2017 27th Annual Grand Canyon Star Party - South Rim
DAY SIX - Wind Tips Over The Scope
Location: Grand Canyon Visitor Center, South Rim of Grand Canyon, AZ, about
340 miles north of home in Tucson, about 7000 ft. elevation
Weather: Sterted partly cloudy, but cleared out after sunset. Still
mid-90s daytime, but the nights are getting cooler.
Seeing and Transparency: As yesterday, The seeing is very stable and the
transparency seems somewhat better than recent nights, but smoke and debris
from the Boundary wildfire in Flagstaff and another large fire in Southern
Utah are predicted to be trapped by a high temperature inversion beginning
Friday.
Equipment:
90mm Orion ShortTube refractor on a Celestron AVX mount
Mallincam Xterminator video system on the 10", 19" QFX LCD monitor.
Tonight the speaer was Dr. John Barentine, Program Manager at the
International Dark Sky Association in Tucson, AZ. We were privileged to hear
Dr.
Barentine's wise light use presentation, and, as every night raffled off
Celestron First Scope. Celestron again donated eight First Scopes for our
week, thanks to my good friend for many years Kevin Legore, head of the Focus
Astronomy outreach foundation and Celestron/Sky-Watcher USA employee.
Every night, a potential future Nobel Prize winner leaves with something to
start their night sky exploration.
This afternoon a disaster occurred. I had covered the socpe and tripod
with the weather cover from my 18" Teeter truss dob. I had pulled the cover
down to the bottom of the tripod and it acted as a sail, catching the wind
and tipping the mount over (a top heavy mount will rotate around any pair
of leg tips as a pivot line with little force). I should have stopped the
cover at the spreader tray. It went over and slammed the scope and mount
into the pavement. Although the damage seemed cosmetic, after re-assembly
and checkout following the night talk, the internal focuser rod is
disconnected or broken from the primary mirror, making the instrument
unusable. I
swapped telescopes to my backup 90 mm refractor, making the rest of the night
pretty simple. I just used Regulus as an alignment star, and talked double
stars and a lot of cultural night sky facts for the rest of the time.
Later on, I moved over to Mizar and continued the multi-star talk. We had a
lot of teaching to do the next day, so we quit early.
Once again, the visitors were great. We also learned that last night we
had over 1600 by the official counting on Wednesday, the largest we've ever
physically counted. At the scope, We talked everything from zodiacal
elements to star color meanings, multiple stars and clusters, and many cultural
meanings of stars, clusters, and asterisms and it was a great time despite
losing the 10".
We packed up at 11PM, ending a night of disappointment yet great public
interaction. It looks like the rest of the week will be wide field observing!
Jim O'Connor
South Rim Coordinator
Grand Canyon Star Party
_gcsp@tucsonastronomy.org_ (mailto:gcsp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
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