2015 25th Annual South Rim_Grand Canyon Star Party - DAY THREE - Better and
Better
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, high 60s at sunset, 50s when we quit near 00:30.
Increasing cloudyness during the day,moderately obscured with rain cluds in
late afternoon, some light sprinkles around 6 PM, and good clearing when went
in for the night talk. When we came out after the night talk, gradually
cleared to about 95% open.
Seeing and Transparency: Not great due to heavy cloud and moisture influx from
the southeast. Winds aloft were from straight south, and by sunset had cleared
much of the obscurred sky away. I worked all night at f/5, about 310X.
Equipment:
18â f/5 2286mm Teeter Telescope newtonian truss dob, Sky Commander DSCs
(unused due to some equipment issues)
10" Meade SCT on Atlas EQ-G mount
Mallincam Xterminator video system on the 10", 19" QFX LCD monitor.
The day did not start well. By about 3 PM, I noticed I had not received the
usual phone calls. I checked my cell phone and there was no display, and a
small fault in how the battery was connected. After I fixed the battery
connection I found I had five voice mails. The the clutch in the truck went
out of adjustment and first, reverse, and sometimes second gears were not
accessible other than by being at a complete stop with the engine off. Oh
well, that means things have to improve.
When we ggot to the site, the weather report is above. I asked fellow observer
and club member Howard Weatherwax, a pilot of large jets, if he could get a
weather story and the winds aloft said the we were good; the clouds would be
taken away. I uplacked and with Karina's help, we had the whole scope and live
video system on Venus before sunset, in about 8 total minutes! The Venus
cookie was missing the bite, the background sky was a gorgeous blue, polar
alignment held it rock solid in the middle.
I was the speaker tonight, an overview on all the types of objects we might see
from the site, and challenging the audience to think about what they might want
to view. The talk went very well, and we raffled off Celestron First Scope
number three, won by a young lady visiting from Solon, Ohion, who's family were
all astronomically interested and had just joined an astronomy club back home.
Good friend Kevin LeGore and his foundation Focus on Astronomy working through
Celestron to get these donations for the raffles are accomplishing such a great
thing. The pure joy on the face of the winners, and the cheers from the crowd
for the forunate receiver, is truly a wonderful event to be part of.
Then I got back to the scope. I really do need to follow Rock Mallin's
suggestion about energizing the power distribution through an inverter to
control the source draw. Running straight out of the deep dscharge battery,
there is a voltage drop that brings the mount power below its desired level so
it resets, losing its knowledge of Park and alignment. A major part of the
problem is that I've been using an two extension cables to service both the
mount head and the camera out of the five line splitter. My extensions are way
too long, initiating their own voltage drop. It hasn't affected the camera,
but that is what has brought the mount head input about 0.2 volts below its
happy zone. After the third reset last night, I pulled the extension off the
mount head feed from the splitter and the mount loved it. Lesson learned. The
dumb thing is I've seen this happen so many times in my lab work, where someone
will set up a regulated power source to run test articles, then locate the test
article across the room so they don't have to run a long data cable to the
analysis station. THen they wonder why they undervolt the test equipment.
DUH. And there I am doing the same foolish thing. Now all configured
correctly, but my inverter is being used by another volunteer who is putting on
a different kind of show for the astronomers but needs 110V input to his
projector. As long as I don't use the long extension line on the mount head,
things seem to be running well enough for the week to do great things.
Tonight was Karina's turn to pick the targets, so we did Eastern horizon for
The Ring and The Dumbbell to start. Aligning on Deneb and Vega made for
perfect pointing, and our polar alignment from yesterday held the targets dead
center. First The Ring. I only needed 4 seconds integration and AGC 3 to get
an awesome view, and then we jacked the zoom up to 2X and it was about the size
of a quarter and Karina did her most excellent stellar evolution talk with the
visitors. A few of the other astronomers came over with Oh Wows, and when I
said 4 seconds I had to show one or to the red light on the wireless controller
and count the time to the image send. I cheated a little and bumped the AGC up
to 4 and the pair of white dwarf stars at the center jumped alive. Earth sized
diamonds. A bit too hot at nearly half a million degrees Fahrenheit to just
run your space cruiser out and hall back without a LONG tow rope.
After a gap in the crowd, Karina decided to jump to M27, the Dumbbell. Oh My
Gosh, at 7000 feet and about 20 seconds integration time had the dense Milky
Way bakground filling the view with their own diamonds, but the planetary was
about 1/3 or more of the screen, a gigantic diaphenous apple core with perfect
oxygen and hydrogen illumination. One lady visitor was shedding tears at the
view!! Several other astronomers again came over and abandoned their own
scopes to marvel at what Xterminator could provide. And there was barely a
hint of amp glow in the upper left, since I've been running with AGR off and
AGC in the 3-4 range.
After about an hour there, a visitor asked about globular clusters. What the
heck, Karina went to M4 and was only a tiny bit off but with the 20 seconds
from M27 still in the wireless, pinpoint stars galore. We ran about four
layers of crisp stars in the view. I did some education with one of our
Interpretive Rangers on age and type of stars, and the supermassive black hole
at the core indicating a likley small galaxy subsumed by The Milky Way; a
stellar retirement home. So he did some of the practice educating with our
visitors.
We couldn't end our night without a new galaxy sho I directed Karina through
the process of doing the Atlas Pointing Aliggnment Enhancement process on Spic
in the west, and she was able to nail M104, The Sombrero, dead center. I used
about 15 seconds integration time to find it in case she had to slew around,
but there it was so I upped the time to 40 seconds just for amusement. A
magazine picture. Quite a bit of amp glow, but when I offered to set AGR on
and AGC off, then fuss with the integration time, the viewers wouldn't let me!
As long as I slid the image to the opposite third of the monitor, the green
bothered no one. But this was about 2/3 of the way to a Hubble shot.
Too much success, too tired after a long day in the sun plus hundreds of
visiitors, we decided to come back another day. Shut it down, packed it up,
and about ten astronomers and visitors were writing down the name of the camera
and source. I've been doing this adventure for 22 years, and pretty jaded in
my ability to get excited, but this is a new, wonderful world of teaching and
just looking out at the wonders of our universe.
Enough. I can't stop babbling about how great this system is.
Jim O'Connor
South Rim Coordinator
Grand Canyon Star Party
gcsp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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