Rekindling the dark romance. Saratoga Gap rural deep sky session 20th August 2017

It has been a long while since I have posted a blog about observing. Call it apathy, call it slacking off, but I have been doing some casual visual observing from my red zone backyard with my largest scope, the C8. Nothing really major though hence the lack of blog articles. Some of this can be attributed to my busy work schedule as a Tech Support Scientist/Field Application Specialist (well till mid February of this year anyways), and an ever increasingly busy weekend schedule with my daughters activities. But I knew I wanted to reconnect with the sky in some way, maybe not as intense as all those imaging sessions many moons ago with my Celestron 102GT and my Meade DSI II one shot color. What better way to do this than to get my now seven year old daughter who has shown an ever increasing interest in everything daddy does to come along (she has been asking to come along for a while now). It also helps when her elementary school science curriculum is currently focused on planets and the solar system. The recent solar eclipse (which will be covered in the next blog article) also helped a bit with the boost of adrenaline. So yes, after a week of planning, me and my lil one finally made it up to our semi dark sky site to view the wonders of the summer milky way. Unfortunately for us, the skies have been rather hazy with dust of late, due to the warmer than usual temperatures and the heavy rains earlier this year fueling the massive grown of foilage. Rest said I have seen our home galaxy better from this site in the past. Still we got in a decent hour of stargazing.

This trip out I wanted to demonstrate to her how much more we could see under darker skies. Now she has been up here with me before, but on a much more casual basis (we drove up after dinner and did not have any observing gear). We had with us two easy to use pieces of equipment, an Orion ShoreView 8x40, which has since become "my binoculars", after our recent trip to Yosemite where she used it for wildlife spotting, and her future telescope, the bombproof Edmund Astroscan. We chose a concrete bench as our staging area and through the course of the hour, we spent time looking at the brighter "stages of stellar life" DSO's. I explained the significance of each object and the stages it represented as we brought them up at the 13T6 Nagler eyepiece.. I started off with stellar nurseries , M8 (The Lagoon Nebula), M20 (The Trifid Nebula) and M17 (The Swan Nebula). We then moved onto star clusters,  M23 and M11 (The Wild Duck Cluster), and finished off the short session with  stellar death, M57 (The Ring Nebula). In between, she lay on her back and scanned the "so many pretty stars" (her own words) regions with her 8x40's. She was even scanning the small Sagittarius Star Cloud that I pointed out to her as a detached "cloud" in the dark sky. One day we will make it out under truly dark skies akin to Mount Pinos, or better yet, Leyburn. Till then this will be our little slice of stargazing heaven. I hope to do this on a more regular basis, and will do a planetary version from our backyard this weekend.

It has been a while. My trip back to my me night sky place..... Down under

Where do I even begin. My love affair with the night sky began more than three decades ago. As I grew from a teen into adulthood, the fire never diminished. Sure as life happened, stargazing gave way to studies, work, yada yada yada. It wasn't until I moved to Australia, my second hometown after balmy Malaysia, and the spiritual home of my astronomer soul that the flame was rekindled in a big way. Moving to good old USA did allow me to experiment with astrophotography, but I longed for simpler times. Just me, a scope and the glorious southern night sky. So imagine my excitement when my wife declared that we were going back "home". OMG.

The first thing I did was to make a list of some of my "old friends" of whom I have spent countless hours at the eyepiece of my trusty C6, sketching under dim red light. Objects like the glorious Eta Carina Nebula, the ginormous Omega Centauri, etc etc. In my haste, I purchased a lightweight Orion Tritech photo tripod, my super portable Celestron Travelscope 70 OTA, and my Orion eyepiece waist pack filled with my working eyepieces and filters.

First night out under dark red zone skies and a few days after a full moon, I set up my portable observatory in my sis in laws suburban backyard, hiding behind a wooden fence to shield my eyes from the streetlights. And then I realized that I had forgotten to pack my dielectric diagonal in my haste. Damn! Here I was, under dream, if not perfect skies, with Carina and Vela climbing higher and higher in a darkening sky, and my scope would not come to focus. I spent a frustrating half an hour "peeking" at Eta Carina and surrounds, as well as the jewel box in Crux, the southern cross, ending the first night with "fuzzy star" Omega Centauri. I had to find another way.

My first port of call was online stores. Problem is I only had slightly over a week, and taking into account shipping time, this plan wasn't going to work. Enter my favorite store Australian Geographic. I knew they carried scopes and accessories from Celestron and Skywatcher. Turns out they were having a great sale. Looking at their website, I found Celestron's 15x70s for the same price as in the US! I rushed out to the nearest Westfield and came home with my "southern sky buster". Woohoo.

Had a blast reliving the past times under dark Leyburn skies back in Queensland. Cruising the star studded fields, starting with Eta Carina (the wedged shaped nebulosity clearly visible, and the dark keyhole dark nebulosity visible), the southern Pleiades sparkling with all its glory. Waiting a little later, I marvel at the huge globular Omega Centauri, and the jewel box members sparkling like diamonds on black velvet. My thirst for southern sky treats have been quelled FOR NOW!

Here's hoping I get to make another trip "home" sometime soon.