Feb 27, 2009 – Friday – La Ensenada “Star” Lodge to San Jose, Costa Rica
2009 Southern Skies Fiesta & Tamarindo Coast
As mentioned in my previous post, today’s early morning hours are my last evening under the dark skies at La Ensenada “Star” Lodge, so this will be an all-night effort to observe and photograph celestial objects. I have a good sleep after yesterday’s dinner, awakening at 12:30am and go down to the ridge line where my Astrotrac is setup. My mission is to photograph a widefield of the Southern Cross to Eta Carina region in the southern hemisphere region I can’t see from my home on the west coast of Canada. Once I polar align the Astrotrac, I setup my Hutech-modified Canon XTi dSLR and set my 70-200mm zoom lens to 70mm – just wide enough to frame the Crux and Carina constellations.
There are some clouds drifting by midway through my photo run, but I end up with enough two minute exposures to do credit to this field rich of many wonderful celestial objects, including (from left to right): the Southern Cross and Coalsack dark nebula, IC2944/8 nebula, Stock 13 cluster, the Eta Carina nebula, and the Southern Pleiades cluster (IC2602). I’m so excited by what I see in my images, I stay up until after 4am processing them, which results is a wonderful resultant image – just what I was aiming for on this trip!
Tired but happy, I have a couple of hour’s sleep before waking around 6:30am. It is time to pack all my stuff that has spread itself out all over the cabin. Getting it all packed into my main suitcase take some doing, but it all fits and I’m ready to go to my last breakfast at La Ensenada by 8am. All the meals are served buffet style, and have been very good. We say thank you to our staff, have a group photo taken, and then we are on our way by bus to San Jose.
We travel the same route we took to get out here until we reach the Central Valley, and then divert to the town of Sarchi. This is a crafts area, and is also our lunch stop. The buffet at Las Carretas Restaurant is very good, and includes complimentary beer or wine, so I have a local Bavarian Gold beer with my lunch (recommended by Jorge). I’m not a shopper when travelling, however I actually purchase a few souvenirs this time. We have another group photo taken, since Jorge was missing from the one taken at the Lodge, and then we drive into San Jose and the Courtyard Marriott Hotel.
Our farewell dinner is held in the Marriott this year – an improvement over last year when we were in a noisy restaurant. This year we could converse, listen to Gary’s and Jorge’s speeches, and enjoy ourselves and the lovely buffet dinner. It was a very nice ending to a trip which I think everyone enjoyed. Goodbyes were said, tips were given to Jorge, and the evening ended. Jorge shared a list of 75 birds he showed the group during our time together, but I certainly didn’t see that many!
Most of our group leave for their respective homes tomorrow, but some of us are staying in Costa Rica for another week. Five of us Canadians are travelling to the Tamarindo area in the northwest corner of Costa Rica tomorrow to get some beach time and just kick back. Walter and Pat (a couple from New York) are going to the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica for a deluxe tenting experience for a couple of days.
