Sunday, June 2, 2024

The Sun and Stars

Saturday's weather was close to perfect. I scheduled a ride out of MCP to take advantage of the good weather. After a couple of weeks in the hills I chose a gentler ride. It had a few rolling hills and some ups and downs but no real noticeable hills. The only problem was that the parking lot in the picnic area of MCP was full by the time I got there because of some event at the pavilion. I had to park on the road in one of the neighborhoods close by. 

It was a little cool at the start but I warmed up quickly as it was a bright and sunny day. We made our way through the bottom of the Assumpink before heading down Rue Road. I like this road as it is twisty and curvy enough to be a fun down hill even if there are a few rough spots along the way. 

We then worked our way to Emley's Hill Rd which was freshly paved. That was nice! Of course once we crossed 539 and headed up Holmes Mill we went through the road closed sign on to a milled road for a couple of miles. I'll have to come back this was in a few weeks once this is freshly paved. 

Our rest stop was Woody's in Allentown which was bustling with activity. I took a slightly longer way back just to get more miles and enjoy the weather. It was a good ride and although I have a few people who I haven't ridden with before we all stayed together and behaved so it was a nice easy ride to lead. 

After the ride I still had a few other activities for the day. We had a party at a friends house with a bunch of people we know in the community. This is one of the advantages of living in a community as there are plenty of social activities to get together and have some fun if you want. I ended up leaving the party a little early because I wanted to get to a local park to do a little star gazing with the Tom's River Astronomy club. 

Since I don't have a really good telescope I always enjoy going to these astronomy events to view some objects in the sky that I can't see on my own. There were about 20 people of the club there with various different types of telescopes. Even though there were a few high clouds at times I was able to see a couple of galaxies, some star clusters and a nebula(M57). 

I did bring my telescope and camera to try and see if I could get any decent wide angle pictures. The picture up top is of the Hercules constellation. You see three bright stars but if you zoom into the star in the middle you can see it is a little fuzzy. This is actually M13 a star cluster of over a million stars. 

 


Of course it looked a lot better in the bigger telescopes than in my picture but I was happy that my camera could get a decent picture of the constellation. Beside viewing some objects in the sky it was just fun geeking out and talking to the members of the club about astronomy. The Tom's River Astronomy club runs these star parties once or twice a month so this is something I will probably do again. 

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