Black Forest Star Party

by Tim Phelan

Image Credit: Tim Phelan

Once a year amateur astronomers from all over the region make their way up to the wilderness of Potter County, Pennsylvania for one of the country’s best star parties. If you’ve never heard of or been to a star party they’re events organized and hosted by a local astronomy club at a dark sky site where people can bring their telescopes and camp at the dark sky site. Usually there are guest speakers who give talks about astronomy-related themes. The best star party in the Eastern U.S. is the Black Forest Star Party that is hosted at Cherry Springs State Park.

Cherry Springs State Park is recognized by Dark Sky International as a Gold tier International Dark Sky Park which means that it has spectacular dark skies free from most of the light pollution that washes out the average American sky. On the Bortle scale CSSP is a Bortle 2 sky which means the Milky Way is bright and highly detailed. You can see galaxies like Andromeda and the Triangulum galaxy with your naked eye. Cherry Springs is about a five-hour drive from Harford County and is located in the remote Susquehannock State Forest in Potter County, PA near the New York border. It’s remote location and 2,000 ft elevation makes it perfect for astronomical viewing.

This year’s Black Forest Star Party was held on September 14-16, 2023 and we had a handful of HCAS members attend. I took the 14th and 15th off from work to head up to the park a day early. There are regularly anywhere between 450-500 people who attend the BFSP. The forecast went from pretty awful and cloudy to amazing in just a couple of days. I stayed Thursday through Saturday and enjoyed two perfectly clear and not too cold nights. I brought my new astrophotography rig to the park for some serious deep sky imaging. This is a rare occasion to image under dark skies without the aid of a filter.

My imaging rig consists of a William Optics Gran Turismo 71 with a 0.8x reducer/flattener coupled with a ZWO ASI533MC Pro camera. The mount running the scope is the newish ZWO AM5 harmonic drive mount and the whole setup is powered by the ZWO ASIAir+. I upgraded my imaging rig this summer and I had a few nights of imaging under my belt already but this was the first time I could really put it through its paces on a full night of imaging thanks to the availability of electricity in the observing field. I planned out two broadband targets to photograph without a dual-band filter since I was shooting under dark skies and I can’t really shoot broadband targets at home in the light pollution. I decided to shoot an object that has become quite popular lately, LDN 1235, the Dark Shark Nebula, and an old trusty target M33 the Triangulum Galaxy.

On LDN 1235 I gathered about 5.5 hours of data and got 6hr 40min on M33. The results of LDN 1235 were stunning and I have to say I was extremely pleased with how easy it was to process. This is due largely to the fact that the signal-noise ratio in the photo was so good thanks to the dark skies. LDN 1235 is a dark nebula and it really does look like a shark! On M33 the processing is a little rough since I’m not very experienced at shooting galaxies. I’ll probably come back to it later on. All in all, I was very pleased with my experience at the Black Forest Star Party.

If you’re new to astronomy or to HCAS I can’t recommend the Black Forest Star Party enough. It’s a great opportunity to meet, not only other club members, but other amateurs from all over the region. You can even look through other people’s scopes if you ask. Star parties are a great way to learn more about the hobby from other people and it’s also fun to just kick back and enjoy the wilderness and the precious resource that is the dark sky. The Black Forest Star Party is held annually on the weekend closest to the new moon in either late-August or early-September. HCAS always sends a delegation up so if you’re interested in attending keep an eye out and visit www.bfsp.org for more information.

Clear skies.