I spent Labor Day weekend at the Almost Heaven Star Party very close to Spruce Knob, the highest ridge in West Virginia. When the skies cleared at night, the stars and Milky Way were magnificent, but that only happened about 1 night out of three. My 12.5″ home-made Dobsonian telescope performed very well; in fact, because its primary and secondary mirror are almost fully enclosed by the light shrouds and upper cage, I was able to keep observing long after all the other refractors and Schmidt-Cassegrains were closed down by the heavy dew. (To keep the dew off of my finder scope and Telrad, I used large rubber bands to wrap chemical hand warmer packs around them, and that crude and cheap arrangement worked very well!)

Here are three photos taken by me:

Exploring the geology of Spruce Knob Mountain Center: Lyle Mars in blue shirt and white hat is in front of the entrance to a cave carved in limestone

Selfie with me in front of three others on the geology hike

This lovely sunset did not portend clear skies

All but the photo with the sextant were taken by Oscar.

Alan Goldberg teaching someone how to use a sextant

Me studying my charts, in front of parallelogram binocular mount

Oscar Olmedo and me at our campsite

Mike Laugherty and me

Mike Laugherty and me

Me fiddling with my 12.5″ home-made dob in the daytime

Me fiddling with the parallelogram binocular mount in the daytime

Mike Laugherty and me fiddling with binocular mount

Left to right: Mike Laugherty, Oscar Olmedo, me

The lottery drawing for a whole bunch of neat prizes. None of us 3 won anything.