The 2012 Stellafane Convention

I never posted a report on this year's Stellafane convention - http://stellafane.org/convention/2012/index.html - on this site.

Thursday night was a fairly good one at Stellafane East this year. I spent over three hours observing with the Kopernik Observatory and New Hampshire Astronomical Society contingents and two more hours near the McGregor Observatory, with Scott Ewart (12.5" ATM split-ring equatorial Newtonian), Sue and Alan French (4.1" Astro-Physics Traveler refractor), and Shane LaPierre (24" ATM Dob). Memorable views included many of the Messier objects in Sagittarius (e.g., M8, M17, M20, and M22) through 18 and 20" Obsession Dobs, NGC 7009 and NGC 7293 (the Helix Nebula) through a 20" Obsession, M15 through the 24”, and NGC 6960 (the western section of the Veil Nebula) through a 25” Obsession. Quite a few late Perseids, some of which were rather bright, graced the skies.

I attended the Meteorite Show and Tell presentation in the McGregor Observatory Library on Friday afternoon. The weather was fine until about 6:00 p.m. EDT, when it began to rain. It wasn't a major case of "Stellarain" but the sky remained cloudy and foggy for most of the night.

On Saturday, I visited the swap meet, bought three meteorites from Geoffrey Notkin and Steve Arnold, otherwise known as the Meteorite Men, and visited Breezy Hill. Various white light and H-alpha filtered refractors provided for great solar viewing. It was the first time that I'd seen the Sun through the 13" Schupmann medial refractor.

The Science Channel’s Meteorite Men gave one of the most amusing Stellafane keynote talks that I can recall.

Saturday night was excellent. The transparency was much better than on Thursday. I saw a hint of the Pipe Nebula (LDN 1773) naked-eye early on and had many fine views through my Celestron 8x42s, the 13" Schupmann refractor (M57), the 13" Arunah Hill Fitz refractor (M11, Epsilon Lyrae, and Jupiter), the 24" ATM Dob (M2), the 25" Obsession (M13), a 28" StarStructure Dob (M8 and M20), John Vogt's 32" Dob (M17 and NGC 6960), as well as many smaller apertures, including the top three winning telescopes in the competition (a 7" Schupmann refractor, a 6" Newtonian on a bowling ball mount, and a 12.5" truss-tube Dob) on Breezy Hill. I also had a chance to look through some of the new focal length Delos eyepieces (4.5mm, 8mm, 12mm, and 14mm) with Al Nagler and his 101mm Tele Vue NP-101 apochromat, during the day and at night.

Dave Mitsky