Stargazing in San Diego

From sea to the mountains to the outer space, San Diego is blessed with a lot of opportunities to spend the summer.  One activity is Stargazing Party hosted by San Diego Astronomy Association or SDAA in couple places in San Diego.

SDAA hosts many events throughout the year, for example, Stars in the Park, Stars at Mission Trails, Camp with the Stars and many more. For complete schedule, visit SDAA website.

Star Party at Sycamore Canyon

We went to the Stars at Sycamore Canyon one Friday night. The SDAA holds a monthly Star Party on the third Friday of every month at the Sycamore Canyon/Goodan Ranch Open Space Preserve at the Hwy 67 Staging area. Located at the east end of Poway, this venue offers a pretty dark sky for being only 19 miles, as the crow flies, from downtown San Diego. There are no homes or business directly around the viewing area and the panoramic view of the city below is amazing.

To access this venue, use the park entrance on Hwy 67, ½ mile south of Scripps Poway Parkway. Continue through the gate and up the dirt road about 1½ miles where the Rangers will direct you where to park.

Our Experience

We arrived around 8pm. Parking was easy. From the parking, we walked a short distance to the location. There were many visitors and SDAA volunteers already preparing their big and small telescopes. Perhaps there were 6 or 7 volunteers at that time, each with a telescope. One came with a computer attached to it so it could pinpoint which stars or nebula to see.

I was not allowed to take photos with flash so I’m sorry for the blurry photo. The reason was the flash would make the eyes hard to see in the dark.

When the sky started to get really dark, then we could see some space objects. First it was Saturn. It’s always lovely to see this planet, white with rings around. Afterwards, the volunteers showed us some constellations such as Scorpion, Hercules and some nebula such as Messier 57 and M13

Photo Source: Weasner.com

A little history about Messier (from Wikipedia)

Charles Messier (26 June 1730 – 12 April 1817) was a  French astronomer most notable for publishing an astronomical catalogue consisting of deep sky objects such as nebulae and star clusters that came to be known as the 110 “Messier objects”. The purpose of the catalogue was to help astronomical observers, in particular comet hunters such as himself, distinguish between permanent and transient visually diffuse objects in the sky.

The Messier objects are a set of astronomical objects first listed by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1771. Messier was a comet hunter, and was frustrated by objects which resembled but were not comets, so he compiled a list of them, in collaboration with his assistant Pierre Méchain, to avoid wasting time on them.

Photo source: Live Science

Above is the photo of M13.  Messier 13 or M13 (also designated NGC 6205 and sometimes called the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules or the Hercules Globular Cluster) is a globular cluster of about 300,000 stars in the constellation of Hercules.

This is a fun and educational activity for all ages. The kids as well as the adults loved looking through the telescope, curious on what they would see. But we didn’t stay until the end because the kids got sleepy. The stargazing probably finished around 10.30pm.

I really recommend this. What about you? Have you ever been to a star party?