[OR] Henry W. Coe SP 11/27/2024

[Francesco Meschia]

On Wednesday night, I was at the overflow parking lot of Henry Coe State Park with Mark, Surya, Vignesh, and Daniel. It was –after the recent rains– a clear night with good transparency, and low humidity to boot. 

I had made plans to image some dust in Cassiopeia around the star nu Cas, not too faint but certainly not bright, either. I actually wasn’t sure whether the few hours I could collect from Coe would be sufficient to produce a clear image. I decided to try anyway, thinking that I could always augment it with data collected from home, or maybe from another dark sky trip next month.

Once the capture sequence had started, I started relaxing and enjoying chatting with Mark and Daniel. Mark was kind enough to let me peer at some of his eponymous lumpy darkness through his 10-inch dob. I had a great view of the M35+NGC 2158 pair with a Nagler 20mm, and a more challenging but very interesting view of a planetary nebula that looked star-like in direct vision, but exhibited a faint disk with averted vision. I can’t remember the catalog designation, unfortunately.

Good chat with Daniel as well. It turned out we had both driven to Coe from Mountain View, Daniel is no stranger to the challenge of imaging from under a Bortle 7 sky.

Additionally, I also enjoyed some nice binocular views of the winter milky way, and I listened avidly for owls, counting four different species.

Throughout the night we had moment of calm air, with temperatures dipping to the low 30s, and breezy interludes that the thermometer revealed to be warmer, in the high 30s. Not that I could tell: with the wind chill, it certainly didn’t seem any warmer to me. In some of the windy moments, PHD2 faced some challenges keeping my imaging refractor on track, but the mount did not disappoint and gave me round stars anyway.

We left around 10:40 pm, so it was a relatively early night. With the data I gathered I produced the attached image (full-resolution on Astrobin at https://www.astrobin.com/cbz95x/) – not very deep given the short integration, but I like the colors of the star field and the ghostly shapes of the dust.

Francesco

[Rajah]

Beautiful round stars  and great star colours. If I was in town, I would have joined you guys, looks like you guys had a great time.

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[Daniel Vancura]

It was great meeting you out there! Getting a peek through Mark's scope really was a highlight and it was inspiring to see what kind of images you managed to capture down in Mountain View (really tempted to place an order for some of those narrowband filters!).

As for the wind, I wasn't sure what to expect from those occasional gusts - at some point I got back to my gear just to see my EAF desperately trying to focus on stars while they kept washing out from the vibrations - nevertheless, here's also the bits of light I did manage to capture with the mere about 1h30'ish integration time that I got in the end. :)