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Date: Saturday, February 13, 2016 Event: Astronomy Magazine Tucson Star Party Location: Pima Community College East, Tucson, AZ Weather: mid-80s at Noon, mid-60s at sunset, low 50s when we quit around 9:00 PM. Some wispy random clouds like contrails occasionally during the day, thinning at sunset, but some patches of the sky showed increasing humidity as the night went on, especially hazy around the moon. Seeing and Transparency: Conditions seemed adequate. Since I was using live video, the conditions did not affect any of my activities. Equipment: Lunt LS60THa B600 H-Alpha solar scope Orion 90 mm ShortTube refractor for a brief attempt at daytime lunar viewing Orion EQ-3 tracking mount for the solar and refractor use 10" Meade SCT on Atlas EQ-G mount for night use Mallincam Xterminator and Mallincam Junior Pro video systems, 19" QFX LCD monitor. This was the fourth Tucson Star Party, sponsored by Astronomy Magazine and supported by the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association. Duration was 10 AM through 9 PM, so we got in good sessions of both solar and evening outreach. I was the first one there, followed shortly by Jim Knoll, so we set up in a central solar location on the patio in front of the PCC Observatories. I won’t say much about the solar video experience, other than it takes quite a bit of attention to detail on many parameters to get good performance, and I never quite nailed it down. I even tried changing cameras, but still had less than great performance. I got a good active region, an associated sunspot group, and as I kept playing with settings I got some filament lines, but no prominences although Jim and others had them. Later, at home, I fixed the problem. Paul and Cathy Carpenter arrived with a huge amount of equipment and display information on solar behavior and TAAA. Plus a number of telescopes, despite Paul’s recent hip surgery and another one to come. Usually they would be set up in the area where Jim and I had set up, but we hadn’t seen them until after we were in place, but the side they ended up on seemed OK for shade and for displaying all the material they had, as well as the use of their telescopes. I was somewhat frustrated that, despite a shade box for the monitor, I just could not pull out the detail that the others were getting. However, I found the problem at home (bad setting on the Etalon) and next time should be a much better show. But despite the under-performance of the image, I got a lot of good stellar evolution discussion in, as did all of the volunteers. Paul and Cathy were great at doing their own education, and forwarding visitors to the rest of us for more TAAA information. Being frustrated in late afternoon by the solar experience, and with a near-first quarter moon making a daylight experience, I thought I’d try some day time moon light. I replaced the Lunt with the Orion 90mm, but with only a small red bulls-eye pointer invisible in day light, I couldn’t get the moon in the scope. I bit the bullet, took everything down, and set up the big Atlas mount and the 10” SCT. With that setup, I can always get the moon in the daytime with the Telrad finder, since the moon glows on the forward side, so by looking backwards at the illuminator rings, it’s easy to do a daytime moon acquisition. For the next couple of hours, I was able to do lunar teaching in the daytime, as the crowd was starting to grow. Polar alignment was so bad, though, that the moon kept drifting out of view. As the sky darkened and some bright stars appeared, I aligned on Rigel and tried to go to M42, Orion’s Nebula, but the polar misalignment was too great to get a decent GOYO. I stopped trying and did a full polar alignment. After doing the polar alignment, which only took a couple of minutes, and then Rigel, we got M42 in gorgeous detail. I used short integration of only 2.1 seconds to show the Trapezium and about a 50 cent piece display of emitting hydrogen to explain the UV energization. Then I jacked it up to about 6 seconds, and the big nebula appeared. It was very colorful and entertaining. We played around with various settings, easy and fast, to show more depth of the nebula or more of the core. After a while, I upped it to around 15 seconds and got M43 to pop in like a chrysanthemum. Actually, if one moves M42 off the screen, M43 by itself can almost look like a red Triffid. I did this a half-dozen times as the visitors rotated through. Since everyone had, by now, seen M42 and got the emission lesson, and M43 for the wonder of Charles Messier seeing that thing under the late 18th century conditions, I did a quick hop over to Cassiopeia for The Owl Cluster, which was huge and amusing to everyone, Then it came time for some real eye candy. Now that the polar was rock steady, I went over to Dubhe to align, and jumped up to M82. At 57 seconds integration, it was like a magazine picture, with almost five inches length and fantastic red and blue colors and detail in the star forming, reflection and dust emitting core areas. We actually stayed after 9 PM because so many people wanted to talk about it. There was about a half hour period where people were interested in how different cultures look at the sky, so we spent some time on many Native American comparisons with the Greek points of view. Despite the solar fuss, which I straightened out at home, it was another great day and night session of outreach and cosmological education. And now it’s even better. I found a cleaner for the LCD screen that got rid of all the grease, oil, dust, and fingerprints that had piled up over the years. Nice and bright, now.

Date: Saturday, January 30, 2016 I’m woefully late getting this out, but better late than never. Location: Catalina State Park, Catalina, AZ Weather: mid-70s at Noon, Low 60s at sunset, 50s when we quit near 10:00 PM. Some clouds forming during the day, thinning at sunset, open sky when we began serious observing. Seeing and Transparency: OK, not great due to the moisture pumping in off the west coast. Equipment: 10" Meade SCT on Atlas EQ-G mount Mallincam Xterminator video system, 19" QFX LCD monitor. This was the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association’s winter star party supporting Catalina State Park. This was an unusual event in that we had no moon or planets to get an early start on, so we and our eventual 250 or more visitors waited for astronomical twilight to set in so we could enjoy some viewing. We had 10 astronomers to support the event, and we were all pretty busy. After dark, for most of the event, I had about 35 people rotating through my video display all night. As the darkness was settling in, I invited any interested visitors to a side area for a laser sky tour. We covered ecliptic, the relation to the zodiac, all of the visible constellations, and many myths from multiple cultures associated with the constellations and asterisms, comparing the Pleiades, Orion, Scorpius (not visible, but part of a similar separation legend in Navajo to the Greek), Cassiopeia, and the Big Dipper and how they are interpreted among Greek and Navajo cultures. We also discussed the point of view of the creation of the Sun, Moon, and night sky as taught by Tohono O'odham and Navajo, and the nature of the night sky as understood by Cherokee, Seminole, Navajo, and other cultures. It was quite a nice experience with the visitors. Back to the scope, I aligned on Rigel and we enjoyed M42, Orion's Nebula for some time, discussing the nature of this stellar nursery and the Trapzium and its generation of the emission/reflection nebula on the screen. I used the flexibility of the imaging time selection to show, at 2.1 seconds, the Trapezium and some of the nebulosity around the four main stars, then upping the integration time to seven seconds for the glory of the colorful hydrogen emission and the reflections around the nebula. Increasing the integration to 15 seconds brought out M43, the emission nebula adjacent to M42, and marveled at Charles Messier’s ability to pick this item out 235 years ago with a small telescope and the wood and coal smoke pollution. Then we went over to Cassiopeia, and after aligning on Schedar, spent time with The Owl Cluster, which filled the monitor. Rotating the camera allowed it to appear upside down as the Bat, as well as ET and Johnny 5 and other cultures’ name as the Kachina Doll. We then went up to the Andromeda constellation for the beautiful planetary nebula, NGC7662, the Blue Snowball. It was a blue disk over ¼” in diameter, all alone in the view. We talked about stellar evolution and the source of the oxygen glow due to the white dwarf at the core. By now, it was time to close up shop as the visitors left happy, and educated, to the environment that is part of their home. Once again, the Mallinccam live video system enabled showing natural wonders and performing education for a large group of visitors. We’ll be back again next quarter!

Observing Report - August 13 Arizona Sonora Desert Museum "Cool Summer Nights" Location: Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, Tucson, AZ, multiple locations on the grounds Weather: 100+F mid-day, 90+F at sunset, 80F when we quit near 8:30 PM. Open sky before sunset but thunder heads moving in and over us, at and sfter dusk. Lightning caused a halt in the operations. Seeing and Transparency: Better than average until after dusk, then sucker holes were stable but sparse. Equipment: 10" Meade SCT on an Atlas EQ-G mount Mallincam Xterminator video system on the 10", 19" QFX LCD monitor. This observing session was in support of the ASDM Cool Summer Nights Saturday night fiesta. The astronomy part of the night was provided by several organizations; seven astronomers and six telescopes from Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association, and additional scopes and support from ASDM, National Optical Astronomy Organization, and the International Dark Sky Association. We were scattered at several venues around the grounds, so my direct involvement was to set up at Cat Canyon with Bob Williams and his Celestron 11" scope, and Peter Bibbo joining us without a scope and acted as additional guidance and helping with the visitor load. The support from the staff at ASDM was great, picking us and our equipment up with golf carts at our vehicles and transporting us to and from our setup locations. The only suggestion I'd make for the future is to consider having the astronomers park in the spaces normally reserved for buses; that would keep the volunteers consolidated and the transportation shorter and less impeded by the regular guests and traffic. Otherwise, the setup and adminsitration seemed very well thought out and supported. It started out as a great evening. After Bob and I got dropped off and we set up, and Peter joined us, I set my video view on the first quarter moon, while Bob did great finding Saturn, and later Jupiter, in the daylight sky. I was doing my usual discussion of the lunar origins and crater and maria configuration, and the combination of the Seas of Serenity, Tranquility, Fertility, and Crises forming a perfect Lunar Poodle, and the Apollo 11 Landing site was of interest to visitors as well. Bob, first with Saturn and then Jupiter with all four Galilean moons on one side, was the popular place while Peter was aiding in the crowd control and diseminating information. My estimate is that by thirty minutes after sunset or so, we already had nearly 100 people come through. I was struck by the number of very young children out for the adventure. With the less youthful folks we had some good exchanges about the beginings of the moon, how it progressed, evidence correlating lunar material with Earth crustal evidence, and the possibilities of future space exploration. The craters were putting on a show that highlighted the solar ray alignment, acting as bright beacons when the Sun's rays were favorably oriented. The Lunar Poodle, though, was almost as big a hit as Saturn and Jupiter, and once seen on the monitor could be detected naked eye on the brightly lit surface. I was eagerly awaiting alignment stars to pop into view so I could jump over to more eye candy when I noticed the roiling thunderheads coming in from all directions. Weather reports had forecast clearing past 7 PM; Instead, by about 7:50, we were down to sucker holes and the lightning was fairly far off, but moving in. By about 8:20, the lightning had moved from over 10 miles out to within 4 miles. And our crowd had disipated as well, so Bob and I started shutting down. Scopes and humans don't take well to 200 kilovolt jolts. What an immense disappointment! The visitors were fun to work with, and the way we all were distributed around the grounds was well thought out. If not for the major shift in the weather, Bob, Peter, and I would likely have had over 300 people at our location alone. This is a great concept in evironmental awareness, with the plant and animal displays sharing the stage with the rest of our home universe. We were able to get enough information shared that it was well worth the effort for the short time we had. This was my first outreach experience at ASDM, and I hope to have many more. Jim O'Connor South Rim Coordinator Grand Canyon Star Party gcsp@tucsonastronomy.org

2016 26th Annual Grand Canyon Star Party In Memory Of Joe Orr DAY ONE - Great Start Location: Grand Canyon Visitor Center, South Rim of Grand Canyon, AZ, about 340 miles north of home in Tucson, about 7000 ft. elevation Weather: 97F mid-day, 93F at sunset, 62F when we quit near 00:30. Totally clear skies. Seeing and Transparency: Transparency OK but recent wildfires have left a bit of obscurration. The well about seasonal temperatures have the upper atmosphere very unsteady. However, because of the performance of the system, I kept the setup at full focal length and doubled the power in software to 620X. Equipment: 10" Meade SCT on Atlas EQ-G mount Mallincam Xterminator video system on the 10", 19" QFX LCD monitor. First, about the name of this year's event. We honor and remember Joe Orr, a lifelong astronomer who often participated in GCSP. Behind the scenes, without much fanfare, Joe provided a large donation for the Grand Canyon Dark Skies program. He also spent a lot of time building and rehabilitating hiking trails at the Canyon and provided financial support as well. He provided a portion of the funding to repair the Clark Refractor at Lowell Observatory, made many other physical and financial aids to parks and observatories across Texas and Arizona, and served on the board of directors at McDonald Observatory in Texas. He passed away far too early in life from pancreatic cancer in late 2013. He left a significant bequest to Grand Canyon National Park's Dark Skies program, and I personally will miss him as he did his last constellation tours for us at the 2013 Grand Canyon Star Party. We are being baked alive. For the rest of the star party, predictions are a minimum of high 90s, with some show two to four days at over 102F. YIKES. That's bring upper layer instability that hurts the image a bit, but we did OK. A bit about our volunteers. Usually, I get about 90 astronomers request the registration packs, but this year I'm at 110! And while we end up with close to 110 or so who show up during the week, I can only imagine what mid-week will bring. The first Saturday is usually our minimum participation at about 35 astronomers, but tonight we had over 50. We started off the evening with the night talk by Dean Regas, Astronomer and Outreach head at Cincinnati Observatory as well as being the co-host of the PBS nightly Star Gazer television short, following in the footsteps of the late Jack Horkeimer. Dean is an awesome communicator. He presented a fascinating unveiling of the size of the universe, starting locally with the Earth and Moon, and using Mintaka and Stellarium, expanded the exposition from local, then the rocky planets, out to the gas giants, the sun's long reach and out to the Oort cloud, then local stars, our galaxy out to other galaxies, and finally out the the full Universe we know, in many different alternative points of view, well laced with humor and at a scale where the elementary school children in our audience were very actively involved. An awesome presentation, and we have him back again tonight. I had set up the night before so that while we were indoors, my granddaughter Karina to do the demonstrations but the sun set to late to get a target planet before we went inside to set up the talk. I got back out to the setup at 9 PM, swung it over to Saturn, and operated at the full f/10 of the SCT while using the internal camera software to double the power. Saturn was a bit boiling at over 600X, but the audince loved it. I started at 9:10 PM or so, and couldn't stop until well after midnight. With the Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn available, I chose Saturn because Jupiter was just too indistinct at the power I was running, while Saturn showed off the color variation between the yellow-brown planet and the intensely white icy rings. Crowd loved it when the seeing would snap the rings into the banded form they display, and there was always a very striking planet shadow on the rear ring disk. While I had plans for a couple of planetary nebulae, M13, and several galaxies, the crowd would not let me move off of Saturn! Great discussions, I was able to mix in the comparison of the eclipic plane with the zodiacal interpretation. At the start we still had Gemini, so while the image of Saturn floated etherially on the monitor, I was able to do a sky walk using Saturn as the anchor, move through Mars and Jupiter and the remaining Zodiacal Light for those mainline constellations, although the Zodiacal Light wipes out Cancer the Crab. But following the ecliptic/zodiak highway, the crowds enjoyed seeing the "why" certain constellations came in order. Gemini to Cancer to a fantastic Leo (never got to try the M66 supernova - too many people!), then over to Virgo and the martini glass next to Spica and explainint the meaning of Spica as an ear of wheat, residing in the goddess of fertility. Scorpius, and finally Sagittarius, completed the arc of the ecliptic and demonstration of the angular tilt of the Earth's axis. As the night wore on, different clusters of 15 or 20 visitors were interested in different aspects of the night sky, so I was able to shift gears to the norhern sky, work in Hindu, Navajo, Seminole, and Akimel O'odham points of view of different approaches to what was seen. It was a tremendous blast all night, and I must admit I've never had people clap for exposition as they moved on, but it happened twice! All the while, Saturn, wiggly as it was at times, pulling in people like moths. I did have one young visitor, about six, and her parents stop by rather late and she seemed overwhelmed by it all. Leo changed that. When I drew the outline of the lion, and pointed above it to The Big Dipper, she could finally see shapes in the sky; with the Dipper located as it is above or to the side of Polaris, it is an upside down Dipper. OR, the Elephant of Creation! And that means in some cultures, you have to be on your best behavior because God is watching. And she could really see the lion and got very excited at going from the unkown mass of stars to the known figure. Another singularly awesome moment of awakening of a young mind. I also had the opportunity, as the Milky Way finally rose itnto visibility, to go through several non-Western cultural points of view. This is the part of astronomy that can really bring a bit of warmth to the old heart - someone walking away with a new view of their home universe. You know you've done OK when they walk away looking up, not just straight ahead. All with Saturn patiently waiting to show off it's own unique character. Jim O'Connor South Rim Coordinator Grand Canyon Star Party gcsp@tucsonastronomy.org

2016 26th Annual Grand Canyon Star Party In Memory Of Joe Orr DAY TWO - IDA Awards GCNP Provisional International Dark Sky Park Status Location: Grand Canyon Visitor Center, South Rim of Grand Canyon, AZ, about 340 miles north of home in Tucson, about 7000 ft. elevation Weather: 94F mid-day, 88F at sunset, 56F when we quit near 11:30. Incoming cloud decks from the west, wildfires disturbed the night's activities. Seeing and Transparency: Transparency started OK but recent wildfires took away transparency to the east and south, and the western clouds also were getting in the way. Sunset winds were 10 to 20 mph. Temperatures dropped a bit, still 10 degrees F above normal. Equipment: 10" Meade SCT on Atlas EQ-G mount Mallincam Xterminator video system on the 10", 19" QFX LCD monitor. This was a VERY special day for Grand Canyon National Park. At 8 PM, the International Dark Sky Association formally awarded Provisional International Dark Sky Park status to GCNP. This is the result of a tremendous effort and investment since the begining of the Grand Canyon Association's 2012 Dark Skies project. GRCA was able to raise funding lin the range of $170,000 to push the project to the point where the local light environment is now understood, and the upgrades required are known. Thanks to the Orr Family Foundation and GRCA, the upgrades are in work with a goal of being completed in 2019, and the award of full Interrnational Dark Sky Park status can occur concurrent with the 100th Anniversary of the Grand Canyon National Park. Following the formal award presentation, Dean Regas repeated his awesome presentation of the Universe to the night talk audience. His interaction with the audience, especially the younger members, presents what could be complicated information showing the relative structure and elements of the known universe, and the the time it would take to travel to far off domains. Intermixing humor with his interogatory exchange, is a wonder to behold. And when he is done, and we need to get outside, it's mostly the young children who mob him at the front of of the auditorium. And the kids ask great questions; he really awakens their thinking about their home universe. Another record for astronomer attendance. We had at least 58 set up, needing to spread to the overflow area in the adjacent parking lot. And we are international this year, with volunteer astronomers from England and France. Busy week coming up! After the night talk, granddaughter Karina and I again started with Saturn, but while the seeing was noticably better, although wind gusts had Saturn doing figure eights at times, the transparency had dropped markedly. I had to extend the shutter speed well slower than the night before, and the great detail from the night before was not there. I decided that I'd see how Deep Sky Objects would do, which meant I had to change the focal ratio from native f/10 so I chose f/5 to start with. I had noticed that the polar alignment was not good, and checked it and found somehow the alignment had shifted over 3 degrees east on 3 degrees north, so we fixed that, added the 0.5 reducer and adjusted the focus. We aligned on Vega and dropped over to the Ring Nebula, and could immediately tell the transparency was not good at all. Usually, with the Xterminator, down at 3000 feet elevation I can get the nebula to show in the monitor at 2.1 seconds of integration, but although we were at 7000 feet, it took a full 15 seconds to get a faint outline, and 20 seconds for the beautiful color and whit dwarf star to come out. Karina and I did the stellar evolution story, intermixed with the usual sky tour of the ecliptic and Milky Way, and many of the various cultural significances of what was in view. The Ring, though, was quite a show. But it started washing out, and finally by 11 PM the wildfire effects were not only visible, the smell of the burning vegetation was being carried north to us as well. Enough for the night! The Xterminator had put on a great show, but it couldn't quite beat Mother Nature. Usually I have a few human intereest interactions, many involving younger people, but tonight the audience was much more scientifically grounded and the conversations were very interesting from a cosmology point of view. The ace in the hole was the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Native American cultural layer that made their stop at my location worth their time. In the end, Coma Berenices was about the least affected, so M51, the Whirlpool, became a target of choice for some folks. Most of us, however, were giving up with the loss of good resolution on the southern eye candy in Sagittarius. The transparency was just too negatively affected, better to save the feet and legs for another day. Jim O'Connor South Rim Coordinator Grand Canyon Star Party gcsp@tucsonastronomy.org