2016 Grand Canyon Star Party - Day 6 - Cool and Windy

[Skylook123]

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

DAY SIX - Lots Of Wind

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

Weather: 86F mid-day, 76F at sunset, 47F when I quit near midnight. Some random clouds of various nature all around at sunset that cleared as the night went on, with very gusty conditions.

Seeing and Transparency: Transparency seemed the best it's been with the strong winds out of the NW clearing the wildfire effects. Steady seeing but constant strong gusts all evening really took away any ability to do video of much duration with my setup very high off the ground to allow aligning on higher elevation stars.

Equipment:

10" Meade SCT on Atlas EQ-G mount, operating all night at f/5

Mallincam Xterminator video system on the 10", 19" QFX LCD monitor.

The five day crescent moon was an easy catch, and again I centered on the Sea of Crises area, now with Sea of Fertility available. We had more of the Lunar Poodle starting to come into view, and again the conversation with the visitors would start with the creation of Luna, and the features causedd by the Late Heavy Bombardment about 3.5 billion years ago. A very nice session before the night talk, with about 150 total visitors passing by.

The night show was the usual excellent talk my counterpart, Interpretive Ranger Marker Marshall, performs called Starry Starry Nights - The Universe As Seen From The Grand Canyon. A perfect integration of use of correct lighting, blending into the awakening of the National Park Service to the protection of the night sky, and going into the nature of our galaxy, important constellations, planetary alignments, and key stars in the local night sky. Always well received, a great one stop shop of a national park, the night sky, and protecting the view with wise use of lighting.

We raffled off the nightly Celestron First Scope, and I headed out to see how Karina was doing. I got back to the scope around 9:10 PM and found that for some reason the camera had reset. Karina tried to get the settings back, and rebuild the alignment mask. She tried going to Saturn, but my kick of the tripod leg the night before hat the alignment off enough to not being able to center it, so she had gone back to the moon. I picked up the thread, but noticed the brightness of the moon was losing details. I hadn't noticed in my checkout that the AGC (Gain) was set to full ON, so off course the moon was not achievable in detail. I aligned the scope on Antares and brought in globular cluster M4. We were able to tell the globular cluster story the rest of the night; I should have known something was amiss when I got got the full cluster at 2.1 seconds integration but with the temperature under 50 F, and the wind was gusting to 20 MPH or more, the view alternated between smears and spectacular diamonds nearly filling the monitor. Along with the glob story, I was able to do a lot of cultural discussion as the Milky Way rose. It was now after 11 PM and both visitors and astronomers were evaporating, so I started the packup. That's when I noticed the full gain setting. No wonder the screen was full of stars! I had noticed polar drifting so, before shutting down, I re-did the polar alignment to compensate for last night's kick of the tripod leg.

We had an exciting magnitude 8 Iridium flare in the middle of the session. Since I had been a test director for Iridium during the development and initial launch phase as a consultant at Motorola in the mid-1990s, my crowd got a good exposition on what we were seeing and why, the nature of the satellite system's architecture, and the source of the name. Originally, the satellite network would require 77 satellites, the atomic number of the element Iridium. Later analysis would show only 66 satellites were required for the initial system, but that is the atomic number of Dysprosium. No way was THAT name ever going to be used for a commercial product, other than perhaps a digestive aid, so the name Iridium is the one that is used.

Once again, the real story is the people, both visitors and astronomers. John Carter next to me had his scope at minimum height and was hardly affected at all by the gusts and once again showing off an awesome M51 in his 24" monitor. And the people have all been fascinated and enthusiastic not only about whatever object I have, but also how cultures have used the sky for so many thousands of years.

Friday, Day 6, has a threat of thunderstorms so it is unclear what the weather will bring us.