July 6 – Point Wolfe

Last night it was clear so I got the telescope out and went to a viewpoint about a kilometre down the road from the campground.

This is the daylight view.

And at night.

Although it was clear, it was not a particularly good night for astronomy. It was very warm and VERY humid and the bugs were so bad I had to don one of Jennie’s bug nets. There were a lot of fireflys out, which was fun to watch.

There was also a lobster boat working out in the bay with a massive, bright light, that when it pointed my way would cast shadows.

Once a few of the bright stars came out I got the scope setup and aligned. I looked at Saturn for a bit and then waited for it to get darker. A young couple came along, also out to look at the sky, so I showed them a few things though the scope and some general things about the sky with the laser pointer.

Once it was a darker I looked a few of the fainter things and then tried to take a some pictures. None of them are any good because I was tired and did a bunch of things wrong and also because of the heat the camera takes very noisy pictures (the little coloured dots that aren’t really there). These are all straight out of the camera, other than a bit of cropping.

First I put the camera and its normal lens on top of the scope and took a few shots of the Milky Way.

Then I took the lens off and put the camera on the end of the scope.

This is called the Hercules Cluster, a ball of about 100,000 stars that is orbiting our galaxy.

This is called the Ring Nebula. it’s a star that has blown off its outer shell and the gas in the shell is energized by the star.

A closer look.

I packed up about 1am and went home.

It was very hot and humid all last night and this morning. We just hung around the RV until after lunch. There was a ranger guided beach walk at 3 pm at Point Wolfe that I thought we would attend.

We couldn’t wait at the RV that long so we did another loop through Dickson Falls mainly because it a vey beautiful place and as a bonus it was much cooler down there.

The bay next to Point Wolfe is more than a kilometer long and very flat so that it is very easy to see the tide going in and out.

The ranger talked about the history of the area for while and then we took the path down to the beach.

We were going to walk down and check out some of the tide pools.

As she was talking the wind picked up and the sky got darker.

It started to sprinkle and since we were already cold we decided to head back to the car for our jackets and then explore on our own. It is about a 10 minute hike to get back to the parking lot. About 100 feet from the car the drops started to get very large and I thought “Uh oh, We had better run”. We almost made it back before the downpour began.

We saw the ranger a bit later and she was completely soaked. We sat in the car for about 15 minutes and the rain just stopped. You could see the steam rising from the pavement in the parking lot.

We got our coats and headed back down. Jennie did her usual investigating of the rocks and I walked down to the end of the bay.

The mud here wasn’t very deep so I could easily walk on it.

A look back towards Jennie.

The ranger said that one possible reason for the name Point Wolfe was that the rocks at the end looked like his face. He must have had very large lips.

Out at our side of the bay there were lots of rocks smoothed off by the waves.

This picture shows the different high tide marks depending on the position of the sun and the moon.

The last time we were here in 1999 with the kids, it was a nice sunny day.

We had waded across this stream and the tide started coming in faster than we expected. We almost got trapped on a sandbar. The incoming water followed us at a walking pace as we made our way back up the bay.

This is the water level when we went down at 3pm.

And this is when we left at 6 pm which is almost exactly low tide. I wish I had a picture at high tide.

Tomorrow we move on to PEI.