Saturday, April 21, 2018

2018 Messier Marathon or Things Didn't Go According to Plan



My yearly ritual is the Messier marathon. I join my fellow astronomy club members at a remote site to try to view 110 Messier objects in one night. I seriously debated not going, though because the predicted weather was awful. The cloudiness was supposed to last most of the night and it would be windy and cold. This was the desert’s WIND season, which usually occurs when I have some outside activity that requires no wind to be optimal. The eternal debate was to go even with predicted bad weather and hope it gets better, or to stay home and wonder what fun I missed.

Bleak.


Rural Arizona desert is un-welcoming. It’s beautiful in its own bleak way, but it doesn’t want humans to stay. It shows no mercy for the hapless. Cattle eat the ground vegetation, so what’s left is scrub and dust. The site  is 120 miles from home, west on I-10, off an exit off the freeway, that immediately turns into a dirt road that goes to the middle of nowhere. The place elicits a sense of unease.  

Since it is so far, the car has to be loaded up with a tent, sleeping bags, the telescope equipment, a chair, a table, food and generally, the kitchen sink. It is not an easy trek. If the weather is cloudy, I go anyway, since the diehards will still show up. In that case, people stand around and talk or go to sleep. The clouds rarely last all night.

At the site, no signs were on the road to indicate direction. I knew the way, but it would have been reassuring to see some signs of civilization. People were set up, but no one that I knew. The diehards weren’t so much and had stayed home. I parked near the porta potty because it’s hard as hell to find in the dark. 

Clouds weren’t totally covering the sky, but the breeze was a persistent, relentless slap. Wind will usually die down at sunset. However, the tent had to be set up before it got dark. It can be calm, but pull out a tent, and the wind starts howling. Every time. I hate camping, but sleeping in the car is even more uncomfortable.

Since  the wind was unruly, my strategy was to weight down the tent corners, then stake it. The system was a dome tent with bendable rods that attached to the corners and erected the tent. Normally, I put up the tent, then try to stake it before the wind blows it away. Secure one corner and the other lifts up. Before I know it, the whole thing has shifted and I am cussing up a storm. Staking it down first made it crooked. It was an hour struggle to make it work and a stake bent in the hard ground. My “shelter” was sad looking, misshapen and rattling in the breeze.



Pathetic.


My mood was dark. The sky was cloudy and the telescope couldn’t be collimated. This was the worst Marathon ever! The strong wind chilled me. I retreated to my car to brood.

A car left and I was envious. Briefly, I wondered if I could leave without ending up in a ditch. Leaving a star site required not using headlights, otherwise raving astronomers will yell at the hapless driver for blinding their night vision. The dirt road edges are not easy to see and it would  have been easy to veer off and get stuck in soft sand.  From experience, driving in the dark from star parties years ago resulted in getting lost, which was terrifying because it’s disorienting.  I just stayed. I didn't drive 120 miles into the godforsaken desert to quit now.

Finally, a few stars popped out. The viewfinder and the Sky Commander computer thingy that tells where to point the telescope could be set up. The targets briefly appeared through the clouds, before they got instantly obscured. It was an exercise in futility, but I outwitted the weather occasionally. Maybe the situation wasn’t totally hopeless.

After a few hours, the Sky Commander decided it was lost. Re-aligning by siting on two stars was too much effort, so the hunt was manual. This took forever because the method was inexact. Look at a map, figure the object is maybe, kind of, between certain stars and hope that it’s there when looked at. Star hopping is tedious. Exhaustion set in.

It was colder by now, the temperature into the forties. I had on long underwear, jeans, a long sleeved t-shirt, a cashmere sweater, ski bibs, long socks, a bike jacket and a long wool coat. It wasn’t enough in the biting wind. Standing outside was a test of determination and endurance.

Someone came by and chatted. She was trying to find the porta potty in the dark. We discussed the dismal state of affairs. A gust of wind blew my list away. I ran after it, barely seeing it in the ambient light, and tried to catch it before the wind blew it farther. I finally caught it with my foot after a sprint through the desert. Could this night get any worse?

She left, and I worked for a few more hours. The sky had mostly cleared by now, but the wind still blew hair into my mouth. The Milky Way was out and the sky was filled with sparkling stars. Conditions weren’t crystal clear, but still beautiful. At 2:30 a.m., I decided to sleep a little, because driving 120 miles home in the morning required at least some level of alertness.

I went into the tent to sleep, but the wind still rattled it loudly. Would it blow down on top of me? Sleep was impossible. I got out and scrunched into the back seat of the car. Setting up the tent had been a total waste of time. The wind whistled around the car and the sleeping bags barely fended off the cold. I slept until 4:30 a.m.

When I awoke, it was difficult to  get up and step outside into the cold. The wind had at least died down. I wandered to find the porta potty, but got disoriented in the dark twice. I saw vehicles, but had no idea where my car was, nor the porta potty. I stumbled over bushes and found my car again by following the camper that was near it. I briefly considered just peeing by my car, but decided against it.

I now had a bunch of galaxies to search, and not long to find them, so I sucked it up and re-aligned my Sky Commander. The Leo and Virgo constellations has many galaxies and the fuzzy balls look similar. To try to distinguish one from another was a descent into madness. The Sky Commander still had problems, but at least located the objects. Time was limited as sunrise would be soon.

I found 68 objects total by the time the sky lightened. The “marathon” was not so much finding them, but defying the weather and not quitting. It was an emotional roller coaster of misery, despair and fun.

With more light, the porta potties came into view. How the hell did I miss it when it was that close? Of course, if it had had its usual red light instead of nothing, it would have been found easier to find.


The elusive Porta Potties.

Was it worth it to go through all this? The whole affair was a clusterfuck with the clouds, the wind, the cold, the misaligned Sky Commander, the list blowing away, the woebegone tent.
The theme of my life this year is Things are Not Going According to Plan and this certainly fit that category. A difficult experience was better than no experience. I could have stayed home and slept in my warm bed, but what would have been the fun in that?