Rocky Mountain Star Stare 2002

My notes from RMSS 2002:

RMSS 2002 was a bit more exciting than anyone would have liked. An otherwise near-perfect event (at least from my point of view) was marred by the fact that the forest started burning down halfway through the weekend. That was just slightly annoying.

I got up to the site on Wednesday (as I've usually tried to do in recent years). Several of us had planned to have dinner, and each of us brought various dishes for the group. I brought a couple of cheesecakes -- my trademark pumpkin cheesecake and a raspberry-pineapple cheesecake I threw together (since I'd waited too long to get bananas for the banana-pineapple cheesecake I'd originally planned, and the bananas in the store were far too green). I think everyone enjoyed the meal; everyone contributed key ingrediants, and it was gratifying to hear Chris Early admit that he'd been misguided when disparaging the concept of pumpkin cheesecake.

Much food was to be had throughout the weekend; besides the food we brought, there were catered meals from Red, Hot, and Blue both Friday and Saturday. It made me happy, I'm quite fond of their hot stuff (as anyone who knows me knows, hot makes me happy). I never really cut into my supply of Clif Bars. For the second straight year, I stuffed myself and still somehow lost weight. I guess I ran around a lot.

The conditions were almost ideal for astronomy during the party (unfortunately, they were also ideal for starting forest fires, but what can you do?) It rained for a couple of days before, which kept the dust down at first, but after several days of no precipitation (normally, we get afternoon showers, this year it barely threatened), it had gotten dry, and the dust was the worst I'd ever seen up there. With the drought, there were few wildflowers to be seen, and even the yuccas were unhappy (bordering on dead). Still, we got three nearly perfect nights (clear, no wind, not too cold), and it looked like we were going to get a fourth.

I really can't remember what I observed, it was mostly a tour of the favorites, since there were a lot of people wandering around looking through scopes and lots of other scopes to compare views with. I just never got organized. I set up next to Art DeBrito and Brian Dumas this year (I'd missed him when he didn't come the year before, but Art had been set up near me last year), and with Theron Hampton showing up later, we had fun. Oh, yes, we did. Lots of silly, silly, noisy fun. Too much, probably.

One thing of note was that I and a friend of mine (Stephanie Pahl) had an entry for the ATM contest -- a Lego telescope. She came up with the idea about a week before -- we were walking through Wal-Mart (mostly killing time for something we were going to later) and (of course) I had to check out the Lego isle. She said "Hey, wouldn't a Lego telescope be cool?" I stopped, thought for a couple of seconds and said "You know, I do have enough Legos." The rest, as they say, was history.

I ended up spending most of the weekend working on it (I did the bulk of the building, she supplied the optics and such), and by the time RMSS rolled around, we had a functioning telescope. Well, mostly. After struggling to finish it at the site, we got it to work optically (although the secondary could have been bigger), and it gave us nice views of the nearby mountains, but we never really licked the balance (it was front-heavy when we started, and with the off-axis telrad we never did better than get it to balance "on average"). Of course, it had a rocket motor and little astronauts, too (they were vital to the proper balance of the scope. Really, trust us). It was lots of fun, most people seemed to think it was pretty cool, and we even bagged an award (second place for "innovation").

Of course, the event of the weekend was the fire. We were camped about three miles from where the Hayman fire started on Saturday afternoon. I was probably one of the first people to see it; I saw the very first plumes of smoke come up over the hill while I was talking to Brian. I knew what it was right away -- given the conditions, it couldn't have been anything else, and immediately ran over to see how bad it was. Eventually the Sheriff's department asked us to evacuate, but since the wind was strongly away from us, there was no real hurry (and the Sheriff's department took a little while to decide). We had time to eat dinner, give out the awards, and do the raffle drawing while the slurry bombers flew overhead.

I eventually pulled out during late twilight (it took me that long to pack up all my crap -- take a look at last year's before and after pictures on the RMSS 2001 page. I had slightly more than last year, if anything). I grabbed a few pictures of the fire before I left (although I forgot a flashlight, making camera operation difficult, there was a DAS member on the hill watching the fire, too, and he gave me a light to set up the camera. I think we were the last two out). The fire never did make it to the site, it immediately jumped the road (Park County 77) and headed northeast, but evacuating was obviously a good idea. Even if we could have guaranteed that the fire wouldn't reach us, the smoke would have made observing pointless once the winds died down (as they usually did after dark that time of year). We had a heck of an ashfall in Denver the next day, though. It was the first of the bad air days, something we saw a lot of during the summer.

We did do a fair amount of damage to the site. It was so dry that the cars (and even people) ripped up the ground pretty bad, and alpine meadows are delicate at the best of times. Normally, when there isn't a drought going on, they bounce back from that much abuse within a year or two, but only time will tell. I guess, ultimately, it's not the worst that can happen; the forest fire kind of puts it in perspective.

I aways seem to sunburn something during the RMSS weekend, and this time was no exception; I was careful about keeping ahead on the sunscreen, but I forgot to wear a hat and torched my scalp (even through my long hair). Oh, well.

Oh, I should probably mention the extraordinarily amusing squirt gun, bo staff, and port-a-potty incident, but I won't.