[AZ-Observing] Observing Report - Grand Canyon Star Party South Rim - Day One
- From: skylook123@xxxxxxx
- To: az-observing@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2010 05:04:35 -0400
Grand Canyon Star Party - DAY ONE - A Great Beginning
Location: Yavapai Point Observing Station, South Rim of Grand Canyon, AZ, about
340 miles north of home in Tucson, about 7000 ft elevation
Weather: 90 at sunset, upper 60s when we quit at Midnight. Zero cloud cover,
zero wind.
Seeing and Transparency: As good or better than any night I can remember.
Equipment:
18â?? f/5 2286mm Teeter Telescope newtonian truss dob, Sky Commander DSCs
The day did not have an auspicious beginning. The bad head and chest colds
Susan and I have had are really hanging on and wiping us out. There is a lot of
up-front preparations for the star party at Yavapai Point Observing Station.
The big effort is in configuring the bathrooms for night use; installing
blackout panels on 10 windows, and getting red rubylith installed on most of
the overhed interior and all exterior lights. I was stressing out a bit over
it, just because we were feeling so miserable. But, we showed up at the site
around 3:30 and we got the panels installed and were about to start the
rubylith when John Anderson jumped in to help. John is tall enough that we
didn't need to use the ladder; he could reach the ceiling and tape up the ends
of the panels while I fed him rubylith and ecouragement. Then came the rush
back to the scopes to finish setups there.
We had gotten to the lot around 3:30 PM and only saw six or seven cars. The
park has a maturing traffic control schenme that has the Mather Point and main
Visitor Center being a Destination Point, with the shuttle bus system bing the
people mover. Seems to be working; Lots of open space now at Yavapai. But it
sets in a premonition that maybe there will not be a crowd.
At around 7:40 we started up to the Observing Station to begin setting up for
the night talk which, coincidentally, is John, talking about Galactic
Morphology, or how the work of Edwin Hubble became the basis for sorting the
species in the galactic zoo. We were stunned as we got to the top of the walk;
over 200 people were waiting to be entertained! With usual first night jitters
in the setup, I fumbled around trying to get my laptop to boot. Apparently,
using the WiFi system in the Canyon Cafe and hibernating is not the way to
encourage a restart. I had a spare computer, but after firing it up found that
I've forgotton to put John's talk on it. So, while John ran back down to get
the talk on portable media, I did some magic with hard shutdowns and disabling
wireless and eventually got the right laptop to talk to the projector. Our lead
Ranger, Marker Marshall, did a great time fill prepping the crowd for us.
Finally, showtime; Marker introduces me, and I introduce John. We'r a full
employment enterprise.
Just as last year, John did a great job not only at bringing the classification
process down to layman's terms, he makes it an interesting, engaging look at
what could be a dry topic. He elicits great questions from the crowd, and the
crowd seemed genuinely interested in his presentation and enthusiastic to get
down to the 44 telescopes we had.
I need to throw in a word about three of the astronomers who perform a valuable
service to the event and set up in the day time. Jonathan Wilkendorf was set up
ant the main Visitor Center with a 5 inch refractor, Derald Nye was set up as
always at the Yavapai parking lot with his larger reflector, and Sim Picheloub
was set up at the Canyon Cafe with a 10 inch tube dob showing Venus. Derald and
Sim have been great ambassadors for the early days of the star party for years.
Jonathan is jumping in and showing the colors of Lowell Observatory, quite a
boost for us. And Sim came back and did the night outreach as well.
So my earlier dread of all the setup work getting done evaporated into a
glorious night. Quite a large crowd for early June! By the time I got the
evening talk equipment put away and returned to my scope it was a huge
telescope street fair. Venus and Saturn have been available for hours before
sunset, and Mars is doing a mating dance with Regulus; tonight they will be
less than 1 degree separation, so the Regulus double star and Mars should make
an exciting image for the evening.
From 9 PM until the shuttles stopped running at 11PM I had 290 visitors at my
scope alone. In the dark, I could only see five or 10 deep in line but John,
set up next to me, said there were always 15 to 20 people waiting. The weather
was absolutely perfect. I have never seen transparency this good anywhere,
anytime. This morning, talking over the previous night's adventures, we all had
difficulty finding old favorites. What did I show? I started on The Ring and
stayed there. It was actually hard to find in the eyepiece because of the rich
star field; I had to use the Telrad to get on it. Same for some folks and the
Hercules cluster - it was naked eye, and the quickest way there was just point
the Telrad. Sim had trouble locking in on M81/M82; too many stars! I start on
the Ring at GCSP because it's low in the east, so at my tall dob average people
can see it standing flatfooted or crouching down a little. I love telling the
planetary nebula story to the crowd, about the end of life of stars about the
size of our sun, the growth to a red giant, and the sneezing off of the outer
layers as the succession of nuclear ignitions proceeds through the periodic
table up to iron. The kicker is when they learn that this is the source of the
elements from helium through iron - the end of life process of average stars.
Since that's where all the star stuff comes from, a challenge was posed: trace
your geneology back to the star whose end of life begat you! I used 254X on the
monster, so it was like a huge dinner plate, the sneezed off remnants glowing
line a neon sign from the ultraviolet engergy from the core white dwarf and
it's iron and hydrogen starlight. After an hour of climbing out of the
atmosphere we started getting the blue-green tint strongly, with several
sitings of the central star. Many, many side conversations about the graceful
demise of solar class stars compared to the novae and supernovae catstrophic
ends of more massive stars that don't get to cycle through elements; just one
collapse and kapboom to generate the heavier elements. I never even aligned the
DSCs, never changed objects, just had a ball doing the stellar evolution pitch.
It ended up a two to three step ladder climb. And to top it off, t-shirt,
shorts, and sandals all night; 65F at midnight. No wind, no clouds, should be
near record temps the next two days, then dropping 10 degrees or more. 93F as I
type this.
My body was dead, so I packed up and bailed out at 11 PM, but was so excited by
the success of the evening that I couldn't get to sleep until 2 AM.
Had a very nice pizza party/brunch with over thirty of the astronomers today.
We owe a huge debt of gratitude for Joe Bergeron nominating Dean Ketelsen for
the Outreach Oscar, and then bringing it here to GCSP and presenting it to Dean
in front of those of us who owe Dean so much. What a perfect acknowledgement of
his 18 years of nurturing this event.
Public outreach as it outta be - awesome skies, great astronomers, probably
1000 people who were eager to learn and who were very appreciative for the
experience.
Jim O'Connor
South Rim Coordinator
Grand Canyon Star Party
gcsp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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