The coach was 51 when I went to bed and 51 when I woke up, so that was better than it being colder!
I did wake up around 3 or 4 and put my hoodie on to use the toilet as I just had warm PJ pants and a tshirt on. I ending up keeping the hoodie on and over my head and went back to sleep that way.
At 8AM I was jostled awake to what sounded like someone knocking on the door. I called out wait a minute I'm up, and extricated myself from under the blankets. I sleepily stumbled toward the door and opened it up. No one was there except a full grown turkey who got spooked by the door and ran around in a circle and left around the side of the coach.
I was understandably befuddled as I was sure there was a knock on the door, but the kids were still asleep in the tent. Later I was talking to a guy 2 sites over and told him the turkey knocked on my door and he told me he was watching that morning peck at it's reflection in the chrome center caps on my coach. Ah, now it made sense as I was on the gaucho bed right over the two rear wheels.
Right away I knew it would be a lot warmer today as it was already warmer outside than in the coach. I opened a few windows to let it breath and pulled the windshield curtains back as there was moisture on the inside from the cold and my breathing all night.
Lazy morning after putting a serious dent in the rum supplies. As you can see our astronomy neighbor packed out early (probably around 9ish) happy that he got better photos last night. The fire pit was filling up with paper and cardboard from 2 days of not lighing a fire, so it'd be and easy start later.
All of a sudden there were a bunch of horse trailers pulling in. More than I have ever seen at one time in the park (probably 10-12 trailers). Turns out there was a 'Toy Trot' to collect Christmas gifts. The local Sheriff came by and got in on the fun, posing for photos.
If you look just to the left of the silver pickup's windshield, you can see the corner of the Taco truck. We were VERY excited about it, as we never get a Taco Truck while camping. We walked over and sure enough they were happy to take our cash. I had a beef burrito and a Pineapple (what else?!) Jarritos. It was very good. I also got an order of Churros as I wanted some deep fried sugar.
By about 11 AM it was in the mid 60s already! It topped out around 70 for the day. The warming trend was caused by the wind swinging around from the NE. With it came the marine moisture and clouds. As it was getting near sundown, I started to worry that the planets may be obscured from viewing.
The clouds thankfully kept pushing west and it was more and more promising. With Lucy and Naya showing up and our friends and Lucy's cousin and his kids all arriving, I knew tonight would be a lot different experience.
You can see the pile of wood just waiting. The power cord tells me I have the telescope already set up (it's soooo much easier in the daytime lol).
It was touch and go at first with the planets as the clouds kept blocking them, making it hard to get dialed in. I then switched up to the moon for a few minutes to get the scope dialed in. Unfortunately, I don't have a camera setup on the scope yet, however, talking to guy on the next site I learned alot about astrophotography.
I shamelessly stole this pic and the one below off of the web to illustrate what we could see. Colorwise to the naked eye, these are the closest ones.
To be able to see two planets and some moons with this detail at the same time in a telescope was beyond my wildest dreams honestly. Between this and seeing a comet naked eye back in July, has made 2020 the best year in my star gazing career.
This is another web grab. it is a layered photo. In other words, the scope didn't move, but there are at least 4 different photos layered here. One of Jupiter, one of Saturn, one of the moons, and one of the background stars. You can see all this with your eye, but hard to get the exposures right with a camera, hence the layers (one of the things I learned).
Unfortunately the planets started low in the sky and only got lower in a hurry. As they drop toward the horizon you are looking through more and more atmosphere. So they start getting fuzzier with the interference.
By 8PM everyone (including some neighbors) had a good look at the conjunction, Mars, and the Moon and people were antsy to light the fire. I didn't want soot on the scope so we packed it up and gave the all clear.
We kept our distance and had a great dinner and some drinks and burned all the wood I had brought outside.
Epilogue:
French Toast for Breakfast and a slow start, I was off the site by 12 and on the road. On the way home the exhaust note changed dramatically as chuck of the muffler left. My ears were ringing by the time I got home as it was basically open headers.
I tried to catch the binary readout on the odometer at 10101.0, but I didn't quite get it. Got home around 3:00 and offloaded everything an put her away as we had to swing into Christmas mode.
Did I mention it was cold? Friday morning it was 41 F outside. The coach did well at 53F as it's usually only good for about 10 degrees over the outside when cold.
The 'outside' temp is actually the inside of the refrigerator and the inside is the temp in the coach just above the fridge. I got up and started the coffee
While I was sipping my coffee and waiting for the kids to come in from the tent, this crew showed up for breakfast.
There were about 6 of them chomping away. JT's tent is just out of frame on the left. Probably a good thing it wasn't green lol.
Close up of the picture above. I like this shot a lot.
Funny thing about site 22. I never thought it one of the shady ones (less coverage = better for astronomy), but with it being only 2 days away from the shortest day of the year, the sun stayed low and kept the coach in the shade the entire day with only about an hour of sun on the front of the coach.
I had noticed this the day before and left the shades open to collect warmth as I would do later today.
We ate breakfast and waited for it to warm up a little, then decided to do a hike. I had noticed two things on the drive in. First, the road was in great shape and looked freshly graded (it was). Secondly, it was very wet for this time of year out here.
Our site was in the Equestrian loop so we started off to make the Green loop. I've done several times before and figured that one was quick and easy with the most variation without getting tiresome. It was still pretty cold so we bundled up and set out.
We got to where the green arrow is and it was wet. Not super deep (ankle to shin), but it was about 50 degrees out and I didn't have a second pair of shoes. We explored options to try and get around it on high ground, but looking at the trail map, we could see this area was slightly depressed and thus no way to get around the water. Photos from a previous trip
We backtracked all of a hundred feet and set off on the Prairie Loop trail in red. It's about a 2 hr walk so not horrible. We set off and found it enjoyable as the sun was on us from the south and trees on the north of us were blocking the cold wind. Not sure how far we got down this trail but it was probably a quarter to a half of mile before we encountered mud. Thick gooey swamp mud. We poked around looking for a way by and I thought I had one until I was sinking...I quickly retreated. It was a smaller passage and we were looking for a way by, but I pulled the trail map and saw that even if we got past here, there was more rough going ahead. Some pics of this trail are available here from a previous trip.
I announced that we could most likely be successful on the area in the oval above as it's a quick loop through a hammock so definitely on higher ground. We picked up the bikes and headed over. This was a quick and easy one and only one small spot of mud, which we got by by throwing some cabbage palm fronds down over the mud and stepped lively. Photos of that part are in the first link above as I was messing around with my GoPro (may have enough footage later) and didn't take any stills.
After the quick hike we went back to the site for lunch. It was now in the mid 50s out and the temp in the coach was sloooooowy inching up. In fact the warmest it got was 62 inside right around sunset. After lunch the kids headed off to the gator hole on the bikes and let them have some alone time.
We got dinner going early as we were doing the telescope thing again that night. Our one astronomy neighbor was still here as he was thwarted the night before by the wind buffeting his scope so he didn't get the pictures he wanted.
Notice the small amount of sun on the front of the coach. JT is looking at the moon already and it's about half an hour before sunset. It was actually really cool as the sky was blue next to the moon but then it was black through the telescope, but still blue to the naked eye.
Got a text from my buddy who was bringing his RV up from Kendall, they were delayed and would make it up the following night :(
Tonight was a repeat of the first night, but with less wind. My buddy Mike with the twinsie GMC bought a Roadmaster wagon and he drove it out to visit with us and look at the planets. We packed it in a lot earlier this night as it was colder.
Being courteous astronomy fans, we skipped on the fire again and went inside the coach. I had batched a couple of cocktails before I left, so it was craft cocktail time in the coach. We had a nice visit with Mike and we kept going until about 12 or so. We went out and looked at the Milky Way and a few other things with our eyes as we packed up the scope around 9PM.
It was 51F inside the coach when I went to bed, but tomorrow was going to be warmer! I woke up in the middle of the night and put my hoodie on to use the bathroom. I kept it on the rest of the night under a blanket and a comforter.
Lucy suggested I take a heater with, but if my son was sleeping outside in a tent, I could deal with it (I did invite them in but they wanted their privacy).
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.
