What is a 'Lucerne Star Party'? Well, it's pretty easy. JPL launched on January 12th 2005 a probe called 'Deep Impact' which was to intercept, and collide with the comet Tempel 1 on July 4th 2005 at roughly 1:00 AM. My family is fairly science-oriented, and as such thought it would be kind of cool to find a dark, quiet place to set up a telescope, and watch the impact.

So, off we drove, heading for El Mirage when we suddenly realized that it was July 4th weekend, and realized that there would be far too many people nearby to be able to see much of anything. The next best location that we could think of was Lucerne Dry Lake. We headed out in the early afternoon, so there was still plenty of time before the sun went down to go play, so I brought some rockets with me.

There wasn't a lot of time after 'dinner', but I did manage to get three flights off. My Sky Writer flew straight and successful (again) and landed about half a mile away. I flew my Mini-Exocet on an Aerotech D24, but I assembled the reload incorrectly, so the ejection charge went as soon as it got pressured up, and did a nice loop about 30' above the pad. Entertaining, but not what I was anticipating. Finally, I flew my 'Blow Dart' on an F21, and that thing took off in a hurry. I was expecting about 3500' based on the simulations I had run, but I didn't see it much after the boost ended, and I never found it again, despite looking at dusk for nearly an hour with a search party of seven.