Telescope Reviews: MAF Starparty 2009 (Denmark)

Hi friends!

I am currently attending the MAF starparty 2009, in Jutland. Just wanted to give you all a brief summary of the first day, fuller report(s) coming later!

I arrived yesterday, before the party officially opened, and we spend the afternoon chatting and eating pizza and more chatting! The weather is absolutely PERFECT with no wind at all, sunshine all day and last night was very, very clear. After midnight, we could see M33 with the naked eye. The milky way was very structured and I began to point out aspects of the naked-eye milky way that none of the other observers had ever noticed before, like the long, dark nebula in Cepheus and the wedge of stars that go from the mily way and almost to Polaris and the starcloud in Cassiopeia and the dark nebulae and starclouds in Perseus.

We also observed a vast range of objects with german observer, Rafael's 30" homemade dobsonian... It was a very rough-and-ready instrument, but the mirror was from Pegasus and performed admirably, thought the seeing was a bit soft. We used powers from around 130x over 260x to 400x, with an Ethos eyepiece... The views were rather incredible!

But I also stunned several observers with views of large objects like M31 and companions, M33 and the double cluster, as seen in my Zeiss Telemator. Later, I used my Zeiss A 85/1600 to show the GRS on Jupiter to a gentleman who had never seen it before. He saw it right away and was duly impressed. Later, I offered the owner of a small company, Track the Stars, who build a very novel altaz mount with GOTO, to come see M13 with the old Zeiss. It was beautifully resolved around the edge at 100x with a 16mm Zeiss ortho. He then suggested we try a 8mm Ethos instead. I told him I thought 200x would be far too much for a 85mm, but we tried it anyway, and oh, boy, what a view! The cluster was unbelievably well resolved, right over the cluster and into the core. Many hundreds of stars could be seen, branching out from the core in long chains, pinpoint sharp and with unbelievable contrast. I'll never forget that view, ever! He immediately told me, he'd never ever seen a small scope perform so incredibly well on M13, it was the best view he'd had, by far, with anything under 4", possibly larger. We were both extremely impressed by the 106-year old Zeiss.

Today, Friday, the star party starts in earnest, and many attendants are to arrive this afternoon, as well as many dealers. Workshops are also to be set up and we have already had the first talk, by Olivier Thizy, a french observer who is an expert on spectography.

This afternoon, we're going to have more talks, workshops and later a barbecue. With this weather, it's going to be the best starparty in Denmark EVER! So far, everybody are already raving about how good the facilities and weather has been so far, and the forecast is just sunshine, sunshine and more sunshine!

Thomas, Denmark