(The One with Mercury)

Six HAL members (including me) and around a dozen members of the public enjoyed clear skies and nice weather at the impromptu star party at Alpha Ridge Park last night.  I didn’t arrive until 6:15 and was suprised to find many people there with small telescopes and cameras set up to watch the “parade of planets.”  After consulting with a couple of the HAL members present and Wayne (via email), I decided to treat it like a public star party and turned on the lighting accordingly (back row on + red bollards).  I had the Dob set up, but put it back in the car in favor of interacting with the public and keeping an eye on things.  I talked to a few people about HAL and told them about the upcoming public star party, and pointed out Venus, Jupiter and Mars to a couple who showed up for a few minutes of naked-eye planet viewing.

 

By around 9:00, the public had cleared out except for one couple.  They had been observing with a small telescope for a while, but had just been sitting in the car for around a half hour at that point.  HAL member Jeff was packing up to leave, so he accompanied me as I politely asked them if they could please call it a night so that Jeff could close the gate when he left.  They agreed to do so, and I turned off the remainder of the park lights after they left.

 

Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to get a very detailed idea of what HAL members were doing.  Jeff was imaging Thor’s Helmet with a Unistellar eVscope 2, but wasn’t pleased with the result.  He also had an SCT for visual observing.  Mike was imaging the Wizard Nebula, among other targets, and reported that he had a pleasant night.  Steve was using a SeeStar and a Dob, but had some issues with leveling the SeeStar.  James was imaging the Horsehead Nebula, but I didn’t get the details on his equipment.  Finally, I met another HAL member just as he was leaving, and I unfortunately didn’t write down his name to get the correct spelling.  Phonetically, his name was Chou.  Sorry about that, I’ll remember to write all names down in the future.  If you are that person, please feel free to respond and your name can be corrected when this report goes up on the HAL website.

 

I decided not to set up the Vespera, but did some visual observing with the Dob after 9:00.  I observed 5 open clusters in Monoceros and Puppis (NGC 2301, 2343, 2353, 2506, 2539) and planetary nebula NGC 2440 in Puppis.  These are all Herschel 400 objects.

 

James was the last HAL member to leave, just after 11:00.  I turned the park lights on, locked everything up, made a final sweep of the park to make sure no members of the public were still present, and locked the gate at 11:15.

 

Ernie