The Stargaze at Lakeside Elementary for 2002

By Bill Evans

Four of us hung in there and bet on the partly cloudy forecast. Dave Richards brought his 8' Newtonian, KVAS members Robert Dean with a NexStar 114 and Ed Conner with his f15 6" refractor, and of course I was there with my SCT. Optimism reigned supreme as the Principal came out unscrewed the security lights and we continued to set up our scopes. Then as twilight came on us, we spotted Jupiter, then Sirius popped out and the Star Party was on.

Admittedly, we spent most of our time with Jupiter and Saturn, but Ed's cannon, that thing must be 8 feet long and sits on a tripod at least 5 ft high is a monster, got into a couple of NGC objects and I slipped over to M42. With Dave's nebula filter, I spent most of my time there. I have a new Antares 2" SCT Mirror Diagonal and I have to say I saw major improvement in my Jupiter views. Some major banding and extra unrelated stars that I would have argued to be extra moons but for their relation to Jupiter's orbital plane.

I moved to M42 and had the Trapezium very nicely but the nubulosity was very subdued. We still had just enough high cloud that the "Sword" was just barely there naked eye, so I was very pleased with what I was getting. Dave's filter brought out the nebulosity a bit more but cost me one star in the Trapezium.

Robert Dean's little N114 is one of the better I have seen and he was really pushing the magnification. Dave loaned him a Barlow and he really started pushing the limits. But his high point came when he programmed in the Pleiades and was very disappointed with the view. Robert is very new to some aspects of the hobby and still wants to push magnification on certain objects that are hurt by it. Dave came to the rescue and I think Robert went through some sort of an epiphany. He is at least ready to buy an eyepiece of much lower power. The N114 with Dave's 40mm really brought in the Pleiades and you had to use averted vision to see it naked eye.

I think Dave stayed pretty much with the planets and had a lot of lookers. Ed's monster has to be seen and looked through to be appreciated.

We had close to 200 people come by the scopes and even though we were through by 9:30 we were still pretty well beat. Brenda Young, our teacher/hostess spent her entire night in the StarLab. She reported that she had 25 cushions in the Starlab that were full for all but one session and she ran about 15 sessions that were attended mostly by the parents because the kids had already been it during the day throughout the week. So you can see that there were a lot of people and we felt like we talked to most of them.

Of course, as we packed up and the custodian felt like he had to turn on the security lights before we left, the clouds began to clear and the views improved dramatically. All in all, I'd say we had a very successful evening, bearing in mind the true purpose of the evening was to show to the kids some things they may have never otherwise had a chance to see.

Special thanks to Dave Richards and my friends from KVAS who braved the clouds to come out and help. Hope the report wasn't too long.

Bill Evans