This was my first trip to the famous Spring Star Party in Bieszczady.

Bieszczady are the farthest range of Polish mountains, in the far south-east corner of the country. The whole area is very sparsely populated, with small villages located in desolate mountains valleys. This is probably the darkest sky spot in Poland, in the middle of the mountains range.

The housing is from old after-WW-II small military building - a base for small garrison, with only few
more houses in the valley. The building was purchased by a local owner and converted to a tourist hotel - a base for mountain hiking but also for us astronomers.

It is located ca 1000m from the state border - previously heavily guarded but now left alone. The elevation is around 700m, and the whole valley is a gently sloping meadow surrounded by mountains on all sides (hence no viewing below 10 degrees over the horizon).

The next bar is 6km away and the nearest settlement of few houses probably 15km. Nearest small town is ca 50km and
larger one 100km. To the south, there is Republic of Slovakia with even less densely
populated mountains and some 200km away over the mountain ranges - Hungary.

Mountains are rather gentle, with highest elevations in the 1500m range, mostly covered by forests and meadows (called Poloniny).

It should suffice to say that when one is well accommodated (not perfectly, as we all had running laptops and lots of LEDs
on mounts, cameras etc), we could see the shadows cast by Milky Way and
Summer Triangle, and I would dare to say rising Jupiter would spoil our
night vision as well as full Moon in the town :-)

We were lucky to have almost pristine skies (some cumulus clouds on Friday evening dissipated by 11PM).

The distance from Warsaw is ca 460km but it takes around 8 hours to get there, as there is no highway in
that direction and the road crosses many populated areas with long runs of limited speed.

A good point is that one will not get bothered there - most of the
mobile networks do not work, I had to climb to a small summit 1 km away to
get access to mobile network from Slovakia.

And the team was amazing - only the most dedicated individuals would dare to
drive that far (there was a girl from Gdansk, she had to travel almost 2
days to get there :-). So there is a lot of good team atmosphere, beer and
wine drinking during the day, a dinner sponsored by Astrokrak company and some also took other activities (climbing,
biking, motor cross etc).

Concerning the equipment, there was Mach-1 with FSQ and later with TEC140, EM-100 with Borg
76ED and driven 13" Dob, one EM-10 with Pentax 100 SDUF, one EM-11
with Takahashi FSQ-85ED, one AP1200 with TMB 5" f/6, two NJPs - one with
Tak FS128, few other mounts and scopes and range of Dobsonians from 6" to 16" Dobs.

So we has a chance to set up an integration sequences and walk around, peer in the large
scopes. Well collimated and cooled down, under such dark skies they deliver
almost photographic performance - with spiral arms clearly visible with
structure on M51 or M101. I also used to take my chair out of the field to
better accommodate my eyesight and simply gaze with naked eyes or my Canon
15x50IS on the splendor of Spring and early Summer sky.

At this time of the year, there is roughly 6 hours of imaging time (from
10PM to 4AM) and plenty of time to configure setup (Polaris starts to be
visible around 8:30PM) - if arriving during daylight.

All that said, it was not without problems.

The weather was not sure when we departed, with some possibility of a low
pressure area passing to the south. The first night there were some cumulus
clouds which dissipated only after 10PM, so we had to wait a bit to polar
align, focus, sync on star etc.

And than I have discovered a strange,
elongated stars in my FSQ - never seen this before! I did a lot of testing
the first night, rotating the scope, camera, adjusting guiding etc but
results were still not satisfactory. Due to these problems I had no time to
set up my P2Z for wide fields. I am not sure what happened, it is either a
camera tilt or something in FSQ got out of collimation - I have not used it
for a couple of years

So for the second night, I have used a TEC140 and managed to image 100 minutes of M101 and over 120 minutes of the
M81/82 (just fitting in the field).

One more distracting point was that I have forgotten my feather jacket, so
surviving the nighttime -5C was a bit of a challenge - the second night I
put on everything from my suitcase, including pyjama and 3 pairs of
socks :-)

Below are some selected images from the Star Party (daytime) and a short trip to the state border.