at all at night this year (did a little solar observing with both scopes, there were some pretty decent complex sunspot groups). I mostly did the star party thing of looking at bright objects (including some of my favorites) the first night (the Ink Spot, also known as Bernard 86; M13 and NGC6702, a relatively bright galaxy in the same field of view; M22, M8, M20, M17, etc.). I planned to hunt planetaries the second night, but got distracted looking at galaxies in Virgo and Coma Berenices, including most of the Messier objects in the Virgo cluster and the Siamese Twins. I did end up looking at about seven later on, including a couple really good ones and my favorite find of the evening -- NGC6440 and 6445 -- a neat pairing of a globular and planetary in the same field of view. Both were about the same brightness, and even in the 22" scope, it was hard to tell which one was which.

The last night I started by going back to Mars (which I'd looked at the first night, too), then worked on a few more planetaries before "wrapping it up" at about 1AM (and proceeded to get sidetracked looking through other people's scopes until about 3AM when I finally made it to bed).

I did put the Pronto on the G11 at one point, but I need different mounting hardware if I ever plan to do it for real -- I couldn't get the focuser free and the thing balanced at the same time with the stuff I had.

I did some hiking and biking around during RMSS, but not as much as I'd hoped. On the other hand, I put about twelve miles on my mountain bike going back and forth around the site and hanging out with people. At one point somebody asked me if I was the official greeting committee or something, and I had to admit that I probably was.

I also made money at this RMSS -- I sold a little-used 20mm TeleVue Plossl I had lying around for just a bit more than registration, meals (we had two catered meals, Friday and Saturday), shirts, and gas. Well, until I ordered one of the nice shirts, anyway. I did get burned, of course, but not until the last full day there. Didn't bother me too much, except when I was trying to sleep and unspeakable one decided to lick my nose. Ow.

And those are the highlights.