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 -- See message header for info on list archives or unsubscribing, and please send personal replies to the author, not the list.