I LOVE the Oregon Star Party. Its combination of remote location, altitude, and often extremely smooth air flow has provided me with views I have never seen the equal of elsewhere. The darkness of the sky and steadiness of the view can be incredable. Months before the OSP, my biggest worries were that air-glow and Aurora due to the solar maximum would ruin the dark skies. With only a couple of weeks before the event my worries turned to the smoke and forest fires. Finally, the week before OSP, weather forcasters began announcing a "much needed" rain was due to arrive in the area which would help solve the fire and smoke problem. Thursday, my son and I headed out hoping to beat the weather. Those that had arrived earlier in the week did have some reasonable views.

We arrived in the afternoon, just after a dust devil (swirling wind) of unusual strength had wandered through the site scattering scopes, tables, tents, and other (some quite heavy) equipment and badly injuring one person with flying debri (a colapsable, covered awning which spun/flew with the dust devil). Shortly after we pulled into our camp site the helicopter arrived for evacuation to a hospital in Bend, Oregon:

We set up along with our fellow astrophotographers in the astro-photo area. It was partly cloudy and we were quite hopeful as we set up our astroturf carpet, 12" LX200, SkyTent, folding chairs, and cot. Our camp site:

Brian prepares for the Mars Rover races to be held on Saturday afternoon:

Photos from about the telescope field:

Our only 2hrs. of dark-sky observing occured on Thursday night. No photos but Brian was excited about all the satelites he spotted and I was able to show him some of my favorite Messier objects through the 12" SCT. These photos were taken with our new video camera with "night vision" (it has a small IR lamp to illuminate the subject. I'm sure it would cause problems for CCD or film exposures but visually it can't be seen):

It was cloudy Thursday night from about 10:30 on and never cleared. Friday morning was dry and pleasant but the rain arrived that afternoon. When the "hairy" clouds were seen on the horizon, I began tossing in all our equipment intothe SkyTent so Brian and I would have as large a living space as possible in the Expedition.

Brian taking refuge from the storm Friday afternoon:

Friday night the rain pounded. There were short periods of calm but not much. The fain hammered the car and just when you thought it couldn't come down any harder it would increase again in severity. In my book, this was a storm, not just showers.

Some time pre-dawn Saturday the rains came to an end and we had partially clear skies at dawn. The SkyTent REALLY came through and everything was dry inside. Brian and I had a look at Sun spots as well as Jupiter, and Saturn against the blue sky (I had polar aligned Thursday night so the LX200 just slewed right to them). The views were very detailed but extremely low in contrast due to the scattered sun light.

At 11am we heard that the clearing would not last and that more showers were coming our way. I decided putting things away dry was better than putting things away wet and my opportunity to take photos was not going to arrive. We packed up and were off by about noon.

We passed through some squalls that included hail on our way home so I felt we left at the right time.

Oh, well. Better luck next year.

-Glenn