[AZ-Observing] Grand Canyon Star Party - DAY SEVEN - Finally Great Weather
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- Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:16:10 -0400 (EDT)
Grand Canyon Star Party - DAY SEVEN - Finally Great Weather
Location: Grand Canyon Visitor Center, South Rim of Grand Canyon, AZ, about
340 miles north of home in Tucson, about 7000 ft elevation
Weather: Low 80s at Noon, Mid 80s at sunset, High 60s when I quit near
Midnight. Totally overcast most of the day, once again very annoying gusts that
made it quite chill.
Seeing and Transparency: Best so far on seeing. Transparency is about 98%
as good as last night, but the camera doesn't care.
Equipment:
18â f/5 2286mm Teeter Telescope newtonian truss dob, Sky Commander DSCs
10" Meade SCT on Atlas EQ-G mount
Mallincam Junior PRO video system on the 10", 19" QFX LCD monitor.
I wanted to get some daytime solar observing in, but it just didn't
happen. This sleep deprivation is hard enough to work around, but the good
influence on timing of daytime activity is that of meeting with other
astronomers over in the Canyon Cafe. Twelve years ago when I started writing
a daily
log of happenings at GCSP, I would do it in the room and use the phone
line to dial up a web connection. When the wireless capability was installed
several years ago, I sort of set up shop over in CC and wrote over there.
It's so much better to have the contact with others of us up here, and not
stay isolated in the room.
The weather has changed. Beautiful blue skies with just a hint of a puffy
white visitor passing through. Still moderately high winds, though, at
20+ MPH during the day.
After writing yesterday's report and visiting with folks, there was not
enough time to set up for solar so we just headed up to the site. The wind
was dieing down, so we checked out the 18" scope and found that the focuser
was not square with the secondary. I tried adjusting it but I was missing
one of the allen wrenches. After fussing around a bit, I went over to get
the 10" ready. I unloaded the S-Video and wired controller so I could start
taking some images, if time allowed. And time was running away from us;
we needed to get into the theater to check out the setup for our speaker,
Dr. Andy Odell, retired Emeritus Professor from Nothern Arizona University
who now does reasearch at Lowell Observatory and does public outreach at
Lowell as well. With Dr. Alan Delman doing the 9 PM tour, and Dr. Odell doing
the 9:30 tour, Marker Marshall said she'd do the 10 PM event so I would
stay with the video setup. The theater seemed ready to go, so we went back
for the Otter Pop gathering.
Time really got away from me. Although I was set up over at the video
area, I wasn[t powered up or pointed where Susan needed it to be, and it was
time to run in for show time. Andy's talk was on Stellar Clusters and Solar
Evolution, and we needed to kick it off. We were full by 7:50 PM, so we
kicked of the show somewhat early.
Dr. Odell's talk was a fascinating comparison of the inner workings of a
star, compared to how members of a cluster show the signatures related to
their size and age. Starting with the Hertsprung-Russell diagram to
illustrate, in effect, the family portrait of stars and how we can
characterize and
classify what we see. Then he jumped into the forecasting of stellar
phenomena from the inside out, as the star goes through its evolution.
Unfortunately, the software routine he had on his computer to implement the
stellar
forecast equations to derive the appearance of specific stellar members of
a cluster would not transmit the results over the VGA hookup, but his
wealth of cluster photographs allowed him to make the point of determing the
age and nature of the cluster and its members told the story visually.
As the talk was ending, I ran out to my setup to get it working. Powered
up the mount, set the time of day, did a GOTO to the Ring, set the
integration time to six seconds, and bang, there it was on the screen in less
than
90 seconds from my arrival. I went through the stellar evolution story,
and how our sun would be a similar artifact in about 6 billion years. The
crowd at my station was amazed at the glorious colors of the crisp planetary
nebula. A reporter writing an article for a New Mexico travel magazine
interviewed me during my discuss, bringing out the why we do this every year.
We want our visitors to "take home a piece of the Grand Canyon": the night
sky environment. Getting their own light footprint under control, to
minimize excess lighting and its effect on the natural environoment,
generation
of greenhouse gasses, and the cost of providing and maintaining excess
capacity we all pay for.
For the next couple of hours I went from The Ring to The Dumbbell (upping
the integration time to 15 seconds woke up The Dumbbell into a huge
blue-green ionized oxygen hourglass and outer red ionized hydrogen rim), the
remnants of the end of the stellar evolution of an average sized star. Then I
wandered over to M51, the Whirlpool interacting galaxy pair, and upped the
integration time once again to about 40 seconds. It filled the verical axis
of the 19" monitor beautifully, with the spiral arms of larger member very
distinct and showing the distortion of the interaction.
By now, the crowd had virtually evaporated. But, I had used the two and a
half hours to not only describe the evolution of the planetary nebulas, I
was able to get in the legend of Orpheus and the Lyre, as well as the visual
Milky Way, both the Greek and Navajo points of view of Sagittarius and
leading into the galactic halo and our own galaxy's black hole. The picture
on the screen was a great introduction to the night sky environment, and
with close to 300 visitors in two and a half hours, a lot of information was
gathered and minds opened to the nature of our universe.
Grandson Andrew helped me pack up, and we headed back. Only one night
left, and I feel like we just started.
Jim O'Connor
South Rim Coordinator
Grand Canyon Star Party
gcsp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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