Black Star Canyon Star Party Recap – Saturday September 27th, 2014

We arrived at the BSC star party site just after 6 pm and found 5 cars lined up and waiting. Pretty good considering that the sky had been pretty cloudy all day.

Just after the sun set, I put my Meade 6″ LightSwitch through a manual alignment using Arcturus and Altair. Then I moved onto the crescent Moon which filled my entire eyepiece and re-syncronized. By then, Saturn was visible just in front of the crescent Moon and looked great. During the night we viewed Mars, Uranus & Neptune along with asteroids Vesta & Ceres. Later we did view double star Albireo and the Andromeda Galaxy. Then we checked out globular clusters M13 & M92

Others also were viewing Saturn, Mars and the Moon. Val had one of his bargain Celestron telescopes set up and was good enough to try and find a star for Nesheena & her boyfriend using RA & Dec coordinates. Larry set up his 9.25″ big Celestron set up next to Val showing great views of many objects.

Rob Mckenzie set up his big scope and showed me Saturn at high magnification and then a great view of M13. Kyle and his Dad Curt were having fun viewing the planets and star clusters. Chris (from SpaceX), girlfriend Stephanie & friend Kenny had 2 scopes set up. Sam & Shannon were set up next to us getting smart phone pictures of Saturn and the Moon.

New member Ameeta attended her first OCA star party and managed to use her phone to take some pictures through my scope. Other first time people were Amiga, Ed Sambrano, Jonathan Hankey, Pulkit Jain, Tito Velasco and Tyson Lee.

Others that showed up were Arpad Balough with binoculars, Judy Haskell after a long absence, Martin & girlfriend, Yongsoo & Elisa Kim and Mary (no scope). Hope I didn’t miss anyone and apologize for any names that are not spelled correctly.

Unlike last month’s star party, the night sky never clouded over and remained clear during the entire star party.

We ended up having 18 cars come out and counted about 28 people. The gate was closed about 11:40 pm after the last person left and the temperature was a cold 55 F.

Steve