Mid Florida Star Gaze '05 - A Note from the President

Kye's Star Farm - March 10 ~ 12, 2005

Our 6th annual Mid Florida Star Gaze has come and gone, and once again this year, the weather cooperated with us by providing clear skies with no rain and only a small amount of high level haze. Although it rained all day on Wednesday, the cold front passed during the night, and Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were wonderful.

In keeping with what has clearly become a club tradition, my wife (Willette) set up a full kitchen and galley service, and nobody was left wanting of any type of food or munchable goodie. Coffee and donuts were available all night long, and breakfast was served from sunrise till 11 AM. An adequate lunch was served at noon, with a scrumptious dinner for all shortly before sunset each day.

Although the work load in preparation for our annual Star Gaze is high, the pleasure derived from it is even greater, and everyone is already looking forward to next year's event.

George De Barros

A Fantastic Weekend

Once again I had the pleasure to host my third Mid Florida Stargaze, and I can summarize the entire event in one word, "Fantastic". I arrived on Thursday afternoon, to find six brave members of the Club (John & Maria Clifton, Jim Kimball and Fred, Willi and Beth Lehman) already there. They had spent the previous night in a torrential rain storm which brought over 3 inches of rain. I was a little smarter, and waited until things dried up. The rest of the weekend was almost perfect. If not for the cold, I would probably have all nighters every night, but being a thin blooded "South Floridian", by 2AM, my hands and feet were completely frozen, and I was pretty much out of commission.

People started arriving Thursday, Friday, and by Saturday, we had a wonderful crowd with a terrific appetite for the night sky of Venus. I believe everyone was pleased with the viewing and many members stayed all night. Me, I was satisfied viewing all my "Red Stars", and I was pleased that this year, my wife decided to join me. Saturday afternoon, a group of us were treated to a 3 hour trip to an Archbold cattle ranch, and besides the fantastic scenery, we also saw various wild Floridian wild life, including a Bobcat!

Saturday night, was the best night for viewing. The skies were clear and steady. I believe I lasted until 3AM, and just missed the Summer Milky Way, which is best viewed at this location. I'm really not worried, since this summer, I'll be moving next door, and will have a chance to enjoy this magnificent sight every night. By Sunday morning, everyone was fully satisfied, and thinking about next year's star party.

At this time, I like to thank several members of our Club, that made this year's party a huge success. First, If not for Willi Lehman and Maria Clifton, we would be hungry and thin.They put up a huge feast every night, and I know that i'll have to go on a diet for at least one week. Fred Lehman again came through with all the equipment including our famous refrigerator. John Clifton and Jim Kimball were there early and helped set up the field, and of course our hosts Al, Kye and Carl Ewing. I thank them again, and hope to have many more star parties in the future.

Sketch

Jay Albert

Another Trip to Venus

While I'm not taking anything for granted, great observing at the Mid Florida Stargazes at Kye’s Star Farm in Venus, Florida seems to have become the norm. Certainly the tradition continued this year. At the outset, however, I'd like to thank Kye, Al and Carl Ewing for being such gracious hosts, George DeBarros for taking care of the name tags, Fred Lehman, Jim Kimball and John Clifton for setting up the field and, of course, Willette Lehman and Maria Clifton for feeding us more than enough to keep us going through those cold, clear nights.

I began observing Thursday night (3/10) with a look at Mercury through Bill Bucklew's Meade 7" Maksutov. Mercury was already low in the west and flickered like a flame in the rapidly chilling air. After aligning my Celestron NexStar 11 GPS, I also took a look at Mercury. By this time, it was only around 5º above the horizon. I could barely discern Mercury’s gibbous shape, which giggled like Jell-O in an earthquake, while atmospheric refraction began to separate its light with green at the top and red at the bottom. After viewing Saturn, I spent most of that first night looking at galaxies and other objects in Ursa Major. Among these was IC2547, a faint, very low surface brightness dwarf galaxy in the M81 group. I had never seen this object before and it required averted vision to be seen at all. I also took time to observe the spiral arms in M51, the always spectacular Omega Centauri globular, the Centaurus A radio galaxy with its wide dust lane, M104, Jupiter and Comet Macholz, which is shown in the first sketch (north up).

We thought Friday night would be rotten. It was cool and mostly cloudy all day and the forecast for that night was for more clouds. To our surprise and delight, however, the clouds blew away and the wind died down as it got darker. Our first sight was of the beautiful Earthshine on the skinny crescent Moon with Mercury only about 4º below and to the right of the Moon. I also had my best view of Saturn during this Stargaze. I spent most of this night on star clusters and planetary nebulae in the Monoceros, Canis Major and Puppis region. While viewing open cluster M48 in nearby Hydra around 10:30, clouds rolled in and appeared likely to hang around awhile. By 11:20 it had become even cloudier, so I put my scope in hibernation mode and hung around with the other observers. I finally gave up and went to bed under cloudy skies around 1am. The next morning Fred told me it had cleared up by about 3am.

Saturday was brilliantly sunny with a deep blue sky. We had a wonderful tour of the Archbold research facility’s 10,300-acre ranch that afternoon. We saw a live bobcat (the first time I’d ever seen one), a couple of deer, an armadillo, lots of wild pigs, alligators, birds and, as you might expect, even cattle. Saturday night was the best of the three with magnitude 6.5 transparency although the seeing was only about 5 to 6 out of 10. I observed too many objects to list here but have attached a few galaxy sketches. One of my favorite objects of the night was the Hickson galaxy group that Jim Mayes brought to my attention. The sketch below shows the group centered on NGC3190 in Leo. Just north of NGC3190 in the faintest member, magnitude 13.1 NGC3187. NGC3193 is to the right (east) and NGC3185 is to the left. When I boosted the magnification from 70x to 156x in my Meade 18mm Super Wide Field, NGC3185 was almost cut in half at the edge of the field and NGC3187 practically disappeared. I finally put my scope away around 2:30am and wandered around to see what those still operating were doing and look through some other scopes before going to bed about a quarter to four. It doesn't get much better than this!

More Sketches:

Photographs
Archbold Cows	Southwestern sector at sunset	Archbold Armadillo
Archbold Tour Bus	Southwest sector mid morning	Southeastern sector at dawn
Southwestern sector early morning	Jim Mayes selling his tent	Joe Badal's new scope

Crab Nebula In Taurus

M104 in Virgo

M83 in Hydra

M51 in Canes Venatici

M57 in Lyra

Fred Lehman

A Weekend of Imaging

Every evening at dusk I snuggled myself into my portable domed observatory, and I spent the remainder of the night imaging an assortment of clusters, nebulae, and galaxies. There was at least a couple of hours of excellent conditions each night, with Saturday being the best of the bunch. The temperature was very cold for this time of year, but the low humidity that accompanies the low temperature was very welcome. Dew wasn't a big problem till well after midnight, and by then your fingers were so numb from the cold that you couldn't turn the focus knob anyhow.

My scope suffered many maladies this year, some of which were even my own fault! While setting up Thursday morning, it became apparent that I had neglected to bring the AC power adapter for my telescope. This is more or less a big problem because the batteries will not last three full nights. As it turns out, I also neglected to hook up the charger after the previous weekend's viewing, so I was starting out with a set of batteries that were already half-dead. Not good.

The next thing to become obvious is that I somehow forgot to bring the extra counter-weights needed to balance the OTA when imaging with a light camera instead of viewing with a turret full of heavy eyepieces. The combination of low batteries and high current draw from an unbalanced tube caused the voltage to droop to the point that the telescope's onboard computer became confused and disoriented. This had the undesirable consequence of a total software malfunction which in turn prevented the telescope from properly slewing or tracking. I reset the firmware and cleared the software which resolved the problem for the remainder of the evening. However, sometime during the night while deep into a sleep-deprived stupor I bumped into the scope hard enough knock it well out of polar alignment. Since the autoguider was functioning perfectly, I simply ignored the alignment problem and let the autoguider earn its keep for a change.

Friday evening I attempted a new polar alignment, but once again something went awry with the software and both the RA and the Declination motors headed in the wrong direction after centering on Polaris. The RA was easy to stop before anything bad happened, but the drive gear on the Declination worm broke right off the shaft before I even realized what was going on.

After quite a bit of crying, I glued everything back together with a half a tube Super Glue Gel, and it miraculously held for the remainder of the evening. The software in the computer was still totally convinced that East was West, and North was South, so I had to manually point the scope at the various objects I wished to image. Luckily, the tracking software was not affected by the bug in the pointing software.

Saturday afternoon I completely removed and dismantled the declination drive and effected a more proper repair. Also, I selected a couple of spare barbell weights to serve as makeshift tube balancing devices. One was drilled and bolted to the tail of the OTA, and the other was fitted with self-adhesive Velcro and stuck to the top of the OTA between the finder scope and the laser pointer. Much to my delight, I was able to perfectly balance the scope in all three axes with both cameras in place. The GOTO still didn't work properly, but at least the tracking would be perfect with the tube properly balanced.

Looking back at it all now, I think the main reason I enjoy going to these big star parties is because of these small problems, not in spite of them. If we never put ourselves to the test, how can we possibly feel good about what we have accomplished.