This year’s Chiefland star Party was held from 3 through 9 November. As usual participants came from all parts of the USA and Canada. Scope sizes ranged from 3” to 36”. This year Camera Concepts from New Jersey and Wolf camera from Sarasota were the main vendors. Both had great selection and prices. Needless to say a few dollars were parted from many attendees. Those new eyepieces were just too good to pass up!!

The drawing prizes were exceptional this year with Televue Nagler and Panoptic eyepieces taking back seat to an 8 inch Dobsonian and ETX-90EC telescopes. The evening programs on radio astronomy, volcanoes and astronomy effects, and telescope collimation were both educational and interesting.

The viewing unfortunately for more than half the nights left something to be desired. Many nights were heavily influenced by low cloud cover with the final Saturday night a complete wash out. Still three perfect nights made it worthwhile. There is nothing like experiencing a great dark sky site, especially after the very poor conditions we have experienced over these many months. The veil nebula under the influence of an Oxygen III Filter never looked better. The filaments stood out in stark contrast to the dark background matter. The nebulosity in Orion was great also, with the flame nebula clearly visible. And yes try as hard as I could with my 14 inch aperture , the Horse head just wasn’t quite there!! But don’t worry just sneak a peek from the nearby 26 inch Dobsonian!! That is what makes star parties so much fun.

With lots of sunshine during the day time hours allowed some time to view the sun. There is still a lot of sunspot activity even though we are past the solar maximum. I counted some 26 sunspots in my little 80 mm refractor, and even got a decent digital picture with my CoolPix 950.

I had the good fortune to be able to reserve a small section of field for CFAS members. Alan Chen, Todd Parker, and I were able to place our scopes near each other which worked out well. Alan was CCD imaging and Todd and I were visual observing. I had finally figured out to hook up my rig to the Sky program. This is a great system as you are able to track your scope’s position across the program’s sky chart. Turning off the star images allows just the deep sky objects to remain on the sky chart. This really keeps you oriented to the sky and the constellations, as opposed to just pushing the “GoTo” button. Steve Neal has his Dobsonian similarly hooked up with encoders and a “B” Tangent box.

We moved about each persons telescope, and had a terrific time. Alan summed it up best when he stated “That's the best of both worlds!” Alan got several excellent images. The one of NGC253 shown below was especially awesome to watch develop. It also looked great in our telescopes !! We successfully found the Fornax galaxy group. We counted 13 galaxies in one small area of the sky!!!

If you have never attended a star party you have missed out on a great amateur astronomy experience. The “Winter Sky Party” in the Florida Keys is next February, and our Astrofest is in March. I hope you can attend at least one!!