The First Friday Art Trail fell on Twelfth Night this year, 2024, and was cold, its custom.  Temperatures hovered near freezing in the damp air, given the rain from the day before and clouds all day Friday.  Arriving late after another delicious meal by my tireless in-laws, particularly my mother-in-law who made fresh rotis and mutter paneer subji, I was setup by 8 PM, a late start, my custom.  Club VP Tom Heisey wrote on FaceBook we had about 275 visitors stop by, an impressive number for Tech not being in session and the decidedly cold weather of the evening, the hearty art-loving members of our fair city turning out.  I would be using my AT80ED F/6.9 refractor this evening, a scope I bought back in the fall of 2006, the oldest scope I still own, and a treasure to this day, even though they've become quite inexpensive of late.

In the focuser I plopped in the venerable AT28UWA, one of the best buys in eyepieces on the market and the lightest weight, widest field, lowest cost eyepiece in commercial astronomy today with this exit pupil as of this writing.  The combination of this eyepiece in my AT80ED scope yields a very nice 4.25° True Field of View at 19.6 power. That's binocular power and on the Vixen Portaount, a very stable setup at that.  At the First Friday Art Trail, people keep coming up about as quickly as we can show them, and this night was no different, and wouldn't be breaking down till after 9:30 PM, past the official 9 PM FFAT's closing.  But that was fine with me, as I had a nice time showing the public the showcase Pleiades, M45.

I'd positioned my scope upon arrival, unbeknownst to me, in about as bad a place to attempt to look at the Pleiades as one could find, almost directly under a streetlight that spewed light pollution to a sufficiently blighting degree.  But when life hands you lemons, make lemonade, and so I showed people the trick of covering up the streetlight with your hand, thereby allowing folks to see naked eye the Pleiades as I pointed them out with my new laser pointer my wife gave me on the First Day of Christmas.  I spent the night explaining the 444 light years distant this beautiful cluster is, and that "Subaru", and the stars that make up the symbol on the back of the car, is actually the Japanese name for the Pleiades cluster, the Seven Sisters of Greek mythology.  The Japanese saw 6 stars, accounting for the 6 of the car's logo,although many ancient cultures besides the Greeks numbered the cluster at 7 members.  Of course, in my telescope there were far more than 7 stars in the cluster, Galileo recording 36 in his 1610 publication Siderius Nuncius, while scientists have confirmed more than 1000 constituent stars in Messier 45.  This sketch provides a hint of the beauty one would behold at the eyepiece.

I exhorted so frequently and boisterously, introducing wave upon wave of the unwashed masses to the Pleiades, Robb said I sounded like a carnival barker, and yeah, okay, so I likes me Seven Sisters.  But to see the Pleiades in a 4¼° field, well, folks, that's the way to see 'em.  If you haven't seen M45 in a 4¼° field through a telescope, you don't know what you've missed.  Some will praise binoculars for this task, and there's a lot of truth in that for people who have binocular-style vision, but I do not.  My vision, like the rest of me, is a bit odd and unusual, so binoculars are not the way to magnify for me.  But on top of that, a telescope on a good mount has more stability than any handheld pair of binoculars could afford.  The depth of the view, the beauty of the Pleiades floating amongst the surrounding heavens, it's a magestic, inspirational view that gets to the heart of the consciousness-raising beauty that is visual astronomy.  Mathew Wedel, in his Binocular Highlight Starry Messenger article in the January 2024 edition of Sky & Telescope Magazine exhorts us to "approach the Pleiades with fresh eyes".  With any luck, my carnival barking achieved that end for at least a few of the First Friday crowd.

Ken Kroft was there with his huge 12" GSO dob, and for all the crummy seeing we've had of late, tonight, here under the streetlights of downtown Lubbock, would you believe the transparency and the seeing were quite good.  Initially, Michael had his GSO 8" dob setup looking at Jupiter.  His tripod mounted binoculars were on the Pleiades, too, I believe.  Robb Chapman had his homemade 10" F/6 pointed at various targets, and Kenny started off with Saturn.  I was genuinely surprised, given how low the King of the Titans was, that the images through their scopes looked as good as they did of horizon-hugging Poseidon.  Clearly the atmospheric turbulence that had recently plagued earlier observation nights was not impeding tonight's views at the eyepiece.  Well, almost.  Robb, towards the end, had his scope on the Double Cluster at the edge of Perseus and Cassiopeia, and at one point noted there were hardly any stars in his eyepiece.  A bit taken aback, then he noticed the frozen dew that had condensed on his eyepiece lens, and understood why so many stars had vanished — atmospheric interference more terrestrial in nature.  I think that experience convinced Robb to shut down, and Michael soon followed suite.  I will say that Saturn, and later Jupiter through Kenny's 12" were amazing.  I exhorted the audience that looked at the Pleiades through my scope to follow that up with a trip to Kenny's 12" dob and Saturn (first) or Jupiter (later).  Not that Michael's or Robb's views of these target were bad — they were great too, but since they had packed up, it was just Kenny and me left to show the FFAT remnants what was what in the sky.  Barb was there to cheer us on and help people with questions, and Mark Smith showed up late to chat and be generally pro-astronomy.  Tom Heisey was there, too, but his tale that evening was fraught with difficulty.  Tom informed me as I was setting up that the focuser in his scope fell out onto the ground when he was getting started.  How that happened, I am uncertain, but that's a problem, for sure.  Somehow he managed to get a video up of Jupiter from his configuration, so he has tenacity in the face of difficulty, but sure am glad nothing like that happened to me.

Seeing a bunch of young women standing at the base of the nearby performance stage some two dozen minutes after 9 PM as folks were breaking down their art displays and telescopes, I rushed over to help get a shot of all of them so the picture taker wouldn't be left out.  And a few snaps thereafter I invited them to come over and take a look at the heavens we were offering — and they came enthusiastically.  Later, as we broke down, I noticed frost on my unused chair, eyepiece case and fold up canvas holding table;  cold indeed and time to leave.  Later still, after friends were taken home, my younger daughter (who we'd picked up) along with my elder (who'd come to the FFAT), all made a late night run to Braum's for frozen yogurt and ice cream.  There seeing the same group of young women, I waved and said "hello star people" as we walked by, but to save any embarrassment from my tweenage and young teenage daugthers, we sat relatively far away, salvaging a modicum of "cool" status with my daughters.

A fun evening under the light polluted skies of downtown Lubbock, hopefully the South Plains Astronomy Club outreach efforts are touching some hearts to consider the glorious beauty that awaits us lucky West Texans who just look up.  I am forever reminded of the early 90's City Boosters' bumper sticker that simply said, in white letters on blue background ...

LUBBOCK
HAS MORE SKY
 

De veras, we are so blessed.