The usual reporting of sky conditions don’t count as you’ll see once you read my report. As the weekend came closer and finally arrived the forecast for Thursday, Friday and Saturday called for mostly sunny days and mostly clear nights.

Thursday morning I got home from work and tried to get some rest before heading out to Valley of Fire State Park. I was so excited about getting out to dark skies that I couldn’t sleep. After tossing and turning and finally giving up, sometime around 10pm I decided to pack up and head out to the campgrounds.

    

I arrived at the park to find most of the campsites still open and I was able to get my favorite spot: campsite #11 in Atlatl Campground. The sky was what I’d call partly cloudy and nothing close to mostly sunny. I took my time and set up camp opting to only set up my 16” Dobsonian. Since a 6 day old waxing moon was out and not setting until sometime around 11pm, I wasn’t too worried about the clouds that seemed to invade my skies and figured I’d have plenty of time to see some new objects later after the moon set. The clouds were kind of wishy-washy looking like they had no real purpose except to annoy me. Fortunately, their leadership was unorganized and they vanished sometime not long after midnight.

 

I started in Draco near the head of the Dragon when the clouds tried to regroup. Mostly it was just high-thin clouds but they brought the transparency down to nearly zero. I tried to fool them and moved my searching over to Serpens Caput and then back to Draco where I was able to find 8 galaxies that were new to me. During my searching I was accompanied by the “hoots” of an Owl off in the boulders. After about an hour into my search, clouds once more invaded from the north and put up a fairly stable front that did not seem to move. I counter attacked by pretending they didn’t exist and shifted my attention towards the south. The Milky Way had risen by now but was nothing like I’d seen it from the park in the past. In fact, I almost forgot about the nice cloud in the body of Cygnus and past it off as a real cloud!

Anyway, while the clouds persisted to the north I searched in Sagittarius and found myself 7 new objects. The most peculiar object I observed was NGC 6445. It’s a Planetary Nebulae way up above the “spout” near the border of Ophiuchus and towards Serpens Caput. In the 16” Dobsonian running at 90x I thought the object looked like a rectangular box-shaped cloud with a round, dark hole in the middle. I did not note any color nor a central star but what added to the view was that a globular cluster, NGC 6440 was in the same FOV!

Just when I thought things were going to last until the morning light, the clouds put a flanking movement on me and circled in from behind leaving my only escape route straight up. If you know Dobsonians, then you know about the “Dobby Hole”. It’s not a fun place to maneuver around (especially with a large 'scope) and with the transparency closing in from all sides; I knew my night was at an end. I threw up a white flag, called a truce and begged for mercy!

I awoke Friday to find taunting blue skies. Great I thought, “I can set up my 3.9” AstroView and look at Sunspots. I can also set up my 80mm Refractor and check out the moon during the day!” The sun was just about straight above me and I took a gander out at the sky to see if the moon had risen yet. Nope, but what is that I’m seeing? A big giant rainbow around the Sun – can that be? I’ve never seen anything like it before. I’ve seen it around the full moon at night plenty of times before but never around the sun. I took some photos for evidence.”

Scanning the heavens I discovered the Sky Gods had other plans for me and had sent out a search party. Long thin streamers of clouds were pouring in from the West.

 

The rest of the day brought nothing but more cloud invasions – they were gathering their forces for the upcoming nighttime assault.

    

I tried to enlist the help of the native land forces but even their beautiful voices were not enough to coax the army of clouds to depart – I spent most of the day in utter confusion wondering what I had done to deserve this weather.

    

As the Sun set and darkness enveloped the skies the Moon too was obliterated from my view. Taunting my helplessness at the situation the clouds parted for a brief moment and I was able to gather one new object: a globular cluster in Coma Berenices. Within a matter of 15 minutes, the clouds returned and I began pulling at my own hair! I resigned from my assigned position astride my telescope and retired for the night sometime around midnight: it has been years since I actually slept at night!

When I woke up sometime around 9:30am I was afraid to look outside – mostly because I feared the worst: clear skies! I say that in jest because of the three nights I planned to spend at Valley of Fire, two of them were reserved for me while the third was set aside for the “Moonlight Astronomy” event I had planned with Heather the Park Ranger. My two nights were shot down in flames and with the last night approaching, and being a public event I knew I would not have a chance to search for faint galaxies. Hesitantly, I opened the door of my tent and looked towards the sky: I was blinded by the light and clear blue skies – go figure!

As the day churned on I finally saw the Moon rise as the Sun was nearly at zenith. I had already packed up my ‘scopes so I couldn’t look at either but what I did notice about the Sun was that it had another one of those rainbow rings around it again. I took more pictures of it.

The rest of the day was spent packing up the rest of my camp. Heather stopped by for a brief moment and we talked about the night’s event being held at Mouse’s Tank. By 6pm I was all packed up and drove over to Mouse’s Tank.

It had been quite some years since I had been to Mouse’s Tank and I couldn’t really remember what kind of horizons it would have. They turned out to be perfect for our purposes. The parking lot is set far enough off the road so that passing cars would not bother us that much. The lights didn’t really matter that much seeing the moon was nearly half.

About 15 minutes after I arrived, John (my son) pulled up into the parking lot. I had already set up the 80mm refractor and he helped me set up the 16” Starfinder Dobsonian and the 5” Meade refractor. While we were setting up Al also arrived. Al has a 15” Discovery which he left at home – dang it! We talked briefly about observing faint, deep sky objects and some about past events with LVAS at Valley of Fire. Shortly after that I noticed that the man that had pulled into the lot in a white pick-up truck was setting up an awesome looking tripod and mount. The ‘scope he attached to it was I believe a 14” Celestron SCT! Being new to the club myself I hadn’t met him yet and I learned later that his name was Bob. We did have another club member join us but for the life of me I can’t remember his name. I think he was fairly new to the club and doesn’t have a ‘scope at the moment. Regardless, he decided to be part of the event but he did bring his two daughters as well. As the evening progressed more and more cars pulled up into the lot. I wasn’t sure if they were visitors here to observe with us or just visiting the park itself. The sky was looking very, very good with nary a cloud visible.

 

At 7:30 Heather, the Park Ranger arrived and we began our program. She introduced herself, explained how this event came about and then introduced me. I gave a somewhat brief and hopefully fairly accurate history of astronomy to the crowd that had gathered. While I was talking, Heather did a head count of our visitors and found the number to be 60 people! We both honestly thought we’d be lucky to have the number reach 10 if that!

Most of the night was spent showing our guests the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn. It always surprises me how few people have looked at the Moon through a telescope. I think it actually gets the best reaction of any object I’ve ever shown people. While Saturn rates a second best, they never believe it’s the real thing and think I’ve got a picture of it taped inside the telescope! Bob got the honors of showing off Saturn and I’m sad I didn’t get a chance to look through his ‘scope. My son took Jupiter in the 5” refractor. I’ll have to give him the most ambitious award since he also showed our guests M51 the Whirlpool Galaxy, The Hercules Cluster and M104 the Sombrero Galaxy. He did all this with a temperamental “GoTo” that was not "Going-To" well at all. He found them all by “hand” in a half-moon, white light flashlight-in-your-face (sorry, I didn’t know as he politely asked our visitors to not shine it in our eyes!) kind of night.

Our guests were very appreciative of our efforts and many of then commented they would like to do this sometime again in the near future. A couple of people even told me they had been apprehensive about going out to the “middle of nowhere” and hanging out with a bunch of strangers in the dark but after things got going they felt totally at ease. Most of our guests stayed until about 11pm before they started to thin out and a few stayed on ‘till midnight.

I think all of us were surprised at how large a crowd we had. The skies were kind to us and stayed clear for the entire event - “For the sake of the public” they must have thought. The certainly hadn’t behaved that way the nights before when it was just me!

I’d like to thank  Heather, my Park Ranger friend for having the inspiration and enthusiasm for organizing the event and the club members who helped get the word out and for those who came out to help. I’m hoping we can do events like this in the near future and beyond. The greatest "Thanks" however, go to our wonderful guests!

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NEW OBJECTS VIEWED

NGC 6689 - Galaxy / Mag = 13.0 / Size = 4.2' x 1.5' / (NGC 6690) Draco
NGC 5921 - Galaxy / Mag = 10.8 / Size = 4.9' x 4.2' / Serpens Caput
NGC 5937 - Galaxy / Mag = 13.1 / Size = 1.5' x 0.9' / Serpens Caput
NGC 6654 - Galaxy / Mag = 13.5 / Size = 2.8' x 2.3' / Draco
NGC 6643 - Galaxy / Mag = 11.7 / Size = 3.9' x 2.1' / Draco
NGC 6412 - Galaxy / Mag = 12.3 / Size = 2.3' x 2.1' / (Arp 38) Draco
NGC 6434 - Galaxy / Mag = 13.2 / Size = 2.4' x 1.0' / Draco
NGC 6340 - Galaxy / Mag = 11.9 / Size = 3.4' x 3.0' / Draco
NGC 6540 - Globular Cluster / Mag = 12.5 / Size = 1.5' / (Cr 364, Lund 808, OCL-11, Djorgovsky 3) Sagittarius
NGC 6553 - Globular Cluster / Mag = 8.1 / Size = 9.2' / (GCL-88) Sagittarius
NGC 6469 - Open Cluster / Mag = 8.1 / Size = 8' / (Cr 353, Mel 182, Lund 788, OCL-21) Sagittarius
NGC 6440 - Globular Cluster / Mag = 9.1 / Size = 5.4' / (GCL-77) Sagittarius
NGC 6445 - Planetary Nebula / Mag = 11.2 / Size = 2.8' x 0.9' / (PK8+3.1) Sagittarius
NGC 6507 - Open Cluster / Mag = 8.2 / Size = 6' / (Cr 358, Lund 797, OCL-32) Sagittarius
NGC 4147 - Globular Cluster / Mag = 10.3 / Size = 4.1' / (GCL-18) Coma Berenices

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