Star Gazers

Early September, we had astronomers come to Whisper Canyon. For the previous eight years they had used Lake San Antonio. I hear it was a barren 5 acre parking lot, but the viewing was pretty good being away from city light. What was fun was they camped in new and creative places. Below is one site just below the shop in Kavanaugh creek.

 Many of them just camped next to their telescopes.

 This was Thursday PM as they were rolling in

  They did have some pretty nice scopes, as one would expect. These folks take their star gazing serious. This scope had a mirror to capture the light. There might have been 8 of these with minor variations.

Carl was a digital photographer of the stars. Home was just outside of Albuquerque NM. He has rigged up this cart to move his equipment in and out of his van. It has batteries underneath and a

winch to move it up and down his ramps.

They mostly did their own meals but Daniel did some breakfast cooking for some of the men. One of the men had acquired some white gas Coleman stoves. So they had fun using them instead of the wolf stove. 

Here are some of the men camping under the big oak in  my staging area. I found that particularly delightful as more of the camp was used, instead of everyone clustered together in the RV park.

We took great delight in serving this group. For example, pointing out that the swamp cooler was running in the chapel if they needed to cool off. We had sub tropical moisture come in so they had 1/2 a night of viewing on Thursday night. Friday night and Saturday night were not really cloudy but it was hazy enough to make it a bust. Most of these folks were old friends so there was plenty of conversation.We enjoy every group but this one was our new favorites.

    The camp was opened up to the community on Saturday evening. Some folks came and  interacted with the astronomers. It was too overcast to see stars though.