Grand Canyon Star Party - DAY ONE - A Pretty Good Start Location: Grand Canyon Visitor Center, South Rim of Grand Canyon, AZ, about 340 miles north of home in Tucson, about 7000 ft elevation Weather: 80s at Noon, 75 at sunset, 50s when we quit at 11 PM. Clear skies, but the wind picked up around 9:45 to about 8 - 15 MPH gusts. Seeing and Transparency: Started good, but deteriorated a little bit due to the winds. Equipment: 18â?? f/5 2286mm Teeter Telescope newtonian truss dob, Sky Commander DSCs 10" Meade SCT on Atlas EQ-G mount Starting our second year at the Grand Canyon Visitor Center, some changes were made in our adventure. First, the Rangers marked off a telescope-free path down the middle of the parking lot for foot traffic. Second, to improve our communications among ourselves, we are having an informal gathering at 7 PM for popsicles and conversation. I think it helps put a more community aspect on what we are doing. The trip up was uneventful, but now there are FIVE of us travelling up. Thirteen year old grandson Stephan has been added to the now 18 year old Jessica on the 10" Atlas and 15 year old Karina on the 18" Teeter. I need to break in Stephan on the 90mm Orion ShortTube with its Skyview mount. Five people, four telescopes and an 8 night stay make for a packed station wagon, packed pickup, and an external rack on the trailer hitch. We came up on Friday night and did dry runs on the theater setup and finished the light reduction operations. All looks well for the future. Saturday was the usual running around getting things organized. I found out I forgot one of the roll up tables I bring, the one I use in the theater for supporting the laptop that has all the presentations. Ginger Applegarth, who has worked with our Ranger coordinator Marker Marshall since last GCSP to try to improve the information distribution for the new volunteers every year called to say she and Alan were running late and did I need anything, because they were stopping at Walmart. Table problem solved. What Ginger is doing is a quantum leap, I think, in helping bridge the gap in the returning vets and the relative newcomers. For health reasons, Alan and Ginger now need to travel in a longer RV so we had sufficient camping slots that we could put then in one of the handicap accessible spaces and they can have an information table set up for all of the volunteer so check out what's going on. And this year I sent out the Welcome and Information package identifying where the campsites are located. As many as two thirds of our volunteers are not housed in Mather Campground, so I identified the location and campsites so we can improve getting to know each other. Having an "Information Central" in the campground, and Marker providing the popsicle session each night, should ease the load on new folks trying to fit in. Unfortunately, we are missing two of our stalwart participants, Derald Nye and Erich Karkoshka. I really do miss both of their presences. We will have to carry on as best we can. We got the two big scopes set up, and headed over to the theater at 7:30 to get ready for the night talk. We are now limited to 233 total bodies in the facility, so with the three of us up front, we no longer have 280+ SRO throng. With everything ready to rock and roll, we were off and running. The talk was a new one, given by Interpretive Ranger Laura Jevtich who normally is assigned to Desert View and does night sky interpretation there. Her talk was a comprehensive look at Supernovas - how the universe evolved, and a very engaging way of demonstrating the life cycle of stars. Her talk then went into the elements generated through the engergy released, and the neutron star or black hole remainder. The interesting wrinkle was that she had every person coming in get a square of paper with an element. The color of the paper was an indicator of the source of the element. Laura then went through a list of items and whether they could exist without a supernova - jewelry, electronics, the Sun, buildings, the Earth, the earth's atmosphere, having peope hold up the cards as she read off different element constituents. A great involvement of the audience. She also had an interesting presentation of candidate stars for supernova and hypernova/gama ray burst status, and their distances. Looks like we're safe for now. I ran out at the end to start the first constellation tour at 9 PM, with Laura set for the 9:30 and 10 PM events. These are always fun, introducing the visitors to the structure of the sky, and the myths and science intermingled. So, it was 9:45 before I got back to the scopes. Not much to report. Karina was doing OK on the Ring and Mizar, but the Jessica and the Atlas were in a bit of trouble. I had adjusted the latitude change from Tucson in the daylight, in the wrong direction! She finally stuck it on Polaris and did a double star show and tell, which she usually does very well. Five minutes after I got there, the wind started gusting and driving the Teeter around, so between that and the Atlas in another universe, it took an hour of fussing to stow the Teeter and to get all of the bugs worked out and realign everything. It should be OK for tonight. The good news is that after I finally got the polar alignment straightened out, it nailed M6 in Sagittarius and M51 in Coma Berenices dead center so we should be OK for tomorrow night. I'm doing my usual talk on what's up in the sky, a simple, introductory sentance or three on the sun, moon, each planet, clusters, nebulae, galaxies, and comets. Then Laura will do the first two constellation tours so I can make sure the kids are OK with the scopes, and I'll do the last tour. The one positive aspect of having to scramble with both telescopes is to listen to Paul Lorenz who was set up next to us. It is always entertaining and informative to hear Paul describe his targets to his visitors; last night it was M82, M51, and The Veil Nebula. So I was actually moving a little slower than usual, enjoying Paul's interaction with the crowd. Finally, it was great to see Joe Bergeron again, our space artist from New York who has designed every one of our t-shirts for GCSP. The adventure begins! -------------------- Jim South Rim Coordinator Grand Canyon Star Party gcsp[at]tucsonastronomy.org Jim O'Connor South Rim Coordinator Grand Canyon Star Party gcsp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- See message header for info on list archives or unsubscribing, and please send personal replies to the author, not the list.