As the majority of you know, last weekend we celebrated the first Meeting 2000 of the Spirit of 33 in northern Spain and I would like to report my impressions of the meeting. In attendance were Luis Arguelles, his wife Ana and their son Eric, Paolo Morini from Ravenna, Italy, Jose Fernandez, and myself and my wife Pepita. Also in attendance were a couple Peter and Maria Jesus who are good friends of Luis. The meeting was held in a small hotel reconverted from a rural school house built at the beginning of this century. It is located in a very small village in the mountains in the north of Spain at an altitude of 1200 meters.

After a three hour ride in the car, we arrived Friday at about 5:00 in the afternoon and got to know Luis, Ana, Eric and Paolo. After checking in we all had coffee and cake on the lawn in front of the hotel and got to know each other much better. Naturally the conversation centered on astronomy as well as other subjects. While we were having the coffee the wind began to kick up very strongly and I was thinking that if it continued the observing for that night would be compromised. However the lady from the hotel assured us that when the sun sets the wind will die down and that is what happened.

At about 9:30pm we all went into the dining room and had our evening meal. We had all our meals in the hotel and the food was fantastic and the atmosphere was exactly like being in your own home. The sun had set and while it was getting good and dark we finished up our evening meal. In the summer it doesn't get completely dark in Spain until about 11:00 at night. After the supper Luis and I set up our 4" refractors and Paolo set up his TeleVue Pronto. Seeing that Paolo had to come by plane from Italy he could only bring his small Pronto. The sky that evening was the best I had ever seen in my years of observing. The milky way stood out like a bright white ribbon. The constellation Cygnus was lost in a forest of stars. With so many stars present it was hard to acclimate ones self to were the directions were in the sky but after a while of amazing wonder the sky became friendly. We obseved from about 11:00 to about 2:30 or 3:30 in the morning. We didn't have any observing plans and just observed whatever interested us and then shared the view with the rest. Their were numerous guests from the hotel that joined us and were excited to look in the telescopes to see some of the marvels of the sky. Paolo showed me the other double double in Lyra and I will always remember this double double as Paolo's. Luis had found and put M33 in his scope for everyone to see and to my amazement it was as clear as M31 was back home. After years of trying to observe M33 without success I was so happy to add 107 to my Messier list of objects observed. Along with a fantastic sky for observing the night was memorable for me with the addition of Paolo's double double and Luis's M33. Naturally we also looked at many doubles.

Saturday morning my wife and I went into a small city nearby to buy some heavy sweaters as the temperatures in that part of the mountains drops down to about 5ºC (40º to 45ºF) and we were not prepard for those temperatures. We were lightly dressed the nite before. My wife suffered somewhat from the cold. I had a light jacket but with the fantastic sky I was anesthetized and did not feel the cold.

Saturday Jose Fernandez arrived because he had to work the day before. Jose or better know by his nickname Pepe is a professional astrophotografer first and a double star enthusiast second. He has been taking photos of the night sky for years and has won a first prize with one of his photos. He uses a Nikon SRL mounted piggy back on a Great Polaris mount.

After Saturday dinner, Luis presided over an afternoon of lectures followed by a chat on the Internet with Richard Harshaw, Tim from England and others. We then had our afternoon coffee followed by a showing by Pepe of more than 50 of his slides of the night sky. My wife was more impressed by Pepe's slides than by the sky the night before. The slides were fantastic. Thanks Pepe.

That night we set up four telescopes the extra one being a 6" Intes by Pepe. However Saturday night was somewhat cloudy and we had to observe through the holes in the clouds. We were spoiled from the night before but all in all it was a good evening and we spent some time trying to split Delta Cygni. Pepe had it almost split to my view but I didn't have enough power in my refractor so this is a double that I will have to work on. We finished up about 2:30AM again with Paolo staying for another half hour.

On Sunday morning we had a long leisurely breakfast recounting all the highlights of the weekend and then we all assembled at the front of the hotel for a photo session in front of the banner that Luis had installed announcing the Meeting of the Spirit of 33. We then made our sad "Adios's" to everyone and the first of many Meetings of 33 had ended.

It was an extreme pleasure to get to know Luis, Paolo, Pepe and naturally the rest of the group. Luis is a warm friendly person but also he is an excellent organizer along with his astronomy knowledge. Paolo and Pepe are also warm, friendly and outgoing. The conversation was in both English and Spanish and there was no trouble in communicating.

I would like to close by saying whoever in the group can come next year for at least a week, you will be rewarded by not only traveling to Spain which is a traveler's dream but the friendship of the group, the night sky and the accomodations were all of five star quality.
John, Salamanca.
 

Well, the 1st "Spirit of 33" Meeting 2000 was celebrated this week-end and it has been a so wonderful experience that I'm tempted to not celebrate any more meetings in order to preserve in my memory these days as a masterpiece of human unification and friendliness. Ok, there will be more meetings, but I can tell you that it will be really, really hard to beat these past days.

Only for a start, on Friday, 1st September, we had the following observing conditions:

Sky darkness: about 6, limiting magnitude
Transparency: 10, no wind
Seeing: about 8 - 8.5
Temperature: About 15-16C
Altitude of site: 1,200 mts over the sea level (3,940 ft)

Every observer agreed that it was, if not the best sky in all his/her observing experience, at least it was one of the 3 best observing skies on our lives. With a 4" Vixen refractor M31 almost needed sunglasses to observe, suspecting some different coloration in the galaxy's center (a very special class of grey-grey-blue). M33 was easy even in the 50mm aperture finder of Paolo Morini's observing system. In the 4" Vixen @ 25x, this galaxy allowed us to use really direct vision, and a clear increasing density was observed in the nucleus without any effort.

On both nights of 1st and 2nd September, Paolo Morini, John Ryan, Jose (Pepe) Fernandez, me and relatives had a so special ambience that we even forgot for some time to observe stars in Cygnus. We used infrared video technology to record the ambience and I can assure you that watching the videotape now is like living it again.

You can think of the Meeting as the true Spirit of 33 materialized in an unforgettable place in the mountains: There was a lot of time to speak about Astronomy, telescopes, arts, architecture, engineering, literature... even about cooking: Pepita, John's wife, got a secret recipe from the owners of the Hotel. By the way, food was also rated as 9-10.

In the saturday's afternoon (European time) Paolo exposed some great work about compiling documents about double stars. Jose Fernandez let us with our mouth really opened with his Astrophotographs using a slide projector, and some new ideas using Fuzzy-Logic for evaluating the difficulty of splitting doubles was also presented.

But there was even more: We also had a chat session and it was fantastic to comunicate with Richard Harshaw, Tim Leese and Chuck. It was a bit as having them with us.

I'm building a new page on our Web Results Page with a lot of graphic information about the Meeting, but in order to let you with the "essence", only to tell you that Paolo summarized the experience in a short expression: "It has been a 'fluorite' week-end!"

Viva el Espiritu de las 33!!!
Luis Arguelles
(One of the most happy weekends of my life!)
 

I have not a lot of things to say after reading the accurate and enthusiastic reports by John and Luis. Only to point out that this was my first flight with the telescope, and I was thrilled very much about this.

More, when I purchased the ticket for the flight I felt the same sensation when I brought home my GPDX mount with motors and encoders: "Probably I'm getting crazy"  :-)

But now I am very happy to have made that flight. I have spent three "fluorite days", and with "Fluorite people", an experience that will stay impressed in me like the first observation of a new planet.

Hoping more "33 people" coming on the next occasion,
Clear skies to All
Paolo Morini
 

As an attendant to the Meeting 33-doubles held last week, I would like to add some comments to the excellent reports written in the list by John, Luis and Paolo.

It has been a very gratifying experience for me to have met John, his wife and Paolo, as well as the "fluorite" weekend spent and I hope to meet them all again next year at Sena de Luna. I would also like to thank Luis the job he has done in the organization of the meeting.

Jose Fernandez