It’s a hot Friday evening in July, and my husband and I are preparing for an overnight camping trip the next morning. My friend J, who is already at the campsite calls me and says “It’s really cold up here. Bring clothes for skiing.” This is not a ski trip. We are headed over the pass toward the eastern part of Washington State where temperatures tend to be much warmer than Seattle in the summer. We are a little confused, but we followed his directions.
Saturday morning we set off to spend a night at an event we’ve never been to before - a star party. This inimitable gathering could be described as a big geek fest in a back-country field on a mountaintop. However it is also an event where the awe inspiring and amazing things you see will have you wanting more. We certainly do.
With our car packed with too many things for one night of car-camping and plenty of ski-worthy clothes (including boots, hats, gloves, scarves and the little heat packets that you stick in your gloves when your hands get cold), we head out on a two and half hour drive to Table Mountain just near Ellensburg, Washington. At an elevation of 6,359 feet, you definitely feel much closer to the sky.
The drive up the mountain from the highway meanders through farm country, before it starts to turn into wooded forest and curving roads with beautiful vistas of the valley below. As we near the campground just after noon, in the distance we get our first sight of the camp that has over 650 attendants and looks like some type of space-age village with campers, cars, tents and numerous telescopes covered in shiny, silvery reflective material.
We pull up to registration and are greeted by a friendly staff member who guides us to our friends’ campsite. Our friends have been there for several days, some coming as early as a week before, even though the main Star Party event is only for 3 days. Although the sight of the entire camp is impressive, our friends’ site alone is quite remarkable. Several silver astronomy observer tents are lined in a row adjacent to a tarp-carpeted living room of chairs for some 15 adults and kids, a table covered with snacks and goodies, a camping stove and various other trappings, to keep everyone in comfort. As we start setting up our tent, our friend A asks if we want bratwurst and beer, and we happily partake.
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During the day, most people hang out and socialize. There are expert speakers that talk about different astronomical subjects and there are plenty of activities for kids. On Saturday afternoon we tour the campgrounds and note that all of the campers and tents surround a big telescope field that has every type and size of telescope imaginable. Some are computerized where one just punches in coordinates, and some are so high off the ground on huge tripods that one needs a ladder to adjust them and see through the viewfinder.
One particularly interesting telescope is a solar telescope, which allows you to look at the sun in broad daylight. Looking through the telescope, all I see is a reddish orb. I feel like I am looking through a microscope at some organism in a Petri dish. Dennis Hoofnagle, a Star Party volunteer points out that we can also see solar flares –the tiny, tiny strings of red on the right side of the orb. They were so little – like the size of a pin head, that at first I didn’t see them, but finally I see this minute coloring that breaks the rim of the orb. Solar flares! It is hard to imagine these flares are actually the length of 3 Earth diameters. The sun’s diameter is approximately 100 times the Earth’s diameter.
At the first sign of dusk, people start preparing their telescopes for viewing and taking pictures, just as the first stars start showing in the sky. This is the time that those with the astronomy tents start to take the tops off to reveal even more telescopes tucked inside vestibules. Everywhere, people are calibrating and preparing for the big show the night is going to put on.
Words cannot really express the magnificence of the spectacle we are about to encounter, nor the brazenly freezing weather we experience. My friend J said it had been colder the night before. I can’t imagine it being colder than it is this night.
Just as darkness is approaching, I start to get colder, so I go into my tent to bundle up with my ski gear. I put on everything I have brought: long johns, jeans and ski pants, ski socks and boots, and my gloves, scarf and hat. It’s weird that it’s July and there is no snow, but I look like I’m ready to make snow angels. After 15 minutes of struggling in the tent to get my gear on, I unzip the flap and step out to look up in wonderment at one of the most spectacular sites I’ve ever seen - an unobstructed, uninhibited night sky full of hundreds of billions of stars and the Milky Way forming a cloudy white pattern across the sky. That view is imprinted on my brain. Although I have seen this sky many times before, I am still amazed. It is surreal. I think just for a moment, “I wonder if anyone is looking back at us right now?” Well at least looking back at our sun.
As I head back to the “living room” I hear hushed tones of conversation in a lingo I don’t understand. “I see M13, did you find M81?” “ISS should be passing at 9:25.” “Did you see that iridium flare? People are referring to the objects in the sky that they spot through their telescopes - galaxies, nebulae, satellites, planets, and the International Space Station (ISS). Some objects, like the ISS are viewable by the naked eye. Others can be seen through a pair of binoculars, like Jupiter’s moons. And some require a telescope for better detail. As I peer through a telescope at a nebula, I remark at how fuzzy it looks. My friend D, a fellow neophyte attendee responds, “They look like cotton balls”.
My husband and I decide to attend the midnight talk – Planetarium under the Stars with Tom Colwell to get a refresher on all of the constellations in the night sky. While Tom is telling us about Ursa Major, there is a flash of light so bright, I think someone has turned on car lights right behind me (white light is strictly forbidden after dusk as it impedes night vision), but it isn’t a car. It is a fireball, a bright meteor that falls to earth creating a trail of light so bright, for several seconds it lights up the entire sky. I turn to catch the tail end of it dying out just above a line of trees. That is the BIGGEST meteor I’ve ever seen. I only stay at the talk for about 20 minutes as I am so cold I go back to camp and sit under a blanket and look up at the sky.
At around 2:30 AM, I’m cold to the bone and sleepy, so we call it a night. Tomorrow we head home. The die-hard astronomers stay out until the first inkling of sunlight appears around 4:30 AM. With my long johns and hat still on, under my sleeping bag and two blankets, I dream about the heavenly bodies I have seen in the starry sky above.
