[AZ-Observing] Grand Canyon Star Party - DAY SIX - Almost Rain
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- Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:13:16 -0400 (EDT)
Grand Canyon Star Party - DAY SIX - Cold and Wind, and Maybe Rain
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 70s at Noon, Mid 70s at sunset, Low 40s when I quit near 11
PM. Totally overcast most of the day, once again very annoying gusts that
made it quite chill.
Seeing and Transparency: Good enough to get great images once again with
the MCJR PRO.
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.
Today we had a request to work with the three to seven year olds at the
Kaibab Learning Center. Although it was totally overcast, Sim Picheloup set
up his binocular chair, while granddaughter Karina and I set up the Lunt
solar scope. The young ones came out in two groups; eight students from
advanced five year olds through a seven year old, then eight from three through
five. What to do with a solar scope and no sun? I had the little ones
look at the size of each others' eyes, and the 60mm size of the Lunt
aperture, and explained hoew it was letting in much more light to help us see
better. I also had my little mascot, a stuffed gray dinosaur we call
Scopasaurus, who heard we sometimes look way far away at light the started out
when
his kind were walking on Earth, and he wanted to pictures of his old
friends. Plus, he cries when I leave him in the truck, so we had Scopasaurus
join
us. Because we had no day sky to work with, I gave each of the 16
children a solar tattoo our club had made up to give out at the Tucson
Festival of
Books. It was a Lunt 90mm solar image we had Kitt Peak National
Observatory take for us and we had an artist turn it into a tattoo with some
words
around the outside. The kids loved the yellow orange disk with sunspots,
filaments, and faculae along with some prominences on our picture.
The sky stayed overcast most of the day, but forecasts were for clearing
around sunset so some astronomers were setting up when we went in to set up
for the night talk. This time it was me doing how a telescope works.
Worst talk of my life. I was using a new to me slide clicker, and I had my
finger on the wrong row of buttons so I was bouncing the slides around in and
out of special effects for the first few slides, then finally figured it
out. Was so discombobulated I felt I was really inadequate for the task, but
we got through it.
When I got out to the scope I had to set up from scratch since I hadn't set
up before the talk because the sky looked doubtful. I finally got the
alignment done, went to M57, nothing on the screen. It was 10 PM, time to
run away and start the tour.
The tour went very well, even though the threatening weather earlier kept
the crowd size down. But they seemed to like the different ways I was
showing them how to look at the sky, especially the experiences of other
cultures and how they used the sky.
Got back to the setup, and on a whim I checked parameters and I has the
wrong integration time on M57. As soon as I set five seconds in, the sky was
screeming alive, and The Ring was dead center. By this time, visitor flow
had totally stopped so I hopped around to a few other objects, dead center
and gorgeous all of them. But, Karina and I were alone, we were sleep
deprived, so John Suscavage, Wayne Thomas, and Karina and I all just packed up
and headed back at 11:30 PM to fight another day.
Jim O'Connor
South Rim Coordinator
Grand Canyon Star Party
gcsp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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