Star Parties moving to Lake Taghkanic

2012 brings us a new era at the Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association. After many years using Wilcox Park as our primary location for monthly star parties, we've decided to try a new venue, Lake Taghkanic State Park.

Lake Taghkanic is about 8 miles north of Wilcox Park, along the Taconic State Parkway. For most members this will add about 10 minutes to the drive. For those extra 10 minutes we'll gain a number of advantages. First, there is no locked gate at Lake Taghkanic, so the issues of getting locked out of the park, which was at least a once a year occurance, will be a thing of the past. Secondly, we'll be getting darker skies, and significantly less stray light. We'll also gain back our ability to roll over to Saturday nights if the weather doesn't cooperate in Friday nights, which we lost this fall with Wilcox. And we'll have the option to do additional nights beyond the normal Star Parties, at the location. Our friends at the Rockland Astronomy Club have been using this site for years, and are really happy with it.

In order to use the new facility, we will need to get people into the habit of RSVPing for the event, as we'll need to provide the Park with license plate numbers for the cars we expect to be there. We're going to start by trying to use our existing meetup account for this. Meetup.com is an online service that assists in creating and advertising events. As a user, it's a very simple signup which only requires an email address, and whatever name you'd to present to the group (it doesn't even need to be your real name). When you RSVP for an event, you'll be asked for your License plate number, which will only be visible to the officers, so they can be provided to the Park the day of the event. As the park is officially closed after dark, Cars not on our list will risk being ticketted by the State Police who patrole at night.

All of this is an adjustment, and we're sure there will be some bumps in the road. Change is both exciting, and annoying, but I think at the end of the day this promisses to be a great site, with a lot of possibility. We'll see how this works over the winter / spring, and will make adjustments to try to find an RSVP process that works well for everyone.

So here's to a new year, a new location, and a new set of (hopefully) clear skies!