Indiana Family Star Party 2008

Image to right - Jupiter with Milky Way. Unfortunate light polution at lower left.

First, for those who don't know, a star party is an organized event for amateur astronomers. It is typically held under a dark sky location with clear views of the horizon. The Indiana star party took place at the Prairie grass observatory from 7/31-8/3. I planned on attending the event for the entire 3 nights, but decided to wait until Friday because the weather forecast was predicting overcast skies. Of course Murphy's law kicked in and all the clouds blew out shortly before sunset. I was told Thursday was the clearest night of the event.
I arrived on Friday morning about 10am and set up camp at NW corner of the observing field. Friday evening a crazy thunderstorm blew through just to the North of us. This gave me reason to play with my new DSLR for the first time. Fortunately no rain fell and the skies cleared quickly.

*One quick note, I used to think I had a large telescope until I saw what these guys haul with them. (See image to lower right)

The event went very well with every night providing at least several hours of beautiful viewing. Dew became a problem in the late hours which prompted me to build a quick heater out of 10watt resistors. The math was striaghtforward using ohms law.
I enjoyed hanging out with my neighbor Fred during the weekend and appreciated him sharing both his experience and equipment with me. His hand built 8" dob proved to be very interesting and has inspired me to do the same at some point in the future.
The star party organizers arranged for several interesting speakers including my favorite Caty Pilachowski, chairman of the astronomy department at IU, who gave an extremely interesting presentation on "The Glorious Summer Sky - Globular Clusters in the Milky Way and Beyond". If you've never seen a Globular Cluster, you can see many at the Hubble Telescope site.

Our best friends Pam and Daryl brought my wife Joy up for the night on Saturday. We had a great time and I was dissapointed when they had to leave so early. Photo at right is Daryl taking a look at Jupiter. Joy stayed the night with me and made a great effort to stay up and enjoy a night of observing with me. She lasted until about midnight and I continued until around 4:30am. As the dew started getting worse than my heater could keep up with, I decided to call it quits and take a stroll around the field to see what others were up to. Everyone at the event was extremely friendly and it felt good to be around others with a common interest. One person in particular really made the day memorable by allowing me to take some time with his 25" dobsonian telescope. The views were astounding and if it weren't for the fact that the scope costs more than $12k and takes a trailer to move, I would have felt compelled to buy one.
The weekend ended calmly with everyone rolling out of bed at 9am or so and packing up their gear.
A few additional notes:
I noticed that I was the only person who brought solar panels to recharge my deep cycle Optima battery. I was really surprised not to see any others considering many had spent thousands of dollars on their equipment setup. The solar solution worked beautifully and I was able to run my laptop, heater, and miscellaneous equipment all weekend without ever having to start my van to recharge the battery.
Apparently it's a good idea to enter the raffle drawings. My neighbor Fred bought 3 tickets and won 2 very nice eyepieces worth well over $100. I'll have to grab some raffle tickets at the next party in September.