2017 Grand Canyon Star Party South Rim - Day 7

[Skylook123]

DAY SEVEN - Daytime Outreach, Tremendous Night Speaker, and Night Technology Recovery

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

Weather: Typical partly cloudy during the day, clearing out after sunset.  upper-90s daytime, back to a warm night when we quit at 1:30 AM.

Seeing and Transparency: As the last few nights, seeing is very stable but the transparency is affected by two wildfires; the smoke and debris from the Boundary wildfire in Flagstaff and another large fire in Southern Utah. Predictions are that the fire byproducts will be trapped by a high temperature inversion beginning Friday night.  SQM readings after midnight have ranged from 21.7 to 21.96.

Equipment:
90mm Orion ShortTube refractor alternating with a Lunt LS60THa-B600 alternating on a Celestron AVX mount.  Mallincam Xterminator video system on the 10", 19" QFX LCD monitor. 

Today was the whirlwind of public outreach.  Every morning my wife, occasionally with the support of grandsons Stephen or Andrew, has been doing two hours each morning in the Visitor Center courtyard.  The topic has been the Great American Eclipse, where the passers by build mailing tube eclipse viewers, tubes with an aluminum foil with a pin hole at one end and a waxed paper projection screen.  The other project is use pinholes in a 4"X7" index card to spell out their message like their name, date of the eclipse, or some other text.  Each of the pin holes will project a refracted image of the partial eclipse onto pavement, white paper, or even their own shirts to have a souvenir from the August 21, 2017 eclipse if they can't travel to the line of totality.

In a parallel outreach, Susan and I teamed with a group of astounding outreach practitioners from Phoenix to support an all-day astronomy education event as part of Youth Conservation Corps training for a group of 20 students and potential future National Park Service Rangers.  These were highly motivated young teens, and the program that we put together for them sort of evolved into very effective combination of practical knowledge and application, with aspects to be applied in their future endeavors.

Jim Palmer, John Meschberger, Kevin Legore, and other members of the group from Phoenix that specializes in this sort of thing were asked to join us when the opportunity was first raised back in March.  We started with an empty slate and evolved the adventure to start outside behind the Visitor Center for solar and planetary education and training in the morning before the temperatures became killer hot, then our Ranger contact set up to move over to the Shrine of the Ages indoor auditorium for the rest of the day's education. 

At the VC, we set up a system of telescopes with Jim Palmer doing some of the solar and using the alignment with his mount to also demonstrate Venus.  I set up my Lunt to show the sun it two forms using live video.  At 1/6000 seconds, I used the Mallincam Xterminator to show the natural view of the Sun which was showing a few small sunspots and a fairly short filament line of sunspot beads.  Then I alternated the ALC time setting to long duration ELC, which did great at showing three weak prominence areas.  The students got a fairly thorough introduction into the magnetic nature of the sun, the wrapping and snapping of the field lines, outer surface phenomenology, and the core, radiative zone, convection zone, and the nature of light generation.

After 90 minutes of baking in the current heat wave, the students moved to the Shrine of the Ages while we broke the equipment down and followed.  Meanwhile, Susan was repeating her eclipse tool building and each student got their projection tube and "Name in Eclipses" cards constructed.  We set up for the video part of the day.  We were a bit ahead of schedule, so I did my Cost of Light Polution presentation before we broke for lunch.

After lunch, Kevin did his great meteorite presentation, with the full explanation of meteors, meteoroids, and meteorites, how they form and arrive on Earth, what the various types of meteors are at the element level, hands-on meteorites to examine, and two tremendous cases of examples to demonstrate.  A great demonstration of the entire topic.

Then I presented an overview on telescopes and binoculars; the types, advantages, disadvantages, and costs.  John Meshberger has an extremely useful cutaway reflector including the focuser and an eyepiece.  By shining a green laser down the aperture, the beam path is demonstrated in living color.  At that point I had to leave the group, but John continued with a suite of demstrations of space probes and missions as well as a lab coat that demonstrated solar behavior.  What a great day of outreach for all of us, and we still had the night ahead.

Tonight the speaker was Pranvera Hyseni, a 22 year old college student from Kosovo.  She originally visited the United States to be keynote speaker at the Texas Star Party, and her journey has grown into a four month tour and interaction with many astronomical groups, NASA Space Flight Centers, and other opportunities for public exposition on her main topic of astronomy outreach.  Her astronomical awakening began when she was four years old and a total eclipse occurred in Kosovo.  Her grandfather took the family outdoors and described the event.  With the tough times in Kosovo back then as Yugoslavia had broken apart, there was no local news to inform the public so the eclipse event was quite traumatic but Pran's grandfather had prepared them well, and an astronomer was born.  She has tried to  learn all she can, but there was no available education to receive so the self teaching was the cure.  By the time she reached high school, she was gifted a 3" refractor and she started traveling around to other schools.  Noticing the response to people seeing a telescope for the first time, she started the Astronomy Outreach in Kosovo group, eventually growing to over 100 like minded students.  As their reputation began to spread, US equipment manufacturers began donating gear, culminating in Steve Ramsden, head of the Charley Bates Solar Outreach organization traveling to Kosovo with solar equipment and helping Pran establish an international chapter of the Charley Bates group.  As luck would have it, another solar eclipse occurred in Kosovo so the AOL announced an outreach event in a local area.  They brought three scopes, and many thousands of visitors showed up, raising a constant media presence and growth in the reach and effectiveness of the infective astronomical passion of Pran.  With the educational structure in Kosovo, she could not get into her primary driven interest, natural science and astronomy, so she was put onto a social science track.  Her drive and vision, though, has resulted in a widespread recognition of her ability to motivate and educate her audiences to the point that she is now working with the Ministry of Education to enhance the science education in her maturing country while being an ambassador not only for the love of astronomy, but, as she ends her talks, for the courage to follow your dreams, do all the hard work it takes no matter how the external environment might try to place obstacles in the way.  Her courage, passion, and drive to awaken and educate others is astounding, and certainly raises my drive to perform as much, and as high a quality, education that I can in my own outreach.

Ah, the night experience.  I finally broke the code on mount setup.  But it took 90 minutes to get it done, some due to environmental conditions, some due to passers-by and education needing to be performed, and some due to operator error.  Coming out of the night talks well after 9 PM puts a crimp in timely preparation.  Usually I would have been aligned a few days and just went on with the eye candy and cultural awakening of my visitors, but this has been a very weird week.  To summarize, I had to finish configuring the mount setup due to a variety of reasons, so camera and monitor setup took some time, then switching over from the solar to evening monitor use was more time, then the stellar alignment, while perfectly chosen objects, were quite dim in the Quick Finder and took a long time to set.  Then, on the final calibration star, the video data line snagged on a tripod leg lock and ruined the effort.  For about an hour I just left the display on Albireo, and adjusted the parameters to get a pleasing pair.  Finally, around 11 PM, I couldn't stand it and I redid an alignment and the world changed.  We hopped around to all the Sagittarius eye candy, each better than the last.  It's a bit tough to get accustomed to the much smaller FOV of the 90 mm than I'm used to with the 10", and all the parametric variations, but FINALLY the system is ready for show time.