For way too many years I've been missing going to Stellafane, so this year I ponied up the money and registered for Stellafane '07, and rented a camping space at Breezy Hill for the weekend. It was to be my first visit to Stellafane in 15 years. Sadly, like many well-made plans, this one was doomed to fail. I just had too much going on at the studio and could not get away for the extended weekend, so instead I decided that a one-day trip to Spruce Knob, in West Virginia, would have to do. But as the time to depart approached the weather did not look all that promising, so instead I just decided to stay home and observe from the StarFarm.
Peter Eckels is one of my best friends, a very avid amateur astronomer I'd met back in 1970 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, when we were both members of the Kalamazoo Astronomical Society. Life really is a long and often strange and twisted road and so 37 years after meeting it turns out Peter and I are now both living in Baltimore. Pete was going to accompany me to Stellafane so that he could display and enter his tilted component reflecting telescope into the optical competition there. Not surprisingly, Pete was pretty disappointed that I was not going to be able to make it to Stellafane. So I invited him over to the house for the evening for what we now refer to as URBAN STAR PARTY '07 (USP07). Here then is a report of the event!
The first order of business was to make the 0.1-acre campground and observing field a bit darker by hanging a tarp across my driveway to block the streetlight that sits just across the street from my house. I was surprised how much this helped - enough so that I now have plans for a screen that can be set up each night I observe. Like most places, Baltimore has laws regulating how high a fence can be. Six feet is the limit, but I plan to make the shields removable and easily stored so that they can be put up quickly just after sunset and taken down and stored when I'm done observing for the night.
Here's a view of the campground. There was plenty of room for all participants.
The telescopes assembled on the observing field. Well, okay, on the driveway! In fact this picture illustrates the diversity of form evident at this year's USP; everything from the computer-controlled C14 with chilled ccd camera and automated filter wheel to home-built, one of a kind tilted component reflectors and nothing in between.
By far the most interesting telescope was Peter Eckel's 6-inch tilted component reflector. There is obviously a whole lot of thought and ingenuity that went into this design. Lacking a machine shop and any sort of budget Pete still managed to build a really fine telescope that featured superb hand-made optics, mounted on an equatorial fork featuring clock drive and RA & dec slow motion controls. This picture was taken at around 4:20 which is about what time it was all night long.
Here are the columating masks Pete uses to keep the optical components aligned for best performance.
As the night wears on it's always nice to have something to munch on, particularly while fighting fatigue in the wee hours. So the USP featured a 24-hour refreshment stand complete with cold beer, mary-ju-wanna, and some of Pete's Nuclear Density Black Hole Fudge. One piece of this stuff will keep the eyes propped for quite a while! And hey, the Urban Star Party is held in the middle of a major US city, so we just called the Poppa John's for a couple 'o large pepperoni pies.
While observing visually through the 6-inch I kept the
14-inch running a sequence of images of MV Lyr. For the most part the sky
just wasn't clear enough to get good S/N data for that object, so later I
decided to try a couple of images of interesting "objects of opportunity".
The first image is of the cluster of galaxies that comprises the origin of the
radio source Perseus A. The second image is of the unusual galaxy NGC7497.
Not too bad for soupy orange mag-3 skies!
All in all the first annual USP was a great success! We had a capacity crowd and everyone had a great time!