An ad-hoc astro party

In October, we typically have poor weather as a constant stream of moist and cold air from over Northern Atlantic develops, until it can only be hindered in winter by a high pressure areas developing east of Poland. Now, in second half of October and quite suddenly, a high pressure area started developing over Ukraine.

I and my friend Dominik are always keen to use such opportunities and even have transportable setups almost ready. I have a trusty AP400 mount and a trusty one-shot color Starlight Express SXV-M25 CCD camera with very low noise (no need for darks) and very low power consumption. This time I decided to pick my "primary" imaging scope which is AP130 EDFS. My friend uses AP600 with FSQ106ED and large Apogee U16M CCD camera. We were packaging in a hurry so none of us took any visual instruments except pairs of binos.

Our observing place of choice was sort of standard – the small tourist refugee in Roztoki Górne in a south-east corner of Poland, in Bieszczady Mountains, which are covered by vast forests and this is one of last places in central Europe where one can find wolves and bears. Despite some recent improvements, the road from Warsaw is still very narrow yet busy, so the moderate trip of 500 km took as usual almost 8 hour.

The refugee is astro-friendly as the owner is also an amateur observer. The closest village is 15km away and closest small town of ca 25.000 inhabitants is ca 60km away - NO light pollution whatsoever. No lights outside, no streetlights etc. There are maybe 10 other village houses in the valley and most people go to bed early. Skyglow makes sky to appear not really black, zodiacal light is visible 2,5 hours prior dawn and actually hinders observing in its direction. Milky Way is magnificent and many DS objects are visible with naked eye or small binos - actually - except few too small objects - all Messiers can be seen with a pair of 10x50s.

This time, it was not a major star party. We were the 2 only astronomers there - nobody else trusted weather forecasts and most got discouraged by the fact that it was almost a week past new moon, but actually moon travels pretty low and sets quickly till first quarter that time of a year - on Friday it set at 19:30 and on Sunday 22:00 - leaving plenty of dark time. There were few tourists who we invited for some common stargazing and explained them the night sky as they cannot see it from a city.

The only drawback of the place is that - unlike deserts - the air is much moister and heavy dew always develops, with equipment literally dipping with water before midnight. Dew control on max setting since evening ;-) Off course this dew also produced some minor problems with equipment, with some of the electronic devices refusing to work properly, but we were able to overcome these. The second feature is the fact that there no mobile range nor internet in the valley - nobody will disturb me when I am there. But off course I need to drive these 15km if I want to call someone or send a mail ;-)

Daytime temperatures were around 23C (T-shirt) and nighttime around and below freezing. As usual, our primarily daytime activity was walking some mountain trails and watching for wildlife and scenic views, this time we are also able to pick some wild mushrooms. In the daytime, there were many people walking on mountain trails, as the weekend was forecasted as the last sunny and warm one this autumn.

The sky turned crystal clear on Friday and Saturday, so we decided to take one more day off and stay till Monday (with clouds forecasted on Monday night). This was a right decision as also Sunday night was crystal clear until ca 4AM, where some light fog started to build in a still air. I was primarily interested in capturing high resolution color for a couple projects, including M31 and M78 as well as complement color signal to a number of narrowband images which I can take from my suburb location. I was able to get 8-9 hours of imaging data per night. Now need lots of spare time to complete processing ;-)

As a bonus, we were greeted by beautiful show of Orionids - on Saturday night there were many very nice, bright meteors (we estimated ZHR as close to 30) and on Sunday night many fainter ones. And in parallel there were many fainter Taurids visible. There were also 2 very nice and bright bolides unrelated to any of these showers, one sparkling some fragments before complete disintegration. On returning back we learned that on Friday night, a very bright bolid was observed over eastern Poland – unfortunately probably when we were warming inside every few minutes.

So in essence - an "ad hoc" astro trip turned into very fruitful although small star party ;-)

We were pretty surprised when driving out of the mountains we found 90% of the country covered by a moist air, with temperatures in 6-10C range, dense fog and drizzling rains, which hindered 80% of country airports for 2 days! Amazing