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?

2012 Messier Marathon

Once a year is the Messier marathon. In the spring for a short time period, all the constellations in the northern latitudes can be seen in one night. Charles Messier cataloged 110 objects because he was looking for comets and wanted to distinguish these objects from what he was looking for. The goal is to find all the objects with a telescope in one night. Some are low in the horizon before sunset or dawn and are hard to see. I have attempted this feat for a number of years, but the best number I have seen is 109. Once I got a computer guidance system on my telescope, it was a lot easier, but I still had to work most of the night to try to see everything. Most people would think that this is an insane thing to do. It’s tiring and uncomfortable     standing around in the cold.                         

Obsessions usually start small. They sneak into your life, and before you know it, you are sucked into doing absurd things. The seeds of my astronomy interest possibly started when I first saw Saturn as a child, through my father’s handmade telescope. I could see the rings around the planet. It was fascinating, a whole visual phenomena that I didn’t know existed.

As an adult, my interest was revived when my then husband got an eight inch Dobsonian telescope. A Dobsonian is a mirrored tube that sits on a swiveling base. It’s simple to assemble and carry around. My husband lost interest in using it, so I took it over. I got a bright star atlas and started looking for things to observe. I learned the constellations and the position of the stars to find objects. Even in my light-polluted back yard, I could see galaxies, star clusters and globulars, which are fuzzy balls of stars. These objects were incredible to look at with the variety of formations, nebulosity and the fuzziness of millions of stars. But after a while, I wanted to see fainter stuff that required the contrast of a dark sky.

This required stepping out of my comfort zone and driving long distances to remote places. I joined an astronomy club, so I wasn’t alone once I got to the site. Phoenix is so light-polluted that a drive of at least fifty miles is required to escape it. I didn’t like driving that far by myself. My husband had no interest in accompanying me, so I was on my own.

The sites always had at least two miles of dirt road to drive on, at the end of fifteen miles of cotton fields after a left turn to nowhere. The roads seemed to meander in pointless directions. At first I would attempt to drive home the same night. This involved leaving the area with no lights on, since white light will invoke extreme wrath and loud cussing from fellow astronomers. Red light is okay, since it won’t spoil a person’s night vision. I gave up trying to drive a car in the dark on a dirt road with no lights because it was difficult to stay on the road if I could even see where to drive. I could possibly go off into a ditch or get lost. I took to sleeping in the car and leaving in the daylight.

Each site we observed at had its peculiarities. One near Buckeye Hills had black helicopters with no lights that flew by occasionally. My guess it was due to the proximity of the Goldwater Air Force Range that the military was checking us out. Other times hunters would send out flares and try to shoot things in the dark. The border patrol checked us out . No one would bother us, but some sites became unsafe to be at due to criminal activity.

One site on Salome Highway near the Harquahala Mountains was memorable because it had a roost of Barn Owls nearby , and I could hear the haunting screeches in the night. It was thrilling to be in that other worldly darkness. One of the members, however, got attacked by a swarm of bees, so we didn’t go there much after that.

The site of the Messier Marathon is an abandoned small airfield near Horvatter Road two miles south of I-10. It is named “Salome Emergency Airfield” on the maps. It looks like it was rarely used, if ever, and it was established in the 1930's. The dirt runways are still there, but are a little overgrown with Creosote. A pilot would have to be pretty desperate to land in this forgotten place. Maybe in the 1930's less concrete existed for landings. Still in the middle of nowhere, it must have been more so back then.

These desert places were always very dusty. It was usually BLM land or a ranch, where cows roamed freely, leaving their cow pies and chewing down the vegetation that kept the dirt down. Any moving car would kick up clouds of dust into the atmosphere that could be seen for miles. My car would be covered with dirt by the time I left.

I usually made up a list of objects to look at. Without a computer guidance system or setting circles on the scope, I had to rely on figuring out where the object was by the position of the stars in the constellation. This was hit or miss and if it was a really faint object, it was mostly miss. Throw in clouds or atmospheric disturbance, it was even more difficult. Actually finding the faint galaxy, star cluster or globular felt like an accomplishment even though it the object might not be all that exciting to look at. Some were amazing, though, making the hunt worthwhile. Some would have a haze of nebulosity surrounding a sparkling star formation. Bright galaxies could have lanes of dark matter running though them. Double star formations could be red and blue. Some nebulas would be ring shaped and green in color. Comets, satellites, meteors with fireball trails were also a bonus.

Sometimes the weather did not cooperate. This is always an iffy factor in astronomy. Loading up a car with all the junk you need is time consuming. Sleeping in a car or tent isn’t all that comfortable. It’s a crap shoot trying to figure out if it will cloud up or be clear. Usually, if I think the weather is going to be crappy, I stay home. The exception is the Messier marathon. People almost always show up, which is not the case with other star gazing dates. If no observing can be done, people stand around and talk. It doesn’t stay cloudy all night most of the time in Arizona. A hundred mile drive is required, so it is hard just to turn around and go home.

This year the weather clouded up and the sky had clear spots at sunset, but the horizon was murky with haze. I couldn’t see the first objects. I had to look at the same areas several times, hoping that the clouds would clear. Sometimes it did clear out and I could see what I was looking for. I have seen the Messier objects many times, but I was reminded how pretty some of them are. I continued this process until I ran out of constellations. I got into the car to sleep for a while. I had on long underwear, jeans, a long sleeved shirt, a ski bib, a coat and another long wool coat. All this, plus sleeping bags kept me warm. It was an effort to get out of the car to look at the sky again.

Being out in the desert at night is strange. I am out of place. The rest of the world is snug in their beds. Or they are traveling on the highway to the north. I could see the headlights that seemed to go slowly only because of the distance. It’s not completely dark. On a good night, I could have seen the Milky Way with dark lanes through it with my naked eye. The stars would sparkle brilliantly. This night a haze dulled everything.

I looked at objects for another hour until I couldn’t see anything and gave up. The warm car beckoned. A mere sixty seven objects was all I saw that night. The next bout of Messier insanity will have wait until next year.