The Second Half of Life: Trout Lake Star Party

I've marked the days on my calendar for each of the summer months to indicate which ones are best for astronomy. This month it was July 7th to 16th based upon the moon's absence. Beyond that, all plans are at the mercy of the weather, which is usually going to be pretty good east of the Cascade mountains. This month the plans were to take our new RV to Emigrant Springs State Park in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon July 6-9th and then for at least me to attend the Trout Lake Star Party in Washington (north of Hood River, Oregon) on at least the night of July 9th. I would have my equipment at Emigrant Springs, so I figured I would try to do some imaging there.

As it turned out, when I tried to image at Emigrant Springs I found that I had not packed a box that contained some key cables for my imaging set-up. Lesson: Consolidate all of the critical equipment into as few boxes as possible. It's really too bad, because the clarity of the sky there was amazing. The only difficulty was that the horizon was not great at the best location in the park for viewing (in front of their Community Building). Having to decamp briefly to move equipment up to (and down from) that site was a bit of a hassle too.

My hopes for doing a significant amount of imaging in July now came down to the Trout Lake Star Party. I called my son, who was planning on meeting us in Hood River to take my wife and daughter back to Portland, to ask him to bring along my missing equipment. I was then determined to spend as many nights as I could at Trout Lake.

The plan came off without a hitch... at least the part that I could control. The first night at Flat-Top Sno Park (the actual site north of the town of Trout Lake) became cloudy after initially being clear. Not thick clouds... broken, thin clouds that would keep you guessing as to whether a portion of the sky where stars were visible was really clear or not. I tried to image in what appeared to be clear portions of the sky, but I won't do that ever again under similar conditions. Many times that night I would start imaging and, after getting a few nice frames, start seeing the image quality (noise level) change from frame to frame trending towards pure noise. I would have been better off getting more sleep in preparation for the next night. I did get a few tantalizing frames of The Eagle nebula in monochrome and a few of The Whirlpool galaxy (both shown below). Towards the end of the evening, conditions did improve a bit and I was able to capture my first color picture of a globular cluster (M92) and took a full set of flat and dark frames for the first time. The fully processed RGB image of M92 (with dark and flat frame reduction using CCDSoft) is shown below.

So my hopes were now set on the next evening. As dusk settled in, the skies stayed clear but the wind began gusting. I set up and aligned the telescope anyway (with the hope that the winds would settle down) and began imaging with short (30") exposures to avoid the effects of the wind gusts. This approach did work, but it was clear that about 30% of the frames were going to have to be tossed due to the tear-drop shaped stars created by the stronger gusts. The winds only got worse until at least 2am to 3am, when they did settle down quite a bit.

In this time, I did get some images, though the winds did have an effect on the quality. Additionally, the skies there did not have the clarity of those at Emigrant Springs (proximity to urban pollution?). While I know the images aren't the best I can do, this was a good opportunity to begin imaging some new objects and to practice new techniques.

The major accomplishments of this second night were 1) Galaxy-group Hickson 68, 2) color imaging of The Eagle Nebula (M16), 3) Color imaging of The Omega Nebula (M17), and finally 4) Color imaging of the PacMan Nebula (NGC281). Mid-way through imaging M17 I converted to taking a set of darks rather than using the "auto-dark" function in CCDSoft. I realized that there were defects I get by using single darks that can be eliminated by using a master dark created by averaging a set of dark exposures. I plan to use this approach in the future for everything except images for initial centering. I found that despite having to re-focus part way through the night, I could use the flats I generated that morning for all images I generated that night.

I finished my last image at about 3am. Though I was thinking about getting another set after that, I had made the mistake of going into the RV to lay in bed while watching for the camera's red LED to stop blinking on my last set of exposures of NGC281. Bad idea. Next thing I knew, it was 5am. I got up and very inefficiently (in a mental fog) took my flat frame images and then put away all of my equipment.

While I could have stayed more nights, I was not hopeful that the winds or seeing would be any better. However, instead of hastily driving away as early as I could that morning, I took full advantage of our new RV to take a shower, cook myself breakfast, and chat with some of the people who were still around and awake. It was SO nice! In the past, I would be feeling smelly, greasy, and worn out such that I was very anxious to get home. With the RV, it is clearly possible for me to make my imaging excursions longer and more enjoyable. I'm really looking forward to trying to stay four or five nights at the Oregon Star Party early in August. In the meantime, I'm going to try to catch one more night in July at a local observing site.

A few frames of The Eagle Nebula with some intriguing detail.

A few frames of M51, The Whirlpool Galaxy. I'm anxious to go back to this beautiful object and "go deep" with some longer exposures.

My first color (RGB) image of a globular cluster (M92).

The Hickson 68 Galaxy Group. Four galaxies are visible here in a very tight space. I had been wanting to do this for quite awhile. They are very small, but I want to come back to them and see how much more detail I can pick up with longer exposures.