Star Party Afterglow


KAAL member Brian Brewer waits for sunset on a near-perfect night.	KAAL member Jerry DeRuiter with his Celestron 114.

The weather on Friday (9-10-1999) was disappointing, and I was hoping we would have better skies for Saturday. After a restless day of watching the clouds roll by, they finally started to clear late in the afternoon. By sundown, they were gone and we had completely clear skies! The seeing was not perfect, but good enough for our first effort.

We had a good assortment of telescopes including small refractors, Dobsonion and equatorial reflectors, and SCTs. As the Sun set, we started by looking at a very pretty two-day-old Moon. With darkening skies, we began our serious observing by looking at Mars and making comparisons to Antares (rival of Mars). Looking at a number of Messier objects in Sagittarius, we compared M7 and M6 open clusters, to M22 globular cluster. The M8 nebula presented itself nicely through binoculars as did Andromeda (M31). A few people said they could see M31 with the naked eye though most agreed, it was not obvious. At about 9:30 local time, we were able to watch a wonderful "Iridium Flare" that grew to -5 magnitude before slipping back into darkness. It was the first time many had seen one and it was truly awesome. Jupiter crawled up in the East and as it got higher in the sky, we were able to see good views of the planet and it's moons. At this time however, some of the telescopes started collecting dew, which became more of a problem as the night continued. Shortly after Jupiter, Saturn made its appearance by slowly rising out of the trees tempting some of us to check out early views as it popped out from behind leaves and branches. Once clear of the tree line, we had some decent views. In some of the telescopes, we saw what we thought might be the moon Titan, but nobody was sure if it really was or not. If anyone knows if Titan is visible in a small telescope, please email us and let us know. The night wound down after everyone had seen Saturn, and most packed up vowing to "do it again real soon". As the last of us were leaving and everything was put away, we noticed that Pleaidies (M45) was visible. It had been a long night, and fall will bring many opportunities to see this splendid object, so we saved that for another time.

I think everyone enjoyed the evening and the consensus was to do more star parties in the future. If you didn't get a chance to join us, keep an eye on the EVENTS page on this web site for our next one.