Transit Of Venus From Biosphere 2, Oracle, Arizona

[Skylook123]

An afternoon of wierdness turned into a fantastic afternoon of public outreach.

I was asked by my astronomy club to volunteer for the Biosphere 2 request for a telescope and astronomer for the transit event. I said sure, I live in northern Marana so I was closer than most club members. A week or two ago, Don Cain sent out an email also volunteering to cover the event, since he lives nearby in Saddlebrooke. It turned out to be a great idea, for the type of coverage we could offer, and the size of the crowd we ended up with.

When we compared the spot where they usually have the astronomy events occur with the compass, and Don driving up on Saturday to verify, we would have lost the sun in the buildings by around 4 PM. Looking at Google Earth, the north side of the visitor building had a pretty clear horizon at the west end of the visitor parking lot. Matt Adamson, the K-12 Education Coordinator and our point of contact for the event, enthusiastically supported whatever we wanted to do to make it work.

Matt wanted us ready to go by 3:15, since they had an indoor presentation starting at 3PM, but I hate to be rushed and wanted to set up at 2 PM. Don did as well, so we planned to be on site at 2PM. I "misremembered" how long it takes me to get there; I could have sworn it took me well over an hour the last time, but even sticking with the low speed limits on AZ77 Susan and I were there by 1:20. I scouted the lot out and we had plenty of setup room, so I started to unpack. Don showed up at the more reasonable 2 PM. He set up his 20X100mm binoculars and Coronado PST, and I set up my Lunt LS60, 10" SCT with a full aperture glass filter, and a 90mm ShortTube refractor for projection. Or at least, tried to set up the 90mm. At 2 PM, the sun was too high for the photo tripod I was using to get a reasonable clearance of the elevation handle. Plus, in taking off the star diagonal to get a good projection image and not unglue the mirror, the outfocus was so far back (I had to take the lens out of a barlow and use it as an extension tube to get 2" back of full out travel) that the setup was almost as tail heavy as I am. The scope has a 1/4X20 mounting pad, which fits the tripod foot perfectly but has the mount point way too far forward for balance. It's only about six inches back of the extended dew shield, but the c.g. is about a foot back of the mount. We ended up hanging about three pounds of river rocks in a bag from the dew shield, still not enough. So we fought with it all day.

I spent so much time fussing with it that it was ten minutes to 3 before I started on the other two scopes. The Lunt always is ready to go quickly, but setting up the Atlas EQ-G is time consuming. Without a solar finder gimmick to help, getting the sun took about 15 minutes. Best way is to take off the visual back and move the tube around until it overfills with a big yellow ball.

The crowd started pouring out of the visitor presentation, where they were also projecting the Mauna Kea live video stream. With Don on the binoculars and PST, and me at the Lunt and fussing with the SCT, the crowd was thrilled. Especially when I got the 10" on the sun. AWESOME in a 50mm 50X eyepiece - HUGE image, with sunspots and Venus stunning folks. Even better was the view in the Lunt. Crisp disk easing it's way onto the sun, prominences galore, and three gigantic high energy white zones on the face of the sun to go along with transit and prominences. We had a constant stream of people, about forty or so at first but easing off to about 20 or so most of the time. They got quality time on the scopes. And, by 3:30, Susan had the 90mm working magic! Depending on the angle and how we supported the white board we were using, we had from 2.5" to 4" of tack sharp sun with the full detail of the sunspots visible along with the transit. Really cool to have five or six people constantly surrounding it and taking pictures of the image.

Actually, every kind of camera was out at the eyepieces grabbing images. We gradually learned some tips and tricks to get a decent result; it seemed that the iPhone and smaller Powershot kind of cameras did well on a telephoto setting. Don and I work very well together, and we both had a heck of good time with teaching and showing. Don's wife Laura showed up around 3:45, and the four of us were a pretty darn good team with the visitors.

Then, around 4:30 PM or so, a near miracle occurred. Half way between Venus and the sunspot cluster on the lower right in the Lunt image, the huge storm had thrown so much material into space to be grabbed by a field line that a humongous filament formed. We watched it grow for over an hour, amazing the crowd as they noticed the rope of shadow looking like someone drew a Sharpie line around the margin of the faculae. We actually had a couple of visitors jumping up and down after watching it grow as they took turns. And over at the white board, Susan was the power behind the tripod. It would hold the image a surprisingly long time before needing adjustment. I chose a 26mm Celestron plossl to compromise between magnification and separation ability to get the white board far enough back for convenience of the crowd. The tripod was fully compressed so we could prop the white board at a suitable angle for viewing, so Susan sat with it under a tree for shade. She kept it moving for about two and half hours, and the crowd loved it. Actually, everyone was excited about everything. About an hour in, a visitor came out from the center and said "You can see it big inside" and was laughed at by the crowd. One person said, "And you can see it for REAL out here."

I'm estimating we had about 150 - 175 or so different people, with many returning and 10 or so staying the whole time. Since Biosphere shuts down at 6 PM, although we were planning to stay until sunset, the crowd evaporated at about 5:50. Good enough for me! Don and Laura hurried home to set up for their neighbors, Susan and I hurried to Eegees for mass quantities of liquids. We brought a lot of cold stuff with us, and drained it all before we left.

So much excitement in the crowd, so much variety of instruments to look through, and so many people serious about learning what was going on. We had a couple of 22"X28" posters that Susan had made up from various Internet sources, but we had to mount them on the tail gate of the truck with gusting winds. Actually, at the beginning of setting up one wind gust blew my equipment box off the chair, dumped the contents without damage, but the lid of the box is permanently deformed. Susan had gotten me a Pelican case for Christmas, time to start cutting foam.

At the start of the planning for this event, it was not clear who was to give a presentation; we weren't told until Monday that a UofA astronomy grad student had that covered, so I had put together a show about the science and history of the event. While we didn't need it, I sent it around to a few places and posted it in the files section of the TAAA Forum. It turns out that at the Grand Canyon, Monday was the regular Full Moon Starry Starry Nights at the Grand Canyon night show, and all but two of the slides were used to link Monday morning's lunar eclipse with the Venus transit. Nice to know it got used.

For the record, our club supported several events around Tucson, with the biggest presence on the University of Arizona Mall and inside Flandrau Planetarium. Thirty astronomers, 20 telescopes, and student volunteers working with various displays and handouts for over 3,000 visitors. This one was a bit more fun, I think.

After supporting the annular eclipse at the Grand Canyon, and this week's Transit of Venus, now for Grand Canyon Star Party in ten days. July will seem delightfully boring.