My first Calstar

[Muriel Dulieu Holzer]

This year was a big year of firsts. I decided to enjoy life to the fullest which means for me going to as many star parties as I can. So there was my first GSSP  which I enjoyed tremendously, astronomy in Yosemite with MDAS, I signed up to Barcroft but switched off to another location in the Sierra (thankfully I have been told that the weather in Barcroft was not so great so I don't have too much regrets) and finally my first Calstar! 

Friday, my first night at Calstar, I arrived late but was happy to meet familiar faces from MDAS. They were generous enough to share their telescope so I did not have to set up mine in the dark. We looked at Messier objects from the list of my friend Pam. 

I had rented a house nearby but as a result I felt like I did not get the full Calstar experience, you know being worried about the pigs eating my coffee ground and bacon, using cold rusted showers, being too hot but most importantly hanging out with fellow astronomers all day. Next year I am camping. 

For the next two nights Saturday and Sunday, I set up my telescope. I  had taken my faithful worry free, always reliable 10" Dob. Except that my pifinder had broken on the way down. This gave me an opportunity to experience star hopping in different ways. First with the telrad only, tracing triangles in the sky, and later on with a rigel quickfinder, a crosshair finder scope (is that what it is called?), and borrowing someone's computer with TheSky to starhop. TheSky had all the right red circles corresponding to the quickfinder and the finderscope. I tried to replicate this with kstars but unfortunately I could only find the circles for the telrad. There must be a way to create the other circles I need on kstars, I have to look into it. 

I forgot what I looked at those two nights. ChatGPT gave me a list. I am thinking of taking notes next time. Do you have special  notebooks for your notes? A list of characteristics to look at for the objects? I am thinking of doing some of the programs of the astronomical league. Or maybe I'll go back in time, so I got a book called "Binoculars hightlights", and then I thought why not go to the origin of times and got my foundations right and I got the book "Night sky with the naked eye". That is one way to travel light. 

But back to Calstar, I remember looking at a few things in Cetus: M77 and NGC 936 maybe, sculptor galaxy, NGC 404 "Mirach's Ghost", NGC 40, NGC 6946, M74 (the phantom galaxy, hard to see!), ... and trying to get familiar with constellation I have not encountered much yet (Hi camelopardalis!). And then of course there was the Titan Shadow transit which I tried to look at in as many telescopes as I could. Thanks everyone with the big telescopes!

Overall Calstar was an interesting experience. I especially enjoyed the toad living under the tap. My phone identified it as a Western toad. I was a little bit worried about it as a toad's skin is porous or permeable and whatever you dump on it goes straight into its system. Maybe I should bring a sign next time: dump your soapy water further, only clean water here, toad habitat! 

Looking forward to next year!

-Muriel

[Richard Navarrete]

It sounds like you had a great time. Thanks for writing about your adventure.

Richard 

Sent from the all new AOL app for iOS

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[Steve Gottlieb]

Muriel didn’t mention that she also found time to observe twice this month at Lake Sonoma, once before CalStar and again last Thursday with me, Mazen Ataya, and Ziad Khoury.

Steve

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[Mark Wagner]

Bufo, Muriel!  Love the toad.

[Ted Hauter]

LSA, welcome. We've got clear skies and clean toads.

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[Akarsh Simha]

Excellent report, Muriel. You sure have had some fun and dove deep into the deep-sky this year.

Staying on site is always a great idea for socializing. One of the reasons I evaded Calstar this year was because I knew I wouldn't get any work done during the day with such excellent company.

I'll share my perspectives on some of the questions you raised in your report.

Regarding various finding methods, you pick what works for you the best. For years I used a Telrad + finder scope. Now I use just a Telrad and a wide-field eyepiece. I have KStars set up to plot Telrad circles in the correct orientation so I know how to place the Telrad circles against the star patterns, and then I set it up to render the field in my eyepiece so I can match star-patterns in the eyepiece. So the Telrad gives me rough positioning and then I'm sort of trying to do "manual plate-solving" by matching star patterns in the field against the software. I also have the offline DSS2 (all-sky image survey) overlay which is to me a godsend: I am using real images of the sky instead of a rendered star chart most of the time. Yes, KStars can plot Telrad and can plot your eyepiece circles, but we don't have a feature to plot the two circle pattern like a Rigel Quickfinder. You should be able to add your finder scope if you know it's FOV and also set it up to generate an inverted view if it's a straight-through finder scope.

I've seen ChatGPT-generated lists and I don't recommend them for beginners. ChatGPT has no idea what a "basic" object is vs. an "advanced" object. My mom once brought to me a list of objects in Draco from ChatGPT, and whereas it had "good stuff" like NGC 5866 (a.k.a. M102?), it also had the Tadpole galaxy, a very difficult target. Rather go to the Deep Map list by Steve Gottlieb, organized by constellation, available here: https://www.raycash.org/dmcon.htm 

I did do an experiment to give a large language model access to the Adventures in Deep Space database via Model Context Protocol and see how it worked. It was an interesting exercise. Maybe some day I will have time to work on and release a chatbot for Adventures in Deep Space, but even an "informed" chat bot won't do as good a job. The point is that curation by an expert deep-sky observer (i.e. avoid list made by very famous planetary observer with no inkling for deep-sky) will ensure that you are not led astray.

The AL programs are quite good. I find the Herschel 400 a bit boring as it has "too many open clusters". If you are referring to the "Binocular Highlights" book by Gary Seronik, I bought it for my mother and from a glance over it I thought it was fantastic and very beginner friendly.

Regarding taking notes, there are again a myriad ways people do it. Some people just like to "check off" on a list, i.e. "mark as done", sometimes with some small details like the date. Others like to take voice notes with a voice recorder and perhaps later transcribe them -- this is an excellent way to capture all your feelings and process as you encountered a deep-sky object. Others like to take rough notes in a custom shorthand like a stenographer and then expound on them at home. Others like to sketch -- with varying degrees of finesse.

https://actualastronomy.podbean.com/e/280-logging-observations-part-1/

https://actualastronomy.podbean.com/e/281-logging-observations-part-2/

I've been through a lot of these phases myself: started out writing detailed notes about how I came upon an object, how I found it, what my experience was; then went on to short notes; then checking objects off a list; then making rough sketches; all this while I was on pen and paper. I transitioned to a USB pen tablet after that, taking notes in digital form for many years -- the notes were rough sketches, annotations over DSS images, a little bit of hand-written text. Sometimes I'd forget my tablet and take typed-up notes on the field. I then went to pencil and paper, where I continued to combine long-form notes, short snippets, sketching of varying degrees of finesse. I've slowly come to terms with the idea that nothing is as expressive as pencil and paper: you can sketch with any amount of finesse, you can write notes, annotate your sketches -- it's certainly more time-consuming than voice recording but I find it much more expressive. Sometimes I find it easiest to express my observation in words, sometimes easier in sketch, sometimes a combination. I tried to take it digital both with the ReMarkable 2 tablet, and the iPad Pro (older version before OLED screens) and neither was satisfactory and as natural with shading like pencil on paper.

Also a bit on the _why_ of taking notes. (1) memories fade over time, (2) nostalgia for deep-sky observing is very fun even if you aren't trying to keep a record towards a specific goal. I think even if you aren't going to submit your observations to AL or post them on a site like I do, the notes are still worth taking as a personal journal to jog your own memory of your fun times under the stars. I regret not having notes of some of my most fun moments in astronomy -- like the first time I saw Tarantula Nebula, or the time I saw comet C/2006 P1 McNaught -- and I do enjoy the fact that I have notes for some other fun moments, like the first time I saw M 81 and M 82, or my first night at Jimi Lowrey's 48-inch. Take notes in some form (voice / sketch / text / whatever), diligently, your future self will thank you.

As for the instrumentation for my note-taking, I follow Howard Banich: Canson artist series Sketch books, 0.5mm Mechanical Pencil. I wanna say I like the Strathmore sketch books a bit more. The mechanical pencil can be a bit of a learning curve if you want to sketch, and Howard has tutorial videos on YouTube.

Regards

Akarsh