[AZ-Observing] Grand Canyon Star Party - DAY FOUR - The Fun Never Ends

  • From: Skylook123@xxxxxxx
  • To: az-observing@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2012 11:31:15 -0400 (EDT)

Grand Canyon Star Party - DAY FOUR - The Fun Never Ends
 
Location: Grand Canyon Visitor Center, South Rim of Grand Canyon, AZ, about 
 340 miles north of home in Tucson, about 7000 ft elevation
 
Weather: Pushing 90 mid-day, 80 at sunset, upper 50s when we quit at 11 PM. 
 Clear skies, only a few gusts up around 15 MPH early after sunset.
 
Seeing and Transparency: Best of the week, but some thin haze did start  
rolling in from the north around 11 PM.
 
Equipment: 
18â?? f/5 2286mm Teeter Telescope newtonian truss dob, Sky  Commander DSCs
10" Meade SCT on Atlas EQ-G mount
Lunt LS60THa
 
We got to the setup spot early again so I could try an Orion Solar System  
Imager web cam for possible use for crowd display.  It has worked well in  
the past on the moon, but solar use has always been spotty.  I fussed with  
all of the many software settings in three different image capturing software 
 packages, and moved back and forth between the native 5mm focal length and 
then  adding an Antaries 0.5X focal reducer, no luck in anything other than 
a  surrealistic, but sharp, art project.
 
The talk was by our Interpretive Ranger Marker Marshall, my counterpart for 
 the NPS and a great person to work with on this adventure.  She does a  
regular night show at the park called Starry Starry Nights, The Universe As 
Seen  From Grand Canyon National Park.  I always learn something new as she 
walks  through the protection of the night sky into the structure of the solar 
system  and how the planets behave, and going through an introduction of 
the current  constellation arrangement and key benchmarks in the sky, with 
some great, simple  to understand scientific proprerties thrown in.  To me, 
it's the Goldilocks  presentation - just right.
 
Aftet the talk I headed out and did the first constellation tour, so that  
Marker could handle the shut down of the theater and answer questions.   
Since I have my "roadies" to run the two scopes, the constellation tour is my  
big chance to have fun with the visitors.  For the 9 PM, we still have  
astronomical twilight so I start from that point and walk up the 
zodiac/ecliptic 
 line, since we have a touch of zodiacal light.  I recommend to the crowd  
that when they have the opportunity to watch a sunset, or a sunrise, with a  
clear horizon, to look in the opposite direction for the subtle pastels and 
the  shadow of the Belt of Venus, the Earth's shadow against the solar 
system  dust.  I included Mars and Saturn in the walk up the ecliptic, giving 
them  the information about Mars and it's atmosphere driven away by the solar 
wind  since it has no magnetic field to resist, and Saturn's specific 
gravity of 0.7,  snf how it would float in a big enough bathtub but leave a 
ring.  
I usually  begin with a story about someone tearing up newspapers in Times 
Square and  scattering them around, and when a police officer confronts him 
he says he is  keeping the tigers away.  The policeman says, "There are no 
tigers in Times  Square!"  "See", says the stranger, "it's working."  Many 
cultures  keep the tigers away with their myths and legends about the night 
sky, and  that's what we touch on.  When we got to Virgo, I redirect to North 
and  compare The Big Dipper and Cassiopeia in some cultures with the life 
affirming  traditions of the Navajo and the Revoloving Male, Revolving Female, 
and Home  Fire of the northern sky.  The talk goes on about the Egyptian 
burial  requirements for an afterlife path to Osiris (Orion) and the North 
Star.   Then I point to Thuban in Draco, the pole star for the great pyramids 
and how  the earth's pole precesses and if they wait 13,500 years, Vega will 
be the pole  star.  But that leaves all those deceased Egytian spirits 
wandering about  without a passageway back to their crypt.  
 
That gives the opportunity to introduce the many approaches to the Big  
Dipper (and Hindu elephant creation mythology), arc to Arcturus, and Bootes and 
 Canes Venatici herding the bears or, in some cultures, being responsible 
for  assuring the sun is in Virgo for harvest time.  Another tiger dealt 
with;  not your fault the crops failed, it was Bootes for not getting the sun 
in 
the  right spot in Virgo.
 
OK, now we've swung around to the zodiac again so we compare Antares and  
Mars (Ares in Greek), Mars being the god of war in motion, and Antares  
(Anti-Ares) being the stationary repositiory of the spirits of the soldiers who 
 
died valiantly in battle.  
 
We then get to the Milky Way and Sagittarius with the galactic core and our 
 10 million solar mass black hole, and many stories of what the Milky Way  
represents.  The Summer Triangle is a strong presence in the east, so we  
visited Orpheus' Lyre, and our air traffic control problem with Cygnus and  
Aquila flying in opposite directions.  Aquila has priority, though, since  it 
carries messages from Zeus.
 
Hercules was too high to get into the slaying of the Nemian Lion (Leo) as  
one of his quests, but we were able to easily see Mel-111, the Coma Open  
Cluster, just off the Galactic Pole, so now we have the zodiac, galactic core, 
 celestial pole, galactic pole, and the stories to remember.  
 
Karina had stowed the 18" due to the high winds at sunset, and I was too  
lazy to unwrap it, so I checked on Jessica with the 10" and she was dead on  
stellar aligned so for the next hour or so we did the Ring Nebula, then I 
hopped  over to The Sombrero, Markarian's Chain, The Whirlpool, and ending up 
on NGC457,  the Owl Cluster.  All gorgeous, but I sure did miss the 18" 
aperture.
 
Once again I listened as Paul Lorenz was showing, I really believe, half  
the NGC catalog.  He is so good with making the sky friendly to his  
visitors.  He had a nice view of The Whale, Whirlpool, many others, but his  
14" 
newtonian tube had an eye-popping view of The Veil, low power with an Ultra  
High Contrast filter.  Filaments all over the place.  What a treat for  his 
customers.
 
Speaking of which, it was an unusual night in that by the time I got up to  
the scopes at 9:40, the crowd was less yet more - constantly coming in 
small  clusters.  The introductions of the object in the eyepiece is a lot more 
 
personal, two or three people at a time coming up, not part of an anonomous 
 crowd.  And they kept coming until after midnight!
 
Jessica and I finally covered the 10" and headed back to the room with a  
well aligned scope waiting for us tonight.
 
--------------------
Jim O'Connor
South Rim Coordinator 
Grand  Canyon Star Party 
gcsp[at]tucsonastronomy.org  
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