Stargazing at Red Rocks July 2001

Stargazing

I love to go stargazing, but it has actually been quite a while since I have taken my telescope out somewhere were it is real dark for the night.  Occasionally I will take my scope to the backyard, but since Sally acquired the medium large brown dog the backyard has been taken over by the mutt so I don't go out there as much.  I have an 8 inch Mead reflecting telescope.  The size of the scope refers to the diameter of the tube, so the telescope is a pretty good size.  The main advantage to a large telescope is that you can see more things more clearly.  The disadvantage to having a large scope is that they are heavy and hard to move around.  Since I live in the Los Angeles area, finding a dark place for viewing is difficult and so going out stargazing can become quite and expedition.  The best time to go stargazing is during a new moon or during the last quarter when the moon rises after midnight.  Southern California is often cloudy during the springtime, so the weekend of July 21 2001 was one of the first weekends that I had free were it was near a new moon and the sky was cloud free.

There are 4 places that we usually go stargazing.  We used to go to Saddleback, but lately the light pollution as gotten really bad and it isn't worth going there any more.  Sometimes we will go to Vasquez Rocks, which is relatively close to our house.  The problem with Vasquez is that it is closed at night.  During meteor showers I will often sneak into the park, but I'm not about to haul my telescope in there.  Sometimes we go to Mt. Pinos, which is where most of the amateur astronomers go.  Mt. Pinos is a good spot for stargazing, but it is often crowded on weekends with a new moon, it can get cold at the top of the mountain even in the summer and my old truck really doesn't like climbing up mountain roads anymore.  So, we decided to go to Red Rocks which is about 20 miles north of Mojave.  It is about a 2 1/2 hour drive from my house.

Packing to go stargazing takes a lot longer that you think it should take.  I have to disassemble my telescope to get it into the truck.  I have a lot of accessories to the telescope as well; a case full of eyepieces and filters, a box containing star maps, books, flashlights, finder scopes, a telrad, tools to collimate my telescope and miscellaneous other things.  I bring a tool box along so I can fix something if it gets broken and the toolbox will act as a steep stool.  I also bring a step ladder along because Sally and Randy have a hard time looking through the telescope when it is at its highest position.  I have a special chair that can adjust to any height for view at the telescope.  I have to bring a power supply along to power the motor to the telescope.  Many people power there telescope off their car battery, but I think it is a bad idea to be draining your car battery when you are out in the middle of nowhere.  Besides, if you don't bring a power supply then you have to bring a long extension cord.  So objects are too big to be viewed in the telescope so I bring along a pair of binoculars and a tripod to keep them steady.  We bring along several chairs to sit and usually a couple of sleeping bags in case we get tired.  We also bring along a cooler of things to drink.  Since it gets cool in the desert at night we have to bring along jackets in the summer time and in the spring and fall you should really bring a winter jacket with gloves and a hat.

Red Rocks is very interesting and pretty in a stark barren type of way.  The rock formations are very interesting and its fun to go hiking there.  Sally and I usually try to get one of the campsites on the north side of the park since the ones on the south are close to the rock formations which block your file of the southern sky.  The day we went it was a little bit windy, but occasionally the wind would die down and we could get some good viewing.  The weekend that we were there was during a minor meteor shower so we saw a number of nice meteors (shooting stars) while they were there.  Since it had been a while since I had been stargazing I spend most of the night tracking down Messier objects and managed to see a good 40 of them during the night.  That night it was possible to see all nine planets, but I didn't bother with pluto because it is right at the limits of my telescope.  Early in the evening it when I first tried looking for Neptune it was a bit windy and when the wind died down I forgot to look again, but I did manage to track down Uranus.   At about 10:00 we got a visit from one of the other campers who had seen my telescope when they drove in.  His name was Ken and was a professional photographer.  We talked to him for quite a while and I tried to show him a number of things in the telescope and explain what they were.

At about 2:30 I as beginning to get tired and the wind started picking up again so I decided to take a short nap.  I set the alarm on my watch to wake me up at 4:00 so that I could see Venus, Jupiter and Saturn.  I woke up just in time to see a very bright meteor pass overhead.  We I got up Venus was very shining very brightly in the easter sky.  With my telescope I could easily see Saturn's rings and 4 of Jupiter's moons.  I actually managed to get a picture of the planets with my digital camera.  A little bit before sunrise Mercury rose over the horizon and we had a nice view of the four planets lined up.  At about 5:00 we decided to pack up and we were home by 9:00am
 
 

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