OR fun and nourishment at CalStar
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Jamie Dillon, DDK
Sep 25, 2025, 3:35:00 AM (11 days ago) Sep 25
to The Astronomy Connection (TAC)
CalStar XXVI was a whole lot of fun. I can especially vouch for Friday thru Sunday. Friday and Saturday nights had serious skies, 6.3 limiting magnitude for me both nights, excellent seeing 5/5.
There were about 50 of us spread out across the baseball field and the live oak meadows to the east. Several of my favorite humans were in that bunch, and if I list them, I’ll forget somebody which would be wrong. As you might imagine, there was plenty of inappropriate banter going on.
The Titan transit of Saturn was a thrill. I’d thought it’d be a longshot to bring it in, in a medium-sized scope, but it was easy in Johannes the 13”. And Saturn with the rings edge-on will not cease to be a novelty.
Got to show off a novelty object, a sibling of our Sun, the only one we’ve found so far. It’s going to get a separate note, q.v.!
Friday night around 11:30, I was gazing around to the north, and saw quite a few more stars than usual. Gave myself the dare to go hunt up some galaxies in Camelopardalis that are still on my longterm list. It’s not an area designed for easy starhopping. Started off with Collinder 463, a bright splashy open cluster in Cassiopeia that’s easier to see in the 7x50 finder.
Then into the wilds of The Giraffe. Took an hour and some work to run down 3 galaxies (hey, who’s in a hurry), ngc 1530, 1560 and 1573. All of them were dim and irregular in the 13” with a 9mm Nagler. One of them, 1560, is only 7 million lightyears from here, not far outside of our Local Group. However, there’s a galaxy in the way there! This was a short ways over from the Cassiopeia Milky Way, so there’s plenty of gas and dust in our own galactic plane in that direction.
An instructive minor adventure in deepspace. For dessert not long after, went to look at ngc 253, the Sculptor Galaxy, astounding as ever. Then went and looked at ngc 55, just north of Ankaa, the alpha star in Phoenix. Well into the southern sky. Haven’t looked at it in a while, another amazing galaxy, long and lanky and complex. Big kid eye candy.
With all this ongoing talk about NV systems, Marek was showing off his new outfit. He had it set up on the new-to-him 13” that George Feliz built as a cousin of Albert Highe’s Australia scope, which is now Johannes! I’d seen these two scopes together at Dinosaur Point more than once. Even more stunning to me than the NV views thru the scope were some of the objects in Marek’s unmagnified NV viewer, like the Veil! There it was, a bright little parenthesis with the middle part in place. We could just look up and see it if we had better H-alpha vision.
Food! Oh dear, the hospitality at CalStar has gotten to be stupendous. Randy Pufahl, Bill Seiler and Charlie Wicks were turning out first class pizzas on Friday night. Randy was making serious burgers on Saturday night. And Chez Dan was as splashy as ever, food-wise.
Here’s to the ole baseball field, here’s to CalStar!
There were about 50 of us spread out across the baseball field and the live oak meadows to the east. Several of my favorite humans were in that bunch, and if I list them, I’ll forget somebody which would be wrong. As you might imagine, there was plenty of inappropriate banter going on.
The Titan transit of Saturn was a thrill. I’d thought it’d be a longshot to bring it in, in a medium-sized scope, but it was easy in Johannes the 13”. And Saturn with the rings edge-on will not cease to be a novelty.
Got to show off a novelty object, a sibling of our Sun, the only one we’ve found so far. It’s going to get a separate note, q.v.!
Friday night around 11:30, I was gazing around to the north, and saw quite a few more stars than usual. Gave myself the dare to go hunt up some galaxies in Camelopardalis that are still on my longterm list. It’s not an area designed for easy starhopping. Started off with Collinder 463, a bright splashy open cluster in Cassiopeia that’s easier to see in the 7x50 finder.
Then into the wilds of The Giraffe. Took an hour and some work to run down 3 galaxies (hey, who’s in a hurry), ngc 1530, 1560 and 1573. All of them were dim and irregular in the 13” with a 9mm Nagler. One of them, 1560, is only 7 million lightyears from here, not far outside of our Local Group. However, there’s a galaxy in the way there! This was a short ways over from the Cassiopeia Milky Way, so there’s plenty of gas and dust in our own galactic plane in that direction.
An instructive minor adventure in deepspace. For dessert not long after, went to look at ngc 253, the Sculptor Galaxy, astounding as ever. Then went and looked at ngc 55, just north of Ankaa, the alpha star in Phoenix. Well into the southern sky. Haven’t looked at it in a while, another amazing galaxy, long and lanky and complex. Big kid eye candy.
With all this ongoing talk about NV systems, Marek was showing off his new outfit. He had it set up on the new-to-him 13” that George Feliz built as a cousin of Albert Highe’s Australia scope, which is now Johannes! I’d seen these two scopes together at Dinosaur Point more than once. Even more stunning to me than the NV views thru the scope were some of the objects in Marek’s unmagnified NV viewer, like the Veil! There it was, a bright little parenthesis with the middle part in place. We could just look up and see it if we had better H-alpha vision.
Food! Oh dear, the hospitality at CalStar has gotten to be stupendous. Randy Pufahl, Bill Seiler and Charlie Wicks were turning out first class pizzas on Friday night. Randy was making serious burgers on Saturday night. And Chez Dan was as splashy as ever, food-wise.
Here’s to the ole baseball field, here’s to CalStar!
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