Arunah Hill Days - A Star Party Recap

 My husband has been an amateur astronomer since childhood, and has spent the past ~25 years attending observatory meetings and star party events. I've been accompanying him on some of these trips for about 15 years now, and I will start recapping the events like I do for my races.

A star party is a gathering held at a dark sky location for the purposes of astronomical observing. This usually involves camping on-site and there are often activities during daylight hours. These activities can range from hiking to academic lectures to solar observing. These events usually range from one night to nearly a week of festivities. While there are fees to attend and sometimes an additional fee to camp, I've found these events are usually very affordable (hence my including them on this blog).

I love camping, appreciate astronomy (I took an astronomy class to fulfil my physics requirement in college), and even enjoy academic lectures, so these are good mini-vacations for someone like me. This year, I have a lot of races scheduled so I'm only attending certain star parties for one night.

The first star party we've attended this year is Arunah Hill Days, held at the Arunah Hill Natural Science Center in Cummington, MA. This event was held over Labor Day Weekend and allowed attendees to camp on the site from Friday night until Monday morning. My spouse and I arrived Saturday and left on Sunday, in part due to availability and also to take advantage of the clear weather forecast for Saturday night. After all, at a star party, your observing time is dictated by cloud cover and seeing conditions. The camping fee for the entire weekend was only $10, which was a fantastic deal. Optional dues to the affiliated astronomy club are $30 per person, per year. There was also a camping lean-to available for people who don't like to bring a tent or camper.

View from the patio, where we attended lectures and ate dinner

We checked in very easily upon entering the grounds, which are accessible only by a treacherous dirt driveway with very deep ruts. This site is not as open and flat as other star party fields I have seen in the past, which made setting up more challenging. We ended up parking on a large rocky outcropping and setting up our tent just behind the car on a small, flat patch of grass. We put the telescope in a different area near the small observatory, where a number of attendees had already set up their scopes.

Tent, sweet home

We use a 4-person Coleman Dark Room tent for our camping trips. It's a pretty typical 4-person tent in terms of size and setup, but its defining feature is the dark coating on the rainfly and tent body that block out bright light. This makes it invaluable for star parties, as you can sleep in well past sunrise to make up for staying up late observing. It also blocks out flashlights, headlights, and annoyingly-bright campground lights.

Since we arrived on Saturday, I can't speak to the activities that we missed on Friday. I know there was a rocket-building activity on Saturday morning for the kids to attend, and they launched the rockets after we arrived on Saturday. That was fun to watch - more charge was added to the rockets each time in an effort to lose them in the woods surrounding the observing field. Ultimately, they succeeded in sending the rockets well out of sight.

There was also an excellent raffle at this star party. We are not in need of any new telescope accessories, but this was a great opportunity for some new enthusiasts to pick up gear. Each attendee received a free raffle ticket and the tickets were only $1 each. There was also a pricier raffle with a few high-ticket items and those tickets were $5 each. In addition to the raffle on Saturday evening, there was a swap table on Saturday morning.

Cute storage area at Arunah Hill

We don't bring a camping stove to star parties, although each year I consider buying one. We bring only water to drink (imperative at Arunah Hill, where there is no running water or power available) and snacks. There was food for sale at dinnertime on Saturday, as well as breakfast on Sunday morning.

There were two lectures on Saturday evening after dinner: Dr. Bob Donahue, PhD. lectured on the history of constellations and John Nardacci, Jr. showed his nature photography and astrophotography work.

Scope setup with observatory and patio in the background

The conditions started off very good on Saturday night, with clear skies and the seeing conditions improving rapidly after sunset (less atmospheric instability as the ground cooled down, making the stars seem to twinkle much less). The Milky Way was visible overhead, and I picked out 20 satellites in between deep sky observations. We looked at the Hercules Cluster, the Veil Nebula, the Dumbbell Nebula, and Ring Nebula, Alberio, Andromeda Galaxy, Lagoon Nebula, the Trifid Nebula, the Eagle Nebula, the Omega Nebula, the double cluster in Perseus, the M92 globular cluster, the Triangulum Galaxy, and the Whirlpool Galaxy. It clouded over at 11pm and I went to bed.

We left around 8am the next morning, before any scheduled events on Sunday, to enjoy the rest of our holiday weekend at home.