2016 Grand Canyon Star Party - Day 3 - Temperatures Ease Off, But Early Clouds

[Skylook123]

2016 26th Annual Grand Canyon Star Party In Memory Of Joe Orr

DAY THREE - The Temperatures Drop Almost Ten Degrees, But Cloudy Early On

Location: Grand Canyon Visitor Center, South Rim of Grand Canyon, AZ, about 340 miles north of home in Tucson, about 7000 ft. elevation

Weather: 90F mid-day, 82F at sunset, 48F when I quit near 11:30. Nunety percent cloud cover during the afternoon broke up to many patchy spots and light overcast all around until about 10 PM.

Seeing and Transparency: Transparency very occulted until late. I didn't set up, so I can't judge the seeing but M51 looked very steady on one monitor. Sunset winds were again moderate, but not strong enough to blow the clouds out. Temperatures dropped a bit, still 5 degrees F above normal.

Equipment:

10" Meade SCT on Atlas EQ-G mount

Mallincam Xterminator video system on the 10", 19" QFX LCD monitor. But tonight, only a laser pointer.

This will be a short one. With the early heavy cloud cover, and needing to escort several news organizations and conduct the 10 PM Constellation Tour, I decided to have an easier night.

Dr. John Barentine, Program Manager at the International Dark Sky Association in Tucson, AZ, was our speaker at the night's sunset talk. 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 employee. Every night, a potential future Nobel Prize winner leaves with something to start their night sky exploration.

When I left the auditorium to meet my first escort and interview task, the sky was awful for a constellation tour; at best, the planets were somewhat visible with the patchy thick clouds, but for the most part stars dimmer than about magnitude 2.5 were lost and in spots, whole constellations would be absent as well as Saturn. I started looking around for my CBS News contact, but they had been clever and while we were inside for the talk, did walk around interviews with the astronomers so I was off the hook. Check CBS Morning News on Sunday.

Since it was after 9 PM and I had the 10 PM tour, I didn't bother setting up and acted as a roving information source, doing mini-sky tours for groups of visitors exploring the site. I was fortunate to have the clouds almost completely evaporate starting about 9:55 PM, so I took my group of about 25 over to the adjacent parking lot and was able to do a high quality (for me!) cultural tour of our home universe. We started with the planetary lineup and the recently set three day old crescent moon to the 7:40 PM sunset point, delineating the ecliptic plane and the path of the Sun through the year. I swithed definitions to rename the path in Greek Zo=living, dia=Day, cos=solar related, and Kyklos, or Cycle, so we had the Zodiacos Kyklos, the cycle of living things for the annual cycle of daytime locations of the sun. We shorten that to The Zodiac, with each constellation along the Sun's annual cycle representing a living object. We had a whole lot of exposition of the audience's "Home Universe", in the point of views of many Native American, Hindu, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Sumerian aspects. It was a very enthusastic crowd for our 40 minute exploration, and I had a whole sky to work with!

I killed time in various wanderings for about an hour, then left as one of our Ranger's for the evening, Rader Lane, was begining his interview with Page from CBS Morning News. It really was a very enjoyable night with the visitors despite never uncovering the scope.

As I write this on Tuesday morning, the sky is clear and the temperatures are predicted to be more reasonable. Another windbreaker night, thank goodness!

It was so uplifting to have so many one-on-a-few discussions of the visible night sky, compared to dozens at the monitor looking at a gorgeous piece of eye candy. It fealt great to know that what I was providing to them, they can take home and appreciate the beauty of the dark night sky. Another priceless night here on the South Rim.

Jim O'Connor

South Rim Coordinator

Grand Canyon Star Party

gcsp@tucsonastronomy.org