2015 25th Annual GCSP Grand Canyon Star Party - DAY FOUR â Karina Goes Solo
Location: Grand Canyon Visitor Center, South Rim of Grand Canyon, AZ, about 340
miles north of home in Tucson, about 7000 ft elevation
Weather: High 70s at Noon, Low 80s at sunset, Comfortable high 60s when we quit
near 11:45 PM. No clouds! When we came out after the night talk, gradually
cleared to about 95% open.
Seeing and Transparency: Much better than last night. Winds gusty off and on
during the day, calm at night.
Equipment:
18â f/5 2286mm Teeter Telescope newtonian truss dob, Sky Commander DSCs
(fixed, but operator was overtired so unused)
10" Meade SCT on Atlas EQ-G mount
Mallincam Xterminator video system on the 10", 19" QFX LCD monitor.
Lunt LS60THa-B600 on a Sky View Pro EQ mount with the added motor kit.
The day continued yesterdayâs adventures. The long duration laptop battery,
which generally provides 9 hours of use, dropped to 45 minutes for some reason.
Later running it completely down twice reset its brain, and today it seems
recovered. More nagging issues Iâll leave for some other time.
Granddaughter Karina and I set up for solar at the main Visitor Center. The
scope could be out in the courtyard while we sat a few feet away in the shade.
For the next two hours, we had a great time with about 160 visitors and a
moderately active sun. Several plage/active regions, two longish filament
lines, and a prominence gave us a nice classroom to teach solar behavior. But
the heat was back, and common sense eventually prevailed and we escaped.
Setup and operation was a 95% Karina show. I got the deep discharge in place,
and by then she had the scope uncovered and monitor ready to go. I did the
final cable hookup, and between deciding to try and set up before the night
talk and having a great Venus image in the monitor was a total of 8 minutes!!
We did forget one step; we left the ALC level at 1/12000 of a second, which we
needed for the sun, so the blue sky background was not the same natural
matching color in the monitor as it was last night. Bouncing around from solar
scope to small refractor to large SCT, and doing solar, and multiple types of
deep sky objects, does force one to keep their wits about them!
I went into the theater to introduce the night talk; tonight it was Marilyn
Unruh, who owns The Booknook science book store in Prescott and is a tremendous
outreach practitioner and educator. She does her talk without any slides,
breaking the presentation down into Telescopes as Time Machines (relative
distances close to home and across the universe), Have You Seen The Shadow Of
The Earth (the sunrise/sunset effect of the Earth shadow against the debris of
the solar system, plus the shadows cast by various astronomical features), and
Using Your Five Senses for Astronomy, a very clever depiction of listening to
the cosmic background, seeing the night sky, smelling and tasting the air which
was once inside a star, and using your hand to measure angular distances in the
sky. Always a well-received talk.
Once again, we raffled of a Celestron First Scope, this time to a 12 ½ year
old from Republic, Missouri. Another astronomer is born.
I got back to the video setup a bit after 9 PM, and Karina had shifted to
Jupiter at a visitorâs request. Unfortunately, while she managed to get all
of the settings correct, I had set the imaging system at f/5, so the image was
pretty tiny.
When I got back, she wanted to try to go back to deep sky objects. This time,
I just let her rock on and only two items needed changing. She had forgotten
to get into Hyper mode for the integrations, and she had remembered the
integration times in reverse for the type of object. So while the scope was
slewing to M57 I did a quick Sense Up enable and she changed the wireless
controller back down to the 5 seconds we were using on The Ring, and bang,
first cycle, there it was.
She worked with the crowd on that for about a half an hour and wanted to go
back over to Sombrero on the opposite horizon. Since our now two day old
alignment had been in the east, I kept my mouth shut just to see what sheâd
do. Immediately she picked up the wired controller, applied the alignment
mask, went to Spica, centered it, used the mountâs Pointing Alignment
Enhancement on the star, and jumped down to Sombrero, all by herself. The one
mistake was a bit of education I had left out. I should have had her disable
Hyper and set the level control high to minimize the effect of Spica on the
system. With the settings for a DSO, too much light had tickled the system so
we had the off/on image cycling of The Sombrero. Usually it will clear itself
after about five cycles, but being overly eager to get a sustained image, I
just powered down the camera for about 30 seconds, restarted, let it cycle
through the wireless controller clock twice, and there it was, gorgeous in the
middle. Except, Karina had decided to reduce the imaging time by about 30% and
the amp glow was almost gone, the galaxy was still huge, this time I learned
something. She is definitely ready to fly solo with the system.
A side note about Karina. Our birthdays are one day apart. She was almost my
49th birthday present. But more importantly, in 1997 I was a system test
consultant to Motorola for the development of the Iridium satellite
architecture, and the first test conductor. On launch day of the first five
satellites from Vandenberg on a Delta II, we were in the Motorola cafeteria in
Chandler, AZ watching the feed from the launch site. I heard the call at 9:23
AM that the second stage engine had cut off â time to start the orbital
insertion of the first ring. So I listened to the radio traffic as the
satellites were spun off and deployed. At 11 AM I got a text page from my
wife. Our second granddaughter, Karina, had been born at 9:23 AM. My nickname
for her became SECO, for Second Stage Engine Cutoff. For me, and her, May 5
1997 is truly a special date, and she is very proud of being born at the minute
we gave birth to the Iridium satellite architecture.
Well, nothing for me to do! But I had the 10 PM constellation tour, so I went
over to the meeting area and took folks around and did my usual half
scientific, half ethno-astronomy tour of the night sky, throwing in a half
dozen cultures other than the basic Greek. Great audiences, very good
questions about certain why/why not aspects, and loving the Egyptian,
Cromwellian British, Navajo, Seminole, Cherokee, and other alternative ways of
looking at the summer sky. I like the 10 PM because I can go a minute or two
longer. We reached the end of the laser tour at 10:33 PM. Then about 10 of
the group kept me in the area for another 30 minutes with more ethno astronomy
questions!
I finally got back to Karina about 11:15. She had perfectly changed to six
other objects on both horizons and overhead, perfectly adjusting integration
times among The Sombrero, The Hercules Cluster, The Dumbbell, and several
others. Yep, sheâs ready to be the star of the show. Now I have to find
something to do!!
Jim O'Connor
South Rim Coordinator
Grand Canyon Star Party
gcsp[at]tucsonastronomy.org
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