Sometimes fate works in your favor and the stars and planets align just for you and their is a cosmic convergence of goodness. Obviously by the title, you think I'm talking about the 'Christmas Star' conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. I am, but that is just the icing on the cake as the whole weekend just fell into lockstep for the most part!
Art by Russell Mofsky
With 2020 and the lack of being able to travel much, I had a backlog of vacation time that I needed to use, so the last quarter of the year has afforded me with a lot of vacation days as I didn't take any until the end of July (see the Skidaway adventure).
My work prevented me of having Christmas week proper off as someone had to work and I got the short stick this year. I figured the week before was almost as good so I took Dec 10-20th off. On October 1, I booked 3 nights at the prairie (17,18,19) as it was a young waxing crescent so it would be good for astronomy and I got a site that is easy to set the scope up on for the western sky (young moon goes down early).
At this point I had no idea about a few things that come into play and serendipitously played out into a great weekend. Right around the time I booked, I saw that an old friend of mine was now making YouTube videos about RVing. He just bought a class C in August and was busy hitting up a lot of parks. You can check him out here. I let him know we would be there and he booked in 2 overlapping nights with us (Fri & Sat). About a week later my son called and said that he would have Christmas off but didn't have his exact dates yet. I gave him the dates we would be at the park. As it worked out, his leave coincided with our visit to the prairie so it was shaping up as a cool trip!
In mid to late November, I found out about the conjunction. I got very excited as I knew even though we would miss the closest day by 2 nights, it would be really good if the weather co-operated. As time rolled forward, I started thinking of adding more days to the trip, but the park was booked out. By the time it was days away, I had some other issues around the house that popped up so I stuck with the original plan.
As I was off for the week, I had everything pretty well packed by Wed. I actually thought about leaving as a spot came available, but a cold front was coming and I would be by myself, it would rain, and I'd have to move sites the next day. I decided to stay home and get out early. My boy got lucky with work and got out early which worked well for him as he was able to leave Virginia a day early and avoid the incoming snow storm.
I got on the road and was on the campsite before 2:30PM. I drove through the front (it was low 80s in Delray when I left).
The drive into the park was showing a lot of clouds overhead, but I knew the front was still pushing through so crossed my fingers it wouldn't stall.
I got a text from the boy and had an hour before their arrival. He said is was cloudless about 50 miles north. I got busy taking out chairs, and the telescope tripod, bikes, etc. We debuted a flag Lucy designed and got made for us. The other side says 1976 (year of our coach).
We ended up moving the tripod a bit further away before we set the scope up. My son arrived and so did the locals. I told his mentioned to his girlfriend that the wildlife in the park didn't shy away from people much and she wasn't disappointed. I think the turkeys came by about 10 minutes after they got their tent up.
You can see here by 4PM or so the clouds are all gone!
About 6-8 feet behind the back of the coach just picking their way through, didn't mind us at all.
Just a couple minutes later there were more!
As we were focused on astronomy, I planned an easy dinner to cook before it got dark. A hearty meal of pasta and meatballs. Pretty much warm it up and boil the pasta. I used the induction cooktop in the coach for sauce and meatballs (pre-cooked, store bought). I had JT use the gas burner to boil the pasta on the picnic table outside. We got it done as it was getting dark (was smart for once and got the scope set up in the daylight).
We ate and cleaned up in the dying light and got busy with the scope. I started with the moon as it's easy and got everything dialed in and switched over to the planets as they were lower in the sky.
Right as we were doing this, a guy pulled into the site next to us and frantically started putting up his scope. He had some serious hardware and soon had a second scope going up.
Meanwhile, it was getting chilly. It was 80ish when I left home, 68 when I got to the site, and it was dropping by the minute with no cloud cover. I got Saturn dialed in and saw a view I hadn't seen since I was about 10-11 years old through the telescope. Saturn and one moon, clear as a bell, with distinct rings! I had gotten the scope aligned pretty well for casual viewing and it was tracking well. We rolled up through different lenses all the was to the 6mm, but unfortunately couldn't get it into sharp focus with it....
It was an easy move to Jupiter as they were so close (both in the spotting scope) so I used the fine tuning to move over. Same result as the 12 mm lens was the highest power we could get clear. Sorry for the lack of photos, but I don't have a camera set up on the scope.
As the planets set (they were below the VERY low tree line by 7:30PM), I moved up to the moon as that was next. a 12% waxing crescent. We spent a good amount of time on that and the temp kept dropping.
We actually had to wait for Orion to clear the trees to the east before we could look at the Nebula. We had a few drinks and I kinda wanted a fire for warmth but not the light that came with it. The neighbor had a buddy roll up. Turns out the guy drove from Homestead (3+ hours) to help take pictures all night and had to drive back and go to work in the morning! We talked with them a bit and checked out their rig. It was impressive as they were taking layer photos of Andromeda and Triangulum over a few hours. We could see what they were getting as they had computer screens (vs. an eyepiece).
Once I got the Orion Nebula dialed in, I invited the first guy over to check it out. He looked and was freaking out how good it was (thanks for the ego pump :) ) and called his buddy over to look. They spent a good 15 minutes taking turns and we tried various lenses to switch it up.
We finished up and packed the scope away. I couldn't bring myself to light the fire and destroy their darkness so we retreated to the coach for more cocktails and lively conversation. I was about 62 inside the coach when I went to bed.
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