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Red Rocks Oct 13, 2001
We went to Red Rocks the weekend of my birthday. Since it was my birthday, Randy
agreed to go with us provided that she could bring one of her friends along.
Originally we were going to go to Joshua Tree with some of Sally's friends from
UCLA, but both Sally and Randy had things to do on Saturday afternoon and we
missed hooking up with Sally's friends. Since Red Rocks is closer and it had
better weather we decided to go to Red Rocks instead. We drove up in two cars
since we weren't sure how if Sally and Randy wanted to stay the entire night.
We arrived at Red Rocks rather late and weren't able to get our usual campsite.
We ended up in site 6, which has a pretty good view of the sky, but we had to
carry the stuff a further and we had to content with the sand, which isn't that
friendly to the telescope. Since it was rapidly getting dark I asked David and
Randy to set up the tent while I set up the telescope. This was a new tent that
Sally got me for my birthday. We had never set up the tent before, but Randy
and David were able to get it set up successfully with only one piece left over.
This
night that we were there the Antelop Valley Astronomy Club was there. The people
in the Astromony club were set up in the parking lot by the Ranger station.
After we got set up Sally and I walked down to the parking lot to check out
the other telescopes. One guy had a large (I think it was an 18 inch) dob. Another
guy had a nice 4 inch refractor and one had a 10 inch Schmidt. There were a
few other scopes, but we mostly looked through the Schmidt. A bunch of people
had new telescopes with GoTo capabilities. I think that half the fun of going
out is find the objects. Everyone so often I wish that I had a better telescope,
but I didn't use any telescope that night that I thought was better than mine.
After about an hour Sally and I went back to our campsite and did some serious
stargazing. At the beginning of the night the sky was a little bit hazy, but
towards the middle of the night it cleared up nicely and we got some great views
of Saturn and Jupiter. This was probably the best night of viewing that we have
had all year.
It
got cool during the night and sometime after 2 a.m. I decided to climb into
my sleeping bag and look for meteors. I saw a few that night, but not many.
After lying there for a while I began to feel sleepy so I decided to go to sleep.
Sally work up a little bit before dawn and her movement woke me up. I had enough
sleep that I felt I could drive home, so we packed up everything and headed
home. We took a few pictures before we left.
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