CN FORUMS ARCHIVE Telescope Reviews: head'n out for the WUTS

Great star party, my favorite really.

I think attendence was around 225 people this year.
The 50's forcast were actually for the nearest town, several 1000 feet lower in elevation, night time lows at 9000' ended up well below freezing. The high humidity / dew point, did prove challenging for all but those well armed against it.

The sky even with the humidity was truly amazing both nights I was there. I guess, I will give a timeline based report as follows:

Friday morning at work: Get a call out of the blue from (My significant other brother-in-law owns 16" Dob) Richard asking me what I am up to for the weekend, I tell him we are going to the WUTSm he indicates that he can go as well, so this massively complexes the packing, transport, and journey to the Foxpark, Wy star party site.

I get off work at noon, and make one last round of the Kmart and Wallmart stors in the area for some additional 10x50 binos to give away. I found like 3 more.

2pm, I make it to Richards house, he takes much longer than expected, get back to our house to pack our stuff, in short we do not get out of Denver until close to 5pm. UUHHGG Friday evening traffic, but we deal with and press on.

Our arrival at the Starparty at around 8:30pm, good, well before dark, reveals a good turn out, 100's and 100's of fantastic equipment. A flury of tent setup, and scope / bino setup, and we are ready to go just before dark. Missing registration cause we got in so late, I went and found some event organizers where I gave them the 2 deluxe beginer observers packages we donated for door prizes. 12x50 binos, nice tripod, and nice hard bound addition of advanced sky watching.

The three of us observed continually on our scopes until about 2am, galaxy, nebulea, and clusters oh my!!! Also were treated to probably 100 really great metors too for a way cool bonus. I was hungry, and decided to make Johnsonville Brats at 2am, and man were they good. lol

At 2:30am, I decided to go walking around to see who was still up, fighting the dew / frost, and had scopes still operating. I ended up looking through 130mm and 150mm AP Starfires always a treat to say the least, I looked through 2 C11's, a C14, and even a 16" LX200. I didn't give many Newts chances but then in the back most corner, I come across Gary and his home hybrid built 32" with a 12.5' (yes, thats feet) focal length. I hung out there for about an hour. Looked at several obscure PN's, and Galaxy objects, then headed back for my scope. Faught frosting over eye pieces for about another 1/2 hour, then decided to get to sleep around 4am.

Waking up I decided to get my H-alpha setup going, Sol did not dissapoint, 3 really fantastic prominences, and one of the best, largest sunspot groupings I ever seen, I wondered around looking for other H-alpha setups and finally came across a PST!!! We compared H-Alpha views, the PST while really great was not able to hang in there with the full 6" setup I was using, but you have to give it an A++++ on value indeed. I tend to be a prom freak, so the seemingly lower end 1.5 angstrum setup I use has it's advantages truly tuned for Proms. After this we decided to hit the Vendor booths, where Astrosystems had a new Anacortes 2" OIII filter for $120, so I bought it, my SO bought some astro jewlry too, Richard finally bought his own 2" Kendrick laser collimator. Went back to the tent for a while, Richard cooked Baccon and Eggs for us. I then notices some of the kids getting back from the "Solar System in 1000 yards", so I decided to start giving out some of the binos we bought. The kids always love this so much.

Around 1pm, we went over to register, where we were being toild about a dirt devil the preceeding day that wiped out the vendor and registration booths, well I'll be darned if another one didn't come through that aslo wiped out one of the vendor booths. Omen maybe? but also maybe a good omen somwhow.. lol

At 4pm it was time for the guest speakers, a physisit doing lots of spectral work from the U of Wy. Another guy that has hooked up with Hardin optical for "The scope in a box" offering demo'd the new yet to come out product, way way cool. 8" and 12" scopes in a box that can be carry on baggage, that also had full goto, and a built in EQ wedge!!!

After that, it was time for the door prize give aways, and this year, they gathered everybody to the center of the field and got a group photo. The photo turned out fantastic and is available at the WUTS website.

Door prizes included highlites such as "Green Laser Sky pointers", "Software and transport bags", "Full 8" telescopes", and of course our "Beginer Observer Packages" we brought.

Time for dinner, we had bugers, beans, and potato salad. The night ahead allowed me to try my new 2" OIII filter made by anacortes and let me tell you, this one is a bust, my Orion Ultra Block Kicked it's tail on the Viel. lol I am actually going to call astrosystems today and try to return it. I'd say stay away from this OIII like the plague, might be good for smaller aperture scopes though, as it does not bock so much it seemed. At around 11:30pm or so people were calling out an Iridium Flair and man, this one much of hit about Mag -8 or so, very cool lit the entire observing field up. I observed til about 2am, and them made my way back over to the 32" scope, where we looked at NGC 40, NGC 6309, the pillars of creation in M16 at 500x, and Stephans Quintet. Curious about the views of the Quint in the 32" -vs- a 16", I returned to our camp, aquired it and all I can say is the difference was very dramatic. lol While observing the quint, the best meteor of the weekend exploded in multi color with 5 or 6 good explosions across the sky terminating with one really big impressive one at the end, seemed to travers almost horizon to horizon, putting on one heck of a show the whole way.

Packed up the next day. (had to wait for optics and everything to thaw out), I caught a few last glimpses of Sol in white light on the 130mm AP, said goodbye's to the many many friends I had made while there. And headed back for the Denver area, with a stop off in Cheyenne to pick up my Pro Rock Crawling Jeep that had been getting steel protective body armor put on it. Got back home about 2:30pm on Sunday.

PS: If you have never been to a star party, you owe it to yourself to go to at least one in your lifetime.