Sunday night observing report from Lake Erie Metro Park

I ended up joining James French at Lake Erie Metro Park. Faac members have a special agreement and can use one area of the park for astronomy with a pass.

So we headed out there. James was actually out there first.

There was a lot of clouds, haze and some cold rolling fog off the river, with a few patches of open sky bug haze often in those areas, not perfectly clear in any location of the sky.

This from 9:45 until 11:30 when we left Lake Erie Metro Park.

James setup his new(used) six inch reflector telescope that he bought at the Faac swap meet and also a four inch reflector that he bought there as well.

Both are Newtonian reflectors. and the larger one we worked on earlier in the day at Harold Thomalson's house. We worked a bit on the mirror mount and position of the mirror and then did a fairly quick collimation of the optics. The laser collimator tool did a fairly good job and the star test showed a pretty good aligned optic using an 8mm eyepiece tonight.

The images of Jupiter and Saturn were pretty nice though both telescopes. We looked at m42 but didn't find any other clusters of faint objects due to the massive number of clouds in the sky.

We looked at a few stars. I brought out my vixen binocular telescope as well and we looked at a couple of boats on the river. One ship and a tugboat pushing a barge. We chatted briefly with George Korody about the weather and he said things should be clearing up in a few hours. I forgot my snow pants. Although it was 45 degrees out, the slight breeze and humidity made it feel a little colder. It was a hint of warmer weather. James felt it wasn't that bad out. I had just had a cold drink before I arrived as a part of a rushed drive through meal from McDonalds. We had a ranger from the park approach us in the lot to tell us to check our watches, because we were supposed to leave when it closed. We said, we have passes for astronomy and showed them to him. He said, I'd didn't know about them and eventually left. The flashing lights and spotlight on us didn't help our night vision much, but the sky wasn't cooperating anyway.

Of course when I stopped off back home and started to unload I could see a clear area in the skies in Lincoln Park. It was almost enough to tempt me to go and open up HJRO early in the morning before the storms arrive to test a new eyepiece I bought. (it's a new used eyepiece, but that's another story.)

A couple of other Faac members were thinking about meeting us at LEMP tonight, but they really didn't miss much due to the cloud cover. We had a good time anyway and were able to test a few of my eyepieces in James new telescopes. All it all it was a pretty fun evening even with the clouds and poor weather.




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