Why I love Coe so....

[Mark Wagner]

A bit of history, for South Bay observers and personal:

When I started exploring astronomy beyond club in town events, the first place I went was Henry Coe State Park. We didn't use the current overflow lot half a mile before park headquarters, we had a small spot where the ranger residence now stands. This was with the late Jim Van Nuland and the SJAA. At the time Ranger Barry  was very astronomy friendly and remained so for many years.


I met my closest long term astronomy friends there at Coe, and out of that group came TAC, CalStar and the various incarnations of GSSP. For a while we even had two Mt. Lassen star parties a year! What great times... who remembers the big group pot luck (but organized) dinners in camp the first nights and observing by the volcano at 8,000 ft?

Over the years, I'd guess 30 now, observing sites have come and gone. For a while Fremont Peak was the undoubted astronomy barycenter with I'd guess between 50 and 100 astronomers setting up on a 3rdQ or NM weekend. Be there by noon or good luck! But things change. Fremont Peak ran into a very strict administration and to this day things remain diminished.

We (our close group) found a friendly astronomy land owner thru - I think it must be via Steve Gottlieb or Bob Ayers, at Willow Springs (near where I'm looking now), and the group had a good decade of astronomy there. The land owner was Kevin Ritschel (and his 33.4" Dobzilla), VP of product development for Orion Telescope. Right person, right place!

All that time Coe persisted, while Fremont Peak degraded (other than FPOA). Always there, reliably.

Here we are today. Looking for sites both for local and on CDSE. But, after 30 years in my experience, Henry Coe remains constantly available while others come and go. Ranger John Verhoven now supports us, always helpful and friendly.

I love going to dark sites. But for local astronomy within an hour of homevits Coe.

So, that's why I love Coe so. I plan on going NM June. Maybe see you there? Close, easy and friendly.  You can even camp!

[Jay Freeman]

I remember the upper lot at Coe, that was a lovely site though a bit on the small side. Coe could get very dark when low clouds formed in the valleys and coastal plain (including the Central Valley) and turned off the city lights. My first sighting of the Horsehead Nebula was from the upper lot at Coe, on a dark night. in a six-inch hand-held Newtonian with no filters. On a similar night I was able to log the counterglow as suspected naked-eye. And talk about transparency -- from a location near the turn-off from the main road to the "upper lot", I once logged a *BLUE* flash off the setting sun -- the color was on the indigo side of true blue, but definitely a peak wavelength well short of the usual green. On that same night, after I had wandered back up the hill, a companion who remained at that same location saw a blue flash off *VENUS* as it set.

Fremont Peak used to be just as good, if not better, particularly in the late 1970s and early 19802, before there got to be lots of outdoor night lighting in Monterey. The marine layer sometimes got very thick over the coastal plain and the Peak was thereby very dark. The only problem was that with any more than a trace of wind blowing from offshore, the clouds got swept upslope and over the observing area, in which case it got very wet, very fast. Sometimes the winds would come and go, so that the marine layer sloshed back and forth over the ridge line, resulting in periods of very dark sky alternating with pretty dense fog, but when that happened there would be condensation left all over everything during the clear intervals, so observing took some care.

And I do miss the Lassen Star parties. At 8200 feet elevation, Bumpas Hell is the second-best observing site I have ever encountered. (The best was the Summit Observatories Visitor Center parking lot, at 9300 feet on Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawai'i.) For me, the great thing about the Lassen events was that I could rent a heated, air-conditioned room with a shower and dark curtains in Old Station, drive to the observing area and set up, and pack and drive back for a good night's (actually, day's) sleep at the end of a long evening, perhaps not leaving Bumpas until the sky was getting light. The no in-and-outs rules of other star parties make them no-go for me -- I am not a happy camper and never have been. (A friend says that for her, "Camping Out" means the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, and I entirely agree.)

I live too far south now (Fillmore, California) to make it to most of the sites that TAC folks are likely to use, but I do lots of observing, mostly in the Ventura County Park parking lot at the Chchupate Ranger Station, which is well-known and well-used by local amateur astronomers in the southland. I will watch with great interest TAC's efforts to find suitable dark-sky locations that might be near enough to me to be of interest.

Clear sky to one and all ...

-- Jay Reynolds Freeman, Deep-Sky Weasel
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Jay_Reynol...@mac.com
http://JayReynoldsFreeman.com (personal web site)

[Rod Brown]

Henry Coe State Park is an underappreciated gem and one of a few things I miss about living in the Bay Area. I spent hundreds of hours biking, tens of hours hiking, and a few hours observing there before moving away in the mid-00s. It is huge, the second largest California state park, and my friends and I would ride all day without seeing others. So many stories of epic rides, beautiful views, and great times with friends. When Hale-Bopp was visiting our solar system and I knew nothing about observing, some friends and I carried one person's heavy department-store scope and an even heavier wooden tripod on a backpacking trip. We thought the comet was gorgeous -- and it was!

Rod