There was a great turnout of HAL members for last night’s impromptu star party.  Thirteen of us gathered to enjoy the pleasant weather and above-average sky conditions.  A diverse collection of telescopes with apertures ranging from 24mm to 350mm were deployed for both imaging and visual observing.

Bianca imaged the Eagle Nebula (M16) with the Illig telescope in HALO and said that the results were beautiful.

Ken also imaged M16 with his ginormous 14″ Meade SCT and the Trifid Nebula (M20) with his 130mm Astro Tech refractor.  The M16 imaging went well, but he was somewhat disappointed in the guiding performance on M20.

José imaged M16 and M20 as well with his Askar 80mm refractor and CarbonStar 150 Newtonian reflector, respectively.  He too experienced guiding issues on M20.  He eventually switched the CarbonStar over to imaging the Tulip Nebula (Sh2-101) in Cygnus, an object that was previously unknown to me.

​Krystal imaged the open cluster M29 in Cygnus with her ZWO Dwarf II EAA scope.

Brandon and his son Jameson made visual observations with a Svbony 80mm refractor.  Jameson was searching for new objects to add to his own catalog to rival those of Messier and Sir Patrick (Caldwell) Moore.  They also observed the Dumbbell Nebula (M27).

Mike D. finished his project of imaging the Ring Nebula (M57) in the SHO palette with his 122mm Svbony refractor.

Welcome to Keith and Adrienne (guessing on the spelling) who attended their first impromptu!  They were using a new Celestron 130mm Starsense Explorer Newtonian and just getting started climbing the sometimes-daunting Starsense Explorer learning curve.  I’m not quite sure how far they got, but they were planning on making some lunar observations, if nothing else.

Joey was working with a new ZWO 90 mm refractor.  He had some setup issues early on, but got those resolved and imaged the Iris Nebula (Caldwell 4, NGC 7023) in Cepheus.

Mike P. successfully imaged M20 with his ZWO 130mm refractor for 30+ frames, but the last 5 were bad.  The Trifid was troublesome last night!

Tony observed visually with a Celestron 8″ go-to SCT that he hadn’t used in a while.  He observed several targets, including the great globular cluster M13 in Hercules.

I used my Orion 80mm refractor to observe four double stars in Scorpius, the multiple star rho Ophiuchi and the large open cluster IC 4665, which is sometimes called the Summer Beehive or Little Beehive.  I packed up the Orion around 11:30 and switched over to my Celestron 8″ Starsense Explorer Dob to observe the multiple star 8 Lacertae and the open cluster NGC 7209 (also in Lacerta the lizard).  I recently installed a dual-speed focuser upgrade kit made by a company named Lacerta, so I thought it fitting to try it out with objects in the namesake constellation.  Unfortunately, I actually found it to be a downgrade from the original focuser.  I’ll try it again next time to see if it grows on me, like a lizard regrowing its tail.

I locked up HALO and all other doors, turned on the park lights and departed along with Ken and José at 1:20 AM.

Ernie Morse