In preparation for the Iowa Star Party I'm doing a some imaging housekeeping. The guider needs a fresh calibration and the filter offsets need a good redoing. More complicated are the changes needed for a basic imaging sequence using the Samyang lens. Because rotating the camera/lens requires the EAF belt to be disengaged and then re-engaged, one needs to put some breaks into the sequence to make opportunities for working with the belt. Here's what I'm setting up for the Iowa party.

The following instructions are for the NINA advanced sequencer. If you're not using that, you really should be! Also note that this is specific to a short focal length system for which you intend shoot RGB suitable for drizzle processing.

• NINA's Advanced Sequencer (If you are not, you should be)
• Your EAF position is zero when the lens focus is at the infinity stop

All good? Great. Here's what you need to do if you plan to orient the imagining camera while it sits in an Astrodymium cradle. It's a little complicated by the need to disengage the EAF belt while turning the lens.

Rotating the lens requires that you add two Message Box (MB) instructions to the sequence. The MB instruction is found in the Utility section. Obviously, if you don't care about the camera orientation, you can just skip the following.

If you're doing a Slew, Center, and Rotate (SCR) and have connected the Manual Rotator to NINA, place one MB just before the SCR command and another just after it. When the sequence reaches the first one, it will stop. You should then disengage the belt from the lens, being careful to not disturb the focus. Then click away the Message Box. NINA will slew, center, and tell you the amount and direction to rotate the lens. Do this until NINA is happy. It may also do some additional centering, but eventually it will reach the second MB and stop. Re-engage the focus belt. Verify that focus is good enough for autofocusing, and click away the second MB. The sequence will now resume normal operation.

If you're using Slew and Center (SC) and simply eyeballing the orientation, just use one MB immediately after the SC instruction and a second SC right after that*. When sequencer get to the MB, Disengage the EAF belt and manually orient the camera using snapshots. When the orientation is correct, re-engage the belt, check focus, and click away the MB.

*The second SC is needed to insure the target is at frame center; it acts as the post-rotation recentering performed by SCR but not by SC.

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I still wasn't happy with the tilt I was seeing, and I wondered if maybe it was coming from the way I had the camera attached to the Samyang -- that partially attached 5 mm spacer seemed iffy. I sent a note to Nic at ThinkableCreations asking if he had some advice about how to remove about 2 mm from the M42 threads on the adapter he sells. He didn't, but he expressed some concerns about the shorter thread length not providing a solid connection. I thought that would not be a problem and went ahead with my plan to sand off the end of the threads.

I used 600 Ultrafine "Wetordry" sandpaper from 3M for a while and made little progress, so I switched to 400 and it went nicely. Eventually I was able to attach my 7.5 mm spacer to the Thinkable adapter, giving me 45.5 mm of backfocus, close enough to the 45.0 desired.

Sounds good, but the reality was that this change once again made the lens unable to focus infinity.

Swapping off the 7.5 mm spacer for a 5 mm, back focus was now 43 mm and focus was restored at a EAF position of about 3200. Still bad tilt, possibly because I didn't sand the Thinkable adapter down far enough. I added two spacer shims to bring the back focus up to 44 mm. The focus position was now around 2300. One last tilt tilt-correcting shim took it up to 44.2 mm and an EAF position of 1400. Possibly I'll add another thin spacer in Iowa.

Evidently the ability of a lens to reach focus depends strongly on backfocus, something I didn't know. 

EAF position (vertical axis) vs. Backfocus (horizontal axis, mm)

(The zero position in the diagram corresponds to the maximum lens movement in the direction of infinity focus. The negative position at 45.5 mm is a guesstimate.)

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Anyway, here I am a few days away from the Iowa Star Party and I'm going to shove my perfectionist nature to the curb and settle for "good enough." I'm going to rely on BlurXTerminator to handle aberration and tilt issues.

Here's an idea of what the lens can do. This is about a 16th of the full image area, unscaled. M31 straddles the right edge of the image. This is a single 20 second frame of luminance; click to see it at 1:1 scale.

Iowa Star Party Imaging

I'm back from the Iowa Star Party! This is held each year at Whiterock Conservency; the observing field is located about five miles southeast of Coon Rapids, and 60 miles from the center of Des Moines.

2024 ISP had some differences from my previous attendances:

• This year's October party was much more pleasant than the steam baths provided by the usual summer dates. Every night had nice cool sleeping weather for us tenters
• The usual evening banquet wasn't prepared on-site and served in the picnic area; instead it was catered and held indoors at the very comfortable Bur Oak Visitor center. It was moved to lunchtime so that it wouldn't interfere with public night. The earlier time also allowed us to be at the field well before dark
• The field was in great shape, and the addition of a modern bathroom / shower facility was very welcome. I had the distinction of setting up farthest from the bathroom, so it was easy for me to get my daily steps in!
• Saturday night was clear, but the high winds during the day put a lot of dust in the air and really enhanced the brightness of local light domes, which have grown much more prominent in recent years. The low, very dark southern horizon may be thing of the past

But let's get to the imaging.

Friday night I was all set up, polar aligned, and ready. First target was Panel2 of my Veil Nebula mosaic, and the scope was doing its slew, center, and rotate thing. But it never finished because something was causing it to throw errors related to the mount control. 

The usual power cycling didn't clear it. What followed was several hours of swapping cables in and out and trying every other remedy I could imagine. Eventually I started to get the sense that the problem was my Pegasus Powerbox, so I recabled everything to remove it from the USB data flow (it remained acting as a 12V power hub, though). This worked, but it left me with no way to power and control my dew straps. Thank goodness it was as dry as it was, dew prevention was not needed that night or the next. 

To confirm where the fault was, I ran a USB cable to the Powerbox but did not connect anything to its output USB ports. The same errors returned suggesting that simply having the Powerbox as an active USB device was enough to cause the problem. 

I've read that the Powerbox can be harmed by connecting a 12V input line to its Adjustable Voltage port, and I know I've done that at least once recently. The poor Powerbox may have run afoul of Stupid User Error and had finally given out at ISP. Bummer. 

Anyway, I was up and running again and was able to collect light frames for my Veil mosaic.  I got everything I needed for Panel 2 Friday night, along with luminance for Panel 3 and a full set of flat frames. Saturday night I collected RGB for panel 3, along with some frames for the odd object seen in Panel 6 data.

Here is the Panel 2 LRGB result (click to see 1/4 scale version):

Panel 2 (NGC 6974, 6979, Pickering's Triangle, and the northern tip of NGC 6960)

Here is Panel 3: 

Panel 3 (NGC 6995, IC1340, and the Southern Knot) 

I've started to work on the full mosaic and noticed that my Panel 1 luminance frames were badly flatted and need to be reshot. If I can manage that this week, next time I'll have a first attempt at the full Mosaic!

Plans for Summer '24

Because last year's plans went so well (which I write with heavy sarcasm) I'm going to make new, possibly better plans for this year.

Star Parties! From none last year to three this year?

The Iowa Star Party finally moved their party date from the usual late August to October. Now although I just love camping in sweltering heat and dew point temperatures of 70+ degrees F, this is a welcome change. It's bound to be cooler in October, I hope, and by then the expected layers of smoke will be gone or at least diminished. As soon as registration opens I'm signing up, and that's meant with sincerity. 

Iowa Star Party

The IaSP has always been one of my favorites. It doesn't have the darkest sky, but the facilities are nice and the observing field is big and open. Civilization (small-town Iowa style) is only minutes away in Coon Rapids (population 1279). My imaging target will be a revisit of IC 348. Here's my image of it from Stacy, MN in 2014:

The bright star is Atik (Omicron Persei) and the dark clouds beneath are Bernard 3 and 4. This was imaged with my TV-102 and ST8300 Camera.  I thought at the time it was an interesting subject, and now I'll go after it with better gear, better sky, and (I hope) more time on target. There is a large emission nebula in the right half of the image that is barely hinted at here. Definitely needs better data!

Northern Nights Star Fest

With the Iowa Star Party vacating the labor day weekend there's no longer the usual schedule conflict with the NNSF, a north-woods party sponsored by the Minnesota Astronomical Society. The dark sky is spectacular for this party; aside from clouds the only thing that might cause problems is a nice Aurora. I've already made my reservations for this and have selected a target: the Soap Bubble. This is a pretty little planetary nebula sitting near the Crescent nebula in Cygnus. Here is my 2013 image of the crescent:

This Ha+OIII narrowband image from my light-polluted back yard is far too brief to capture the Soap Bubble; if you know just where to look in this image you can see it's not there. Sometimes the data simply aren't adequate. Repeated attempts at overprocessing failed to pull it out of the noise. The hope is that with the dark sky of the NNSF and a few nights on this one one target using LRGB--it will be there!

Nebraska Star Party

NSP is always a challenge. Heat. Thunderstorms. Mosquitoes, little prickly pear cacti, and in recent years, unusually high humidity.  Add to that layers of forest fire smoke and even unhealthy air quality as Canada burns. (It's possible the smoke may be part of a long term trend.)  I hope to go, but it will probably be a wait and see game to see if it's worth the travel time.

If I do make it, I think I'll update yet another old image of mine, M8 (the Lagoon). Two solid nights on the Lagoon should produce something spectacular! And if there are three or four good nights I'll tack on an overlapping frame to make a mosaic of M8 and M20 (the Trifid Nebula)

From the 2013 Iowa Star Party:

Nothing special, but I was pleased with it at that stage of my deep sky imaging. The scope was a 72mm f/6 refractor. Eleven years later I'll use a 106mm f/5 scope; I should be able to do much better.

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Next post --- I'm still looking for a reasonably close-in camping location that is convenient to use on a same-day basis and has at least green-zone darkness as defined by this scale. I visit two new campgrounds two hours from a southern suburb of Minneapolis, and revisit three others that I previously found unsatisfactory to see if anything has changed. See what I learned this time around.

FSQ106 First Light Image; Astronomical League Open Cluster Observing Program: A To-Do list for Astro Photography Tools (APT)

At last! My FSQ system was complete and I could take it out for a first light image. Nothing fancy, just a lot of stars. I also made it a point to process it only with PixInsight, replacing ImagesPlus for calibration and reducing my dependence on Photoshop. The image is here at AstroBin. Below is a preview, along with a 1:1 scale of M13 itself. Click each for larger views.

 

 

The image is based on a bit under three hours of LRGB. There's a lot of room for improvement in this image, I know, but it's wildly better than my previous efforts.

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I think one of my first long-term projects for the FSQ is going to be the AL Open Cluster Program list. The AL provides a PDF document listing the 125 objects in the program along with their coordinates which is helpful because quite a few of the clusters are from obscure catalogs like Berkeley, Trumpler, and Dolidze Dzimselejsvili.

I'm using Stellarium and APT to control the G-11 mount. Wouldn't it be nice if there was an observing list of the AL open clusters for one of those so that I could do simple a simple go-to for each object? Unfortunately Stellarium doesn't seem to support user-defined object lists but APT does. 

Some poking around failed to turn up a list. In APT it's fairly easy to create lists by loading objects into the ToDo list. Start by opening the Object Browser. If a cluster is in the Deep Sky list, find and select it, then click the "Add in ToDo" button. If an object isn't in the list, use the ToDo list's Add New button. When you're done creating a list, just export it. The data is put into an easy-to-read XML file.

This is just what I did! If you use APT and want a copy of the list, click this link:

https://app.box.com/s/l3ji97b1ysm3xxvpve2mgud34nv4x34c

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And now a footnote to my last post in which I was saying goodbye to the Nebraska Star Party for a while. I should mention the same applies to the Iowa Star Party. The last two times I've attended that the heat and humidity were incredible. Those were on the Labor Day weekends, and this year it's a week earlier--meaning the probability of excessive heat is even greater. Much as I hate to give up on ISP, I probably won't go back until they move it into late September or October. 

Yes, I know, I won't be missed by either event, and yes, I'm a weather wimp 😄

This Year's Star Parties

It's once again time to start planning which star parties are worth the travel expense and time to attend. A big attraction of nearby star parties is their skies which can be much darker than those nearby, which are marginal at best or abysmal (like my back yard). But that's only one attaction. Let's look at the most important factors:

• Sky darkness
• Open horizons
• Light domes
• Programs
• Amenities
• Downsides

I would list ambience as a factor, but the truth is I've never been to a star party where the people have been anything less than great.

Here are some information about the ones I plan to attend this Summer and Fall:

Nebraska Star Party

 

I put off attending this because of the comments about heat and storms. What a mistake!

• Sky darkness: Dark gray (the darkest zone possible). 
• Open horizons: Excellent in all directions; the observing fields are surrounded by low hills. 
• Light Domes: Only one dome worth mentioning, and it's a feeble one from Valentine (population 2700, 26 miles to the northeast.) The dry air seems to suppress domes.
• Programs: Exellent. The Wednesday talks at the local high school are top notch with nationally known speakers.
• Amenities: Campgrounds are available, as is primitive camping on the observing fields.  The observing fields are essentially "bring whatever you need," providing only mowed land with three pit toilets. There's no power or water (drinkable or otherwise). There are catered suppers on three nights; the food is basic but very good. Door prizes that range from very good to grab-bag stuff you'll donate to your local club.
• Downsides: Prickly pear cacti will puncture unguarded feet and tent floors that aren't protected by ground covers. By day there are occasional biting flies and just enough mosquitoes to provide distraction. DEET up and it's fine. And don't forget the possibility of withering heat and violent thunderstorms packing lightning, wind, and hail. 
• Hints: If you're concerned about the heat, make the half-hour drive to Valentine where the public library has WiFi and A/C! A great place to cool off. Also be sure to visit the showers at the nearby campground (bring quarters).

Summary: I'm going for the third time, despite never having won a door prize! If you don't mind the primitive conditions, heat, and threat of storms you should make the pilgrimage to NSP at least once.

Iowa Star Party

 

This is a personal favorite of mine, in part because I was a charter member of the host club and did my graduate study in nearby Ames.

• Sky darkness: Light blue
• Open Horizons: Excellent if you set up in the middle of the field.
• Light Domes: There's a significant dome from Des Moines (population 611000, 50 miles to ESE). During humid conditions a few others can be seen. To the south, nothing.
• Programs: Usually there's a talk by a scientist from one of the nearby universities and another by a host club member. These are given in an old barn which can sometimes be stiflingly hot and humid. 
• Amenities: There's no power or water at the observing field, but power for recharging batteries can be had at one of the nearby buildings. There are a limited number of cottages and houses for those who want to sleep in comfort, and one is kept open during the day for those who seek respite from the heat. Saturday night there's a home-cooked supper that's always terrific. Door prizes that vary in quality from year to year.
  If you like hiking, horseback riding, and wildlife there's a lot to do during the day.
• Downsides: Summertime heat and humidity have been insane the last couple of times I've attended. This year it's on the Labor Day weekend, so maybe it will be cooler. Pests are usually not a problem.

Summary: A nice sub-regional party with dark sky and pleasant surroundings

Heart of America Star Party

 

I've only been to this once, but it's a really well organized event with a lot of things going for it. Unfortunately the one time I attended it rained all three nights so some of my information is incomplete.

• Sky darkness: Light blue
• Open horizons: Excellent
• Light domes: I think there may be one to the north from Kansas City (population 2 million, 50 miles N) and probably from Butler, MO (population 4100, 12 miles E)
• Programs: Substantial--usually at least one speaker of national significance, another visiting from a university, and members' talks. These take place in a building with good A/V adjacent to the observing field.
• Amenities: Limited field power; showers set up nearby, and good food aplenty. Food and drink are available throughout the night, as are activities (movies and bingo) for cloudy nights. Very nice door prizes.
• Downsides: People like to pack together on the observing field, but there's ample room.

Summary: A superb gathering, well organized and attended. Usually in October, so it doesn't conflict with other major parties and is unlikely to be subjected to hot weather.

Two star Parties, Two Images

A sad story.

First, the Iowa Star Party. Another year, another hot and humid run of days, even worse that last year. The weather forecasts were so bad (ditto the satellite loops) that I stayed home the first two nights. Thursday night reports were that there were at most two hours of observing. Friday night (the public night) it rained. Saturday it was hot, with the heat index hitting 113. Around the time of the before-dinner talk the dew point reached up to 82. The compensation was that the evening was clear, and I managed to get one image. Because of the extreme humidity my camera's sensor window fogged over at any temperature under 15C, which curtailed using it in a meaningful way. Sunday: l little cooler and drier, but still very warm and humid. The evening started clear (with clouds to the south from a thunderstorm over Missouri) but ended early when a thunderstorm to the northwest attained a high level of electrical activity--its lightning illuminated the sky to such an extent that observing or imaging was nearly impossible.

Out of four possible nights, one decent one.

Now on to the Northern Nights StarFest. Great Facilities. Amazingly enough almost no mosquitoes or flies. As might be expected for a forest setting, generally poor horizons. Wednesday night, clear, but absurdly heavy dew. One image as I fought the fogging sensor window problem. Thursday night: cloudy. Friday night: cloudy, Saturday night: cloudy with rain.

Four possible nights, one decent one.

No more star parties for this year, unless I opt to go to the Heart of America party. As nice as that one is, it's simply too far to go for a maximum of three nights.

In other news, SBIG sent me the ST-8300 sensor window heater and it was waiting for me when I returned from NNSF. It installed easily, and last night it seemed to work, although conditions didn't test it well. With it running, the camera went down to -15C, a good value for any summer night. It may have used a little more power than it used to, perhaps compensating for the heat source.

 I managed to image one of the objects on my list for ISP/NNSF: DG 191:

DG 191 and vdB 158

This was an ill-conceived RGB image. (I should have had the patience to do a multi-night HaRGB image. But it's just for AL, so it doesn't have to be frame-worthy, or even close.)

Another clear night on Friday? Sadly, the moon will be nearly full, so I'll collect Ha. IC 4954 may be the target.

Imaging Targets for This Summer's Star Parties

I'm probably going to four star parties this summer: The Jeffers Starry Nights (JSN), the Nebraska Star Party (NSP), the South Dakota Star Party (SDSP) and Iowa Star Party (ISP). I'm hoping to do quite a bit of imaging at these, taking advantage of the dark skies and slightly more southern locations. It's not much, but every degree of elevation helps!

I'd like to bump along my Bright Nebula list work, and take a couple of pretty pictures, too.  The dark locations let me image reflection nebulae that I can't get from my light-polluted back yard. Another constraint is that whatever scope I bring to Jeffers will also be the one I use at NSP. So what should I image?

(1) I'd like to go really deep on the Iris (NGC 7023). It's a reflection nebula on the list, and it's pretty. Near by are some barely luminous clouds. A wide field shot with my AT65 will take them all in. The Iris a better target during the JSN/NSP time period than in late August. This would be a multi-hour object, to say the least.

(2) I've always wanted a good image of the Helix nebula (NGC7293). This is better imaged around labor day, so it should be during either the SDSP or ISP. ISP has darker southern sky, so that's where it will be imaged. The C925 produces a nice image scale for it.

The Helix from 2009 JSN.

The above is my only Helix image, taken using my TV102, an unmodded Canon DSLR, 16 x 180s @ ISO 1600. Not at all adequate. A few hours (or longer) of LRGB could be much better.

(2a) Other objects I would like to go really deep on are the Ring--see a previous post about the outer shell-- and the Dumbbell. Those would be best in the C925.

(3) I have only one so-so image of the eagle nebula (M16) from a couple of years ago. Unfortunately it doesn't include the portion of the nebula that's considered LBN 68, a list item. So that should be reimaged from a dark site. This would probably look better in the C925 but the wide field of the AT65 would be adequate. Best during JSN/NSP.

(4) There are a good number of large list items in Scorpius and Sagittarius that would image well in the AT 72. These should be imaged at JSN/NSP. These include Sh 2-13, 2-16, NGC 6334, IC 4628, IC 4701 and LBN 52. An hour each should produce images that could satisfy list requirements.

So there you are:

• JSN and NSP get the Iris and the large list items. This means that I can travel to them with the smaller, lighter AT65. One pretty picture (Iris) and a flock of list items.

• SDSP and ISP get the Helix, Ring, Dumbbell, and whatever else comes along. For those it's the C925. Pretty pictures all, and perhaps list items left over from July.

Now it's all up to the weather!

2013 Iowa Star Party on Iowa Public Television

Iowa Public Television (IPT) sent their Iowa Outdoors crew to do a segment about the ISP. It just became available for online streaming here (It's episode #305 for you folks reading this long after the post date).

They did a nice job talking about astronomy and the amateurs who love it. I'm not just saying that because I got some face-time:

Me, in all my sweaty glory

(Note the always-chic Aruba 1998 Eclipse T-shirt and goofy forehead light.) Nor am I lauding them because they used my images taken at the event (M8, M33, and the North America / Pelican Nebulae), although that did score them some points.

They did a nice job and treated people with respect. There wasn't any hint of "this is a geekfest," or "this is something that's not accessible to regular people." They spent considerable time talking to attendees and got a good feel for what it was about.

My DEET-soaked hat is tipped to them.

Iowa Star Party 2013

Another star party, and continuing poor weather. This was probably the hottest ISP ever. Thursday: high temperature of 94F, dew point temperature of around 70F (heat index = 100F) Friday: high temperature of 97F, dew point of 72F (heat index = 106F) Saturday (the nice day): 91F and 61F, (heat index = 91F) Speaker's talk in the Barn: 86F and 66F (heat index = 88F) That was a very sticky 88! Some relief was found at midday on Friday in the Oakridge house, but unfortunately the A/C unit was unable to keep pace with the heat: it actually froze up. I bailed out around 3 P.M., preferring to face the heat outside where the air occasionally moved.

Friday was also public night, and the attendance was significantly smaller than I recall from my last visit. Between the heat and the fact that it was the opening night of high school football, it's understandable if people decided to be elsewhere.

And how about the sky? Thursday night was grand, although around 1 A.M. the south wind began shoving clouds northward and the southern sky started to deteriorate. Friday night was great for the public, but about the time they left the clouds moved in. The sky went partly cloudy during the early morning, but at 4 when I woke up it was about 50% cloud cover. Visual observers could deal with that, but imagers not so much.

Saturday night usable sky was all of  90 minutes pinched between the end of twilight and clouds rushing southward ahead of thunderstorms. It never cleared for any substantial time after that, and in fact around 3 A.M. a thunderstorm with heavy rain and gusts to about 44 mph (at Carroll) hit us. From what I saw the next morning no one sustained serious damage from the winds, although a couple of screened sun shades looked like they needed some repair.

Yes, imaging time was scarce, but I managed to get three objects in. Thursday night started with M8 and surroundings:

Messier 8, the "Lagoon"

Click this for a larger version. There are a number of objects here, not just the big old Lagoon. At lower left is globular NGC 6544. At about 10 O'clock from the lagoon and next to a bright double star is the pretty reflection nebula IC 5070. On the left edge of the picture about 1/5 of the way down from the upper left corner is emission/reflection nebula IC 4685. The lagoon itself is a confusing construct of NGC objects.

At this point it was a bit before midnight, and my sense was I didn't have much "awake" left in my tank. Some years ago at Jeffers I'd imaged M33 with my DSLR and TV102, so I  thought I'd try it here with the AT72ED and CCD. Here's the result:

Messier 33, the "Pinwheel"

The AT72 is really too short a scope for this object, but it was the scope at hand. I'm not happy with the color balance of this; judging by the star colors I'd almost say that the green channel is too strong. I'll doubtless reprocess this.

Friday night was clear for a while, and I was able to learn my target's star field while entertaining/educating the public. I  think I collected one frame before having to shut down.

Saturday I raced from the meeting barn to the observing field and was able to get everything running and my target composed in under 30 minutes (a not-so-minor miracle). In fact, I even had to toss my first light frame because it was still twilight. about 90 something minutes later it was over. The NA and Pelican are bright!

Nebulae NGC 7000 "North America" (left) and  IC 5070 "Pelican" (right)

Don't know why the stars bloated so badly in this one. Poor focus, most likely.  Clouds rolled in while there was still plenty of time for another image, so I count this as half a night.

Details for these images, along with their full-size versions can be found on AstroBin.

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The last year's star party log sheet runs like this:

HOASP (Autumn 2012): three nights of rain.
WOW: Registered but did not attend; I would have had one good night at best out of three.
Jeffers: 2 good nights out of 3.
South Dakota: 1 out of 3.
Iowa Star Party. 1.5 out of 3

Add those up and it was 5.5 good nights out of 15. Disappointing. Perhaps this autumn will be better? If it is, I'll probably be making more runs to the club's dark-sky sites. Stay tuned.

2013: Star Party Bonanza!

My summer schedule is usually all over the place, and if I can make it to one star party I'm doing well. It seems sometimes like all the new moons fall on busy weekends; if it's not that, there may be several star parties at the same time. Then there's the Minnesota State Fair baked goods entry day, the August Sunday fifteen days before Labor Day.

"Fairchild," mascot of the State Fair.
What, you've never seen a gopher wearing a bow tie?

For a few days leading up to that I'm usually baking furiously in preparation. What can I say, I like baking bread, and I like winning ribbons.

The Ribbon is what it's all about.
Disagree? Get your priorities straight.

And on top of all that, there's earning a living. Oh, to be retired and financially secure! Years to go before that happens, if ever. I teach Friday night and Saturday afternoon science courses that typically run through the end of June. That puts a crimp in attending the usual Thursday through Sunday parties.

Amazingly, this year four parties fall on open dates for me:

1. Wisconsin Observers Weekend, near Waupaca, WI. This was my only summer party last year, and I really enjoyed it. In 2013 it's in June, on an off weekend for me!
2. Jeffers Petroglyphs informal party (nee Prairie Grass Stargaze), near Windom, MN. My favorite star party. Hard to do better than the people who stage this and attend, and the setting is made all the more sublime knowing that an ancient Native American observatory has been found nearby.
3. Northwoods StarFest, near Fall Creek, WI, and hosted by the Chippewa Valley Astronomical Society. Never been to this, but it's close and most people speak highly of it.
4. Iowa Star Party. I've missed this for the last few years. This is where I was introduced to real astrophotography by some very nice imagers. Someday I hope to exact my revenge.

I don't know if I can handle all this dark site time, but I'll try.

Next time, some words about Astrobin, where I've started posting images. There's not much else to talk about thanks to the clouds and cold weather.

Planning for the new year

It's a new year, and that puts me in the mind to start thinking about star parties to attend. There aren't many firm dates for these yet, so right now I have to guess a little on when they'll be. Let's look at the dates we know and use the new moons for guidance:


MAY NEW MOON: 20th

JUNE NEW MOON: 19th

JULY NEW MOON: 19th

July 15-20: Nebraska Star Party.

July 19-22: Wisconsin Observer's Weekend (WOW). This looks promising, and is much close than the Nebraska Star Party

AUGUST NEW MOON: 17th
The August new moon is around the date of the weekend that items are submitted to the Minnesota State Fair.

South Dakota Star Party/Northwoods Starfest. Dates unknown.

North Dakota Badlands Star Party, in Teddy Roosevelt National Park North Unit. Dates unknown.

SEPTEMBER NEW MOON: 16th

Iowa Star Party. This is usually around labor day, but this year the Moon is full on August 31. Probably they will have to push it to September 6 through 9. Augsburg College (where I teach) doesn't have the schedule out for Fall of 2012 yet, so it's about a 50% chance I can make it.

Jeffers Petroglyphs star party (once promoted as the Prairie Grass Stargaze). This is probably going to be in around the time of new moon in September, the 13th to 16th. I will be able to attend only Friday and Saturday nights at most, possibly only Saturday night. Bummer.

OCTOBER:

October 10-14: Heart of America Star Party, October 10-14. Day Classes make it impossible to attend.

So the year does not look very good at all. I'll probably go to the WOW, and make trips to Onan and Cherry Grove.