The Backyard Stargazer

The sign of a perfect star party – the company, the equipment, the quality of the sky and the number of targets you can check off from your list. Last night had a bit of everything.

The Westchester Amateur Astronomers gather monthly at Ward Pound Ridge in Cross River to enjoy the dark skies. Last night we started with a 20 hour old Moon and quickly moved on to Mercury, the Orion Nebula, the Beehive and (my own personal long-time, never realized White Whale) the Leo Triplet (which I might add I managed to find manually).

And all night long we enjoyed great views of Saturn from the variety of telescopes assembled.

The clear skies are expected to continue at least for tonite, so I’ll be out late again.

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DSC_0073, originally uploaded by david parmet.

Astronomy is one of those esoteric hobbies that have pretty much been saved by the Internet. Online retailers like Orion Telescopes have thrived where once we only had mail order and a few retail stores in major cities from which to purchase the tools of our trade.

And like other hobbies down the far end of the Long Tail – it’s a lot easier for us all to find each other online than it was back in the day when all we had was a subscription to Sky & Telescope.

NEAF – the North East Astronomy Forum – is the SXSW of amateur stargazing. Every April the Rockland County Astronomy Club throws a two day shindig in the bowels of a Community College gymnasium and thousands of the faithful come from all over the North East to gaze and paw at the latest in telescope gear.

This is a ‘hold on to your wallet’ event – unless you have a few grand in the bank, it’s hard to come back from NEAF with much of anything. But in addition to the vendors, there are demonstrations of archaic skills like mirror grinding and collimation. And the schwag is second to none.

So if you are a stargazer and live in the North East, don’t miss NEAF.

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Taken at NEAF