2015 25th Annual South Rim Grand Canyon Star Party - DAY SEVEN â Solar,
Lunar, Stellar, and Sky Touring
Location: Grand Canyon Visitor Center, South Rim of Grand Canyon, AZ, about 340
miles north of home in Tucson, about 7000 ft elevation
Weather: Mid 80s at Noon, Low 90s at sunset, Around 60 when I quit near 01:00
AM. Scattered cloud streams in places. Generally clear and hot.
Seeing and Transparency: About average for the week. Again, not as good as
last year but much higher moisture in the air, and a pine pollination season is
affecting the usual perfection. Visitors don't noteice, but astronomers do.
Equipment:
Lunt LS60THa-B600 solar scope on a Sky View Pro EQ mount with the added motor
kit.
Orion 90mm f/5.56 ShortTube refractor on a Sky View Pro EQ mount with the added
motor kit.
Mallincam Xterminator video system and 19" QFX LCD monitor on the Lunt scope
for solar.
Mallincam Junior Pro video system and 19" QFX LCD monitor on the 90mm scope for
night use.
We are still under an advisory for high heat, with the sky showing wispy cloud
strips and reports of potentil fire debris being caried into the area.
No other way to put it, the heat is hitting me along with a bit of unwise
eating so the morning was spent trying to bring order to the digestive tract.
Almost made it, not quite.
Dr. John Barentine, Program Manager at the International Dark Sky Association
in Tucson, AZ, is our speaker at tonight's sunset talk and he had a table set
up outside the Visitor Center during the day to discuss wise lighting and light
use. Jim and Vicki Palmer, John Meschberger, and Chris had several solar
scopes set up near John so, after the death of my big mount was verified the
night before, I thought I would check and see how the solar support was going.
I stopped by the front of the Visitor Center and saw that the solar scopes had
lines over 20 visitors at times, so with grandson Stephen I went around back to
the 90mm Orion ShortTube and demounted it, using the Skyview mount with a Lunt
LS60 to add some support. I set it up for live video since the crowd was so
dense, we could handle a larger group. And we were innundated! Great group of
visitors, lots of kids, we were capturing the normal passers-by plus the 30
minute cycle of the theater participants. Our club uses solar tattoos with an
image made for us using a Lunt LS90 over a year ago at Kitt Peak National
Observatory and converted to a 2" square image of the sun, given to children
who stop by. Kids loved it.
The sun was very cooperative, with several large active regiouns in view, one
with a sunspot family where the magnetic field from the plage having punched a
hole in the surface and disturbing the convection below and cooling the
material in view, as well as several extremely long filaments snaking acros the
view. Quite an image to teach with. We had put the scope out in the sun while
we were under the shaded outdoor seating area with a video table, so visitors
could visit and talk without standing out in the hot sun. I had intended to be
there for an hour, but stayed for over four hours along with the team from
Phoenix. We finally broke it off when a lull in traffic gave us the
opportunity. My wife Susan had made a trip into Tusayan, outside the gate, and
brought me a Wendy's double for lunch; it sat for two and a half hours until I
could get a break to munch.
Stephen came back and we broke the equipment down, moved it around back be
ready to mate with the 90mm, and went back to the room around 5:30 PM. After
cooling off a bit, back to the observing site around 6:15 PM to do a 6:30 dry
run of the Barentine talk, came outside for the nightly Otter Pop gathering,
and Stephen and Karina assembled the night version of the setup.
We went in the theater and were privileged to hear Dr. Barentine's wise light
use presentation, and raffled off Celestron First Scope number seven, this time
won by a 15 year old young lady from Green Bay, Wisconsin, who happens to be
one of triplets.
Outside at 9 PM, I scrambled a bit to set up the video. We used the Mallincam
Junior Pro to save weight on the aft end, still way too heavy so time for a
much longer dovetail. I got a great image of the second day moon crescent,
about 30 minutes before sunset. I fussed for a while with settings because I
kept getting a red image. DUH. It was the refracted light of the moon at the
horizon.
I powered off the monitor and went over to do my 10 PM ethno-astronomy tour, of
course drawing a tremendous ovation as usual, and ran back to find something to
look at. Then I noticed that while I had shut off the monitor, not so the
tracking and if we had a tunnel through the Earth's mantle, we could have still
observed the moon.
I went up to Albireo and learned an awful lot on the difference in settings
between a 10" optical tube and a 90mm. I gently danced among integration time
and gain to try to get the yellow-blue pair, but the mismatch in intensity
between the pair meant getting a yellow primary and disappearing secondary, or
a gorgeous blue secondary with the primary slightly bloated and white. If I
left Sense-Up at x2, I got Albireo all by itself. If I bumped the integration
up, more and more of the Milky Way would appear. At X48, it still looks like a
binary star but pretty much white, with a very nice Milky Way behind it. So I
showed it off in a variety of configurations, sparking a great discussion with
the remaining visitors about the wonderous dynamic range of the human eye
compared to a live imaging system.
I slowly packed up, leaving the scope in place because of the perfect polar
alignment, and ended up back in the room by 1:30 AM. What a great day and
night of outreach!
Jim O'Connor
South Rim Coordinator
Grand Canyon Star Party
gcsp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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