2009-09-21 Camping in Liberty Glen

Charlene's been taking an astronomy lab class from Santa Rosa Junior College. Her teachers are Michael Healy and Keith Waxman, and their web pages have lots of cool astronomy resources.

  Anyway, class was scheduled for Thursday, Friday and Saturday of last week from 5PM to 2AM, up at Liberty Glen campground at Lake Sonoma, a bit over an hour's drive north of us, and rather than have Charlene driving back and forth at ungodly hours, she went up Friday afternoon and I followed with camping gear Friday evening.

The class syllabus forbids visitors (with good reason, the class is already massively oversubscribed and bringing along family and friends would make a chaotic hectic scene even worse).

I had two scopes along, one borrowed Celestron on a Mead AutoStar mount that I've never gotten to align correctly, and one eyepiece, and another small inexpensive one, a Celestron FirstScope, with two eyepieces.

The first night I wandered out in the dark past the camp with the FirstScope and spent some time looking at Jupiter's moons and whatever else looked cool, then went back to camp and napped 'til Charlene's class ended and I walked up and got her.

During the day I left Charlene at camp to study, went out and ran some errands, came back, hung out in a chair beside her with her book bag in between us. At some point Charlene got up to go to the bathroom or something, and said "oh, look who's decided to join us":

       

Note to self: Hiking boots first, sandals second. I just had sandals this trip...

Saturday evening I dropped Charlene off at 5 and walked way further down the fire road, up over a hill and through some trees, to a place where accidentally lighting up my spot wouldn't tick off a whole class full of would-be astronomers.

  The view over the apparently unused water treatment plant looking south was nice   I set up in the middle of the road. Thinking I was completely alone, I was quite surprised when two groups of people, one fairly large, wandered up the road, clearly they'd been hanging out down at the lake all day.

  The shadows lengthened   The views were pretty cool   And continued to be so

Then the sun went down and the stars came out and I spent several hours panning around with the scope trying to find interesting stuff. I had downloaded Distant Suns, GoSkyWatch, and Star Walk for the iPhone. All three have pluses and minuses, I ended up getting along best with GoSkyWatch, but I also came to the conclusion that it's hard to beat a red flashlight and paper or cardboard.

I also took some shots with the Canon G9 of the milky way.

   

After Charlene's class we went back to camp and we pulled out the little scope to keep looking. Orion had risen, so we were able to see the nebula in his belt really easily, and we were able to find the double nebula just below Cassiopeia before I completely ran out of steam.