[AZ-Observing] All AZ Star Party

John Majewski and I headed for the party Saturday afternoon. It was 
my first time there. John was reading the directions from the SAC 
Newslettter. It seems the directions are a bit off. We ended up 
making a wrong turn on dirt roads twice. Seems others had the same 
problem.

Once we arrived we found a gigantic area, flat and open with 
scattered cars and telescopes and folks around the edges. The sun was 
hot but not too bad. There was a breeze. We looked through Jeff 
Vandecar's  alpha filtered refractor.  A most impressive sight seeing 
the two gigantic sun spots and all the flares along the edge of the 
sun.

As darkness fell the wind dies and the bugs came out.Tiny black bugs 
(nats?). Then some mosquitoes. They weren't bad, however. Once the 
sun was well below the horizon it got very dark. The sky glow from 
Phoenix and Tucson was there, but not too bad. Overhead was very good 
seeing. Comet Encke (I think that was what it was) was very visible 
up near M31. With a 32 mm eyepiece on my 13.1" f 4.5 DOB you could 
easily see both the comet and M31  at the same time. That's and easy 
way to find the comet. Jeff Vandeca was planning an taking some 35mm 
pictures of M31 and was worried the comet might spoil it, but it 
seemed far enough away that it wouldn't. I might try a shot of the 
comet tonight with my 8" SCT or maybe even my 6" refractor.

George (I don't know his last name) set up with an 8" Meade SCT GPS 
unit with all the trimmings (electric focuser, special mirror 
coating... I was very impressed with it. I think the images of M31 
were as bright in the 8" as in my 13.1". After a could of quick 
calibrations, it was near dead on for finding any object by just 
entering the item in the keypad. M27 Dumbbell Nebula and M11 (Wild 
Duck Cluster) were impressive.

Around 9:00 PM Saturday night a strong wind picked up and in addition 
to getting rather cool, the seeing went down the tubes. We packed up 
and left around 8:30 PM. Aside from the poor directions, we had a 
great time.

Jeff
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                                           Jeff Hopkins
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