Table Mountain Star Party (Washington State)

For the past 8 years I've been going to "Star Parties", amateur astronomer events, that on the west coast at least, are held in remote mountain primitive camping sites. Remote and primitive camping to get away from city lights and mountain to get above the clouds as much as possible.

Table Mountain Star Party is in Washington state in the mountains between Ellensburg and Wenatchee. Their website is here: http://www.tmspa.com/

Anyway, it's usually attended by 600 to 700 people, all coming in campers, trailers, big RVs or people just sleeping in the backs of their trucks. Of this crowd I've only seen 2 other trailmanors there and I'm by far the one who most frequently attends this event. I have several friends who I mainly see only at these events. With that as an intro, this year's trip was unusual for me as I was going by myself. My wife and youngest kid (17) had other things going on and I was a little nervous about precision parking (TMSP really packs them in) without my trusty co-pilot (wife) so I side stepped this issue by arriving a few days early.

Just as I was settling down to a lonely dinner on the first night (some other astronomers were there but we're all pretty much doing our own stuff at this point, unpacking telescopes and what not) I heard a knock on my door. It was indeed one of my astronomy buddies. He recognized the trailmanor right away, figured it was me and came on over! A quick dinner, I convinced him to set his telescope up close to mine and this year's event was set!

An overhead view of the whole site is below. (This is a photo from their website circa 1998 before the 700 person limit was imposed by the forest service.)