First Annual Central Nevada Star Party

37° 49' 33" N, 117° 20' 15" W

Join us June 30th to July 4th for The First Annual Central Nevada Star Party! We will be gathering at Alkali, Nevada at an altitude of 5000 feet in the middle of the dark skies of Central Nevada. Alkali is located seven miles off of US95 between Goldfield and Silver Peak and about 20 miles south of Tonopah.  Alkali is also known as Alkali Hot Springs and there are Hot Springs at the site.

The weather forecast  is looking great!

    Someone asked about campfires so I called the owner who is letting us use his property for this event and this is what he said. First and safest choice is to use a propane stove. If you do not have a propane stove use a charcoal briquettes grill. As a last resort, a campfire is acceptable provided a) Do not gather wood at the site. You will have to bring in your own. b) Have a shovel and a bucket of water available to douse the fire if needed. Remember that we are out in the middle of the desert and fire fighting resources are limited if a brush fire should get started.

Scorpius and Sagittarius and the center of the Milky Way will be directly to your south as twilight ends. This combined with the extremely dark skies will be an astronomical imager's delight. Both M13 and M57 will be directly overhead and M51, M81 and M82 will be high in the dark sky to the north. See the Virgo Cluster without any city lights at all.

As a finale to the weekend, NASA's Deep Impact space craft will strike comet Tempel 1 at 11PM on Sunday night, July 3rd. Watch as the impactor collides with  the comet and see if there is any brightening as ice and gas are expelled.

The down side to having a dark site free of light pollution is that this is a primitive site. There is no water available, so bring your own. There are no garbage facilities so what you haul in, you will have to haul out. We will be bringing in portable toilets and this is the only expense we have to cover. In order to cover the cost of the toilets, we are charging $10 per person to offset this cost. If you plan to attend this star party please email the webmaster so we will know how many people to plan for. If you do not want to camp, lodging is available in Tonopah about twenty miles away. Tonopah also has several restaurants, a Scolari's grocery store, a hospital with 24 hour ER and medical clinic, numerous gas stations  and museums.

The First Central Nevada Star Party was an unqualified success. The first and foremost requirement for a successful star party is clear skies and we had them every night from Thursday straight through to Sunday. It was hot during the day so we will probably schedule future star parties earlier in the year or much later but the evenings were very pleasant and what wind we had died down to almost nothing. The warmth during the day was offset but the pools at the site which many of us made repeated use of. On Thursday night only Charlie Perry from the Las Vegas club showed up but by Friday night we had a good crowd of over a dozen and most everyone stayed until Monday morning after watching the Comet Temple impact. Charlie said that viewing Thursday night was excellent and he had it all to himself. I showed up Friday just after noon and more trickled in during the rest of the day. Friday was clear and calm but there was apparently some turbulence in the air because we did have some trouble getting a good focus on objects but it was still better than anything I ever saw at Death Valley. Saturday night was as calm and as clear as Friday. Sunday turned out to be the best night of the weekend with calm, clear skies and that turbulence seemed to have gone somewhere else. All of our favorite deep sky objects were bright, clear and steady and they kept us busy until the appointed hour of the comet impact. Maybe I was expecting too much. The comet was there but very dim and spread out. Like this faint cotton ball hanging in the sky. At the time of impact, I saw nothing but about twenty minutes later there seemed to be this very small bright (okay, brighter) spot in the center of the dim cotton ball. Was I really seeing the result of the impact or was I just seeing what I wanted to see? I believe what I was looking at was the impact. That itself was worth the trip.

Most of our visitors were from either Tonopah, Las Vegas or Reno but we also had folks from Los Angeles and Truckee. The internet certainly does get the word spread even on just a couple of months notice.

Several people made the trip into Tonopah and did some shopping and visited the Central Nevada Museum, which impressed all who entered. 

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Copyright © 2005 Tonopah Astronomical Society