Grand Canyon Star Party -Day 1-Great, but Hot, Start

[Skylook123]

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