2018 Canyon Wrapup

Again, better late than never, here are a few photos and stories from this year's Grand Canyon Star Party! It ended a week yesterday, but as normal lately, the photos have to settle into my brain before figuring what I'll do with them - text normally follows the photos I've selected! With a recently-obtained fisheye (Sigma 15mm F/2.8), I think these are the most striking photos! Particularly the one at left that shows the Milky Way rising over the crowd of star party telescopes and observers...

The shot at right is a bit more personal as I'm shown sitting beside my Celestron 14".  The string of red lights is one of the park rangers stopping by to say hi, and there is also someone looking thru the telescope. The bright "star" at upper right is planet Jupiter, and Saturn, a little fainter, has just risen above the trees, just to the right of the observer's head... The same part of the Milky Way - the brightest part near the Sagittarius/Scorpio border, is always spectacular as a backdrop. These are both 30 second exposures, wide open and an ISO of 4,000.


In the right shot above of my C-14, you can see above the observer's head my 500mm lens mounted there for some snapshots taken after the crowd thins out... I did this last year and was a lot of fun, so decided to do it again! With the C-14 properly polar aligned, it should easily track for a couple minute sub-exposure, so took a few frames to stack to decrease noise and increase signal and color saturation. At left is an eternal favorite this time of year - Messier 20 above (the Triffid Nebula), and Messier 8 below (the Lagoon Nebula). On more than a few occasions, I pulled up a frame of this image and used the colors to explain the physics that caused them. Of course visually no colors are visible - just shades of grey. It was a powerful demonstration - people could see the blue (reflection from a nearby blue star) and red (hydrogen fluorescing from UV light from nearby hot stars) nebulae, but no color. It demonstrated how our eye has evolved so that our B&W sensors (rods) allow us to see in dim conditions, but the color sensor (rods) only work during daylight brightness levels.

Also visible nearby in Sagittarius was the comet 2016 M1 PanSTARRS. I knew approximately where it was and in my 3rd shot there it was! Comets are easy to spot when near the sun - they show up green from the dissociation of carbon molecules by sunlight. On this night (11 June), it was 120 million miles from us on the Earth, and 214 Million miles from the Sun! While it gets a little closer to the sun at perihelion in October, it will not be visible from the northern hemisphere... This is a stack of 4 exposures of 60 seconds each. Oh - that fuzzy star at upper right? That is Messier 70 - a globular cluster about 29,000 light years towards the center of our galaxy...


Anyone who knows me also knows I'm a fan of dark nebulae! How do you see a black cloud, I hear you ask? Well, you see it in silhouette against clouds of stars, so looks like dark clouds against the Milky Way, as in the fisheye shots above. A spot in southern Ophiuchus is rich in dark clouds. Shown here at left thru the 500mm is part of what is called the "pipe" nebula because of its resemblance to a smoking pipe with more dark nebulae curling upwards...


And at right is a little dark cloud visible at the top in the link's wide field - the Snake Nebula, or B72... The "S" shape of the snake is strikingly apparent in photographs, but try as I might, have never seen it visually!


There IS one dark nebula you can see - Barnard 86, the Inkspot Nebula! It is shown at left in the full frame of the 500mm. Seen against one of the brighter clouds of the Milky Way center, the small dark cloud is easy to see in silhouette between a small star cluster and bright-ish star... Several friends and I show the dark cloud at the Canyon for something "totally different"!

Also for something different, Omega Centauri is a spectacular globular cluster that just clears the southern horizon.  Not many people have it on their observing list at the Grand Canyon, but I happened to notice that it was hanging just over the visitor center from my telescopes location on the field. I happened to have my 200mm mounted on the scope that day so took a 30 second snapshot of it - shown at right. It is a HUGE cluster, upwards of 4 million stars about 16,000 light years away.  But it is usually a dim glow seen so lowly in the sky. A photograph can make it look more apparent - here over the VC roof!


We had a great 6 nights of the star party, but some clouds and sprinkles (!) at the end. There were spectacular crowds at night, good crowds of astronomers too - likely about our best year given the weather at the end. We had elk too! Remember I've been going to these things for 28 years, and in the beginning saw absolutely NO elk. Now they are hardly getting excited about. They are evidently smart enough they know how to turn on the water fountains to get a drink - the photo at left taken near the bathroom at our old site at Yavapai Point... And as the star party wound down, a young female stops by the telescope field to say hello to Erich Karkoschka! We are supposed to stay over 100 feet from them, but we're not sure the protocol when they walk up to YOU!



Finally the last Sunday dawned clear - very clear, and after a few days of clouds, a trip was needed to go see the Canyon. We all took many photos of the Canyon, but one of the most striking of mine was from Mojave Point where an agave flower in its brilliant yellows was seen against the reds and browns of the Canyon. At left is an HDR shot of the plant mostly in deep shade, and at right is a close-up of the flower with what I think is a female black carpenter bee pollinating the beautiful flowers...

Next year's star party, the 29th, faces some uncertainty as the current organizer Jim O'Connor has broadcast his intentions to retire from those efforts. But the event is so successful that I think it would continue regardless. The astronomers love it, the public and park loves it, so I'm sure it will continue far into the future in something like the present form...

A Fine Winter Night!

Those of you who know me knows it doesn't take much to get me under a dark sky, so when buddy Laurie Larson expressed interest in coming down for a visit and a camera session under the stars, my answer was, of course, YES! So last weekend we headed west towards one of my favorite pieces of sky, that over Kitt Peak National Observatory. It was a job on that mountaintop that got me to Tucson, and after a stint as a full-time employee there in the '80s, another as a docent in the '90s, and another with their nightly observing programs in the '10s, it is still a favorite place to go, though one can't interfere with the night time activities there. I use one of the pull offs on the west side of the mountain for a sky that can't be beat! We made it to the Observatory well before they closed to the public and wandered around for a bit, finding I no longer know anyone working in the visitor center! The photo at left shows a view of the 4-meter telescope atop Kitt Peak from the road far below through a 500mm lens and a 6-frame mosaic assembled in Photoshop...

A bit later, after we finished atop the mountain, we went to the first pullout below the 4-meter telescope and set up my TEC 140 to do some real telephoto-lens imaging! With a focal length of 1,000mm, it works great if the seeing allows. Case in point is the shot at upper right. At right foreground is the San Xavier Mission, likely just under 40 miles distant. Above that is the Tucson International Airport, above that the Pima Air Museum and at top is the "Boneyard" of spare airplane parts at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base!

Also, a couple months ago I documented the LBT shooting off the ARGOS laser from Mount Graham 120 miles distant! While easy at night, I've never spotted it during the day. While I couldn't see it in the viewfinder, I shot blind and sure enough, is also easy with a little Photoshop adjustment of brightness and contrast...

We moved down a few miles to my favorite pullout and set up a small tracking mount for wide-angle lenses, and the big AP1200 mount here to mount the 500mm lens, as well as another piggyback 300mm without breaking much of sweat! That is Laurie doing her best Vanna White impersonation...

The first object of the night was an unusual comet - 2016 R2 PanSTARRS. It has been putting on a good show in larger telescopes and digital detectors, with an unusual blue color due to an overabundance of CO. Not quite as impressive through the smallish 500mm lens (compared to some telescopes), but the color still comes shining through! This is 15 minutes of total exposure through the 500mm. The 10 exposures were stacked on the comet nucleus, so the star images are trailed due to the comet's motion.

Laurie was interested in chasing down some of her favorite sky objects through the 500mm telephoto, and took these of the Rosette Nebula at left, and the Horsehead Nebula at right. In both images, the colors are real - the red is mostly from ionized Hydrogen gas, the most common element in the universe! Also in both images, the gas is condensing to form new stars. In the Rosette Nebula at left, you can see there is a loose cluster of stars that have used up and/or blown out the gas from the center of the nebula accounting for its hollow appearance. The Horsehead nebula is similarly composed of dust and gas also forming new star systems. the cream-colored nebula at upper left is actually a "reflection nebula", reflecting starlight from nearby stars, compared to the red glow caused by the gas' fluorescence! The "horsehead" part of the nebula is a dark cloud blocking the glow from the hydrogen cloud behind it. The Rosette is 10 minute total exposure, the Horsehead is 22 minutes!


I was content with some wider-angle fields, so went with the small tracking device after the comet photo above. At left is the Winter Milky Way rising over the southern slopes of Kitt Peak. While we thought it was clear, the photos make it obvious that it was not, with thin clouds being lit up by distant city lights. Over looking towards the west was a different kind of light! While parts of the Milky Way is visible in both images, the searchlight-looking beam reaching nearly the zenith at the Pleiades is the Zodiacal Light - meteoritic dust in the plane of the solar system reflecting sunlight to us. It is bright this time of year in the evening sky, even outshining much of the Milky Way! Both of these frames are with the 16mm Fisheye, and are each 70 seconds long.

As the night wound down, I did a 2-frame mosaic of Orion with a "normal" 50mm lens. The effect of doing the mosaic is retaining a little more resolution, though blog limitations remove most all of those advantages! Visible through most of the Orion shot (at left), are a plethora of red hydrogen clouds, including the above Rosette Nebula in the upper right corner, and the Horsehead under the left-most star of the belt of Orion...

I took another Fisheye shot to close out the night as the night's attendees also departed the mountain, illuminating the roadway with their headlights. Just above the southern horizon near the "blip" of Baboquivari is the bright star Canopus. I never saw this star growing up in the Midwest as it never clears the horizon there. The "light domes" of a couple towns are visible - I think the glow just to the left of Canopus is the border town of Sasabe about 30 miles to the south. And on the right hand edge of the horizon, the largish town of Caborca about 90 miles away illuminated the cloud deck.

Even given the clouds it was a great, mild night for January. They just don't come often enough for my taste!

A New View!

Long time readers know I'm justifiably proud of some of the Mirror Lab accomplishments, including the twin mirrors of the Large Binocular Telescope, each 8.4 meters (about 27.5 feet) in diameter. In particular, I've been on a quest of sorts of imaging the telescope while it does interesting things. It seems to have culminated last Spring when I caught the ARGOS laser propagating into the sky from a distance of 12 miles. From the town of Safford, through a small telescope, I almost had a front-row view of the instrument, visible at left, which is used to project a constellation of artificial stars in the field of view of the telescope to partially correct atmospheric turbulence. Several hundred similar frames were combined to make a short video seen here.


Well, without permission from the powers that be to get any closer (made more difficult by the recent severe fire this last spring that approached within 50 meters!), my most recent query was - from how far away can you see it?! From a post a few years back, I knew that LBT was line-of-sight from Kitt Peak National Observatory, very close to 120 miles away! The image at left is from that post and demonstrates that if you can see KPNO from LBT (flat-topped mountain in center), you can see LBT from KPNO!




So last night after work (working evenings this week at the Mirror Lab), I found my way driving westward - this after confirming with the LBT telescope operator that indeed ARGOS was operating properly. Being that it was dark-of-the-moon, I parked on the last pullout before turning towards the Observatory so that my lights would have no effect on operations there. It was an interesting night - totally clear, but obviously above an inversion layer. I watched the thermometer climb as the van ascended. It was 60F at the base of the mountain, 70F on top! The wind seemed a little blustery, alternately blowing out of the south or the north - weird! But fortunately, I was very comfortable in shorts and a long-sleeved t-shirt.

I had several optics to try - the first was easiest to set up - the 500mm F/4 "big bertha" telephoto. I had it up, pointed and focused on the lights of Tucson in a few minutes. It took me a couple shots to find where the LBT would appear - I'd never seen it from Kitt Peak, as it is quite small. But I knew it would be left of the red-lit radio transmission towers atop Mount Lemmon, so used that as my guide. About my 3rd shot - there it was! The green laser standing out from the occasional star and headlight visible on the Mount Lemmon Highway. At left is shown a 6-frame panorama of part of Tucson. with the green spot of the 18 watt ARGOS laser visible. At right is a single frame at a little larger scale better showing the laser beam.


I then broke out the big gun - the TEC 140 - a 5.5" diameter telescope with 1,000mm of focal length. Again, because of the large magnification, it took a couple practice frames to get it pointed properly. Note that at NO TIME was the ARGOS laser visible to the naked eye or even visible in the camera viewfinder. It was only the power of a 20 to 30 second exposure that revealed it was there. I had started an exposure sequence for a possible time-lapse, and interestingly, the inversion layer is visible just under LBT. In a couple minutes of exposure, it slowly dropped and became a little brighter in the less-affected air. Also visible in the exposure is the south slope of the mountain, brightly illuminated by the lights from Ft Grant prison at its base.


Most of my outings, I usually finish with a practice shot or mini-project that can be completed while putting away gear. This night, approaching 1:30 in the morning, I mounted the 16mm fisheye on the Canon 6D and took a couple frames of the sky from Andromeda to the rising Winter Milky Way. What is most interesting, besides the reddish airglow that looks like clouds to the west (right), is the oval glow just below center. This is called the Gegenshein, or counter-glow - a spot defined by being opposite to the sun in the sky. An optical effect allows sunlight to reflect from meteoritic dust back to us. This may be my best photo of it, and from only 2 stacked exposures shown here. Each of the 2 exposures were 2.5 minutes with the fisheye working at F/4.

Always great fun to be under a clear dark sky, and while chasing an ARGOS viewing might be only an excuse, it doesn't take much to get me out looking up!

No Substitute for Experience!

In the last post about the solar eclipse, I posted the best I could do in revealing the most out of my photos. I knew that you needed to take several exposure lengths to capture the tremendous range of brightness of the sun's corona. At left are the 4 exposures taken with the TEC 140 and Canon 6D that aren't totally overexposed (I tended to go way to long!). From upper left the exposures range from a 400th of a second to a sixth of a second at lower right. In an attempt to wring details out of the image, I did the standard HDR (High Dynamic Range) technique in Photoshop to combine them. That resulted in the photo shown in the above post that normally does a reasonable job in revealing details in a scene with a huge range in brightness. While ok, it was NOT what I was seeing others getting.

I arm-twisted my bloggin' buddy Ken to have a go at it. Part of my problem above is that I used jpegs, that results in loss of data. While I've had my camera over a year, I don't use the raw files as it would require my getting an annual subscription to Adobe which I refuse to do. Ken has the latest version and I though using the raws would make a big difference. But I was wrong as he didn't get great results either. He took the liberty of passing it on to another friend Stan Honda, a professional photographer and owner of several "Astronomy Pictures of the Day". I was reluctant to bother Stan, but Ken had no such reservations, so I was glad for the help!

And what Stan got was quite spectacular! Shown at left here is his proper handling of the raw data in revealing more of the coronal structure. I've yet to learn what he did, but he sent links to a pair of tutorials he followed from Adobe. I've not had a chance to work through them yet, but tutorial #1 is here, and tutorial #2 is here. If you have access to Adobe products and want to get into this kind of processing, I suspect all you need is there!

Thanks so much to Stan for demonstrating there is always more to learn, and thanks for revealing where you learned it!

Oh Yeah! There was that eclipse!

I was reminded at work today that I hadn't posted about the eclipse on the blog. Full moon indicates that the solar eclipse was 2 weeks ago, so guess about time to get off my duff! I did have a brief post on the Facebook, but time to document the event on a more permanent record! While FB is convenient for everyone to look at quickly, in 5 years if you want to see what you did, it is harder than heck to find it! I think that is where the blog excels!

Yes there was that solar eclipse! When I last left you, we were moving north towards the path of totality, visiting Meteor Crater, Lowell Observatory and Monument Valley. I had texted w/my buddy Melanie, who is Navajo, about where to go in Monument Valley. She had a meeting as we visited it, but as she was driving back towards the reservation, it was obvious we'd cross paths so met in a grocery parking lot in Utah. I thought I'd impress the Russian kids by giving a hug to a seemingly random female in small-town Utah, but they seemed nonplussed. Melanie and I worked together a decade ago when she was at the Mirror Lab. It was great to see her, if only for a few minutes!

We drove through some beautiful country up through Moab, overnighted in Grand Junction, Colorado, then north into central Wyoming. With the small towns, there were few places to look for motels, so we stretched our driving, arriving in Shoshoni a little after dark on Saturday for the Monday eclipse. I had warned our hostess Karen, and she had a pot of chili and cornbread waiting for us - a feast after a long day on the road. That is her in pink in the group shot at right. That tall good-looking fellow in the center is Karen's son Kevin, who is the local sheriff, and obliged the kids by taking them on a ride in his tricked-out sheriff's truck!

Van acting as screen for crescent shadows at eclipse!

Best dressed women wear crescents!

Karen and I had been concerned about keeping the number of people that she was hosting and cooking for to a manageable number. Even as we drove north, we met people who asked if they could join our party. We had 10 in our group, and a few weeks before eclipse, I heard a good friend and her family were outside the path w/their reservations, so got Karen's permission to include them - 6 in 2 RVs. Then the day before eclipse day, our buddy Bernie called and asked about joining us. I was originally going to depend on him as he had reservations in Wyoming AND Nebraska, and I was going to take the one he didn't use for our group. After Meeting Karen at the Grand Canyon Star Party, I didn't need his reservations. Turns out he didn't like the weather forecast and wanted to move west towards our group in Shoshoni. Hostess Karen overheard us telling him that he couldn't join us, and made us invite him and his what, 6 additional watchers, bringing us up to 22 that Karen was caring for (and using their one bathroom!). She pulled it off in a great way, and best of all said she had the time of her life taking care of us - can't hear better news than that!

My setup showing morning clouds

It's a solar eclipse Party!

I set up my mounting the day before the eclipse - I needed to align the mount to Polaris so it would track accurately on the sun. Since it was a big change from Arizona (43 degrees north vs. 32 degrees in Tucson), it might have taken a while, but fortunately I had preset it approximately before leaving. As a result, Polaris was in the field of the alignment scope, making for quick work. One of Bernie's group had an 8" scope and entertained Karen's girls and some of the neighbor kids with views of Saturn - impressive even under the streetlight we were set up under!

Eclipse day dawned partly cloudy, but mostly clear, so we all had high hopes of seeing a good eclipse. It turns out that the school across the road was hosting a national webcast of the solar eclipse that would appear on I believe the Fox Business channel. With all the international kids we had with us (my 6 Russians plus the two girls from my friend Karen (in the RV) who are from the Netherlands). They went over to take part in the online event, and totality in our yard was oddly kid-free!


The partial phases were a blur - I took a few photos, but was still concerned about running 3 cameras with only 2 hands! I also took a few photos of the group with my cell phone, though some used their cell phones to try to photograph the eclipse through the 8" scope or the filtered binoculars, with mixed success... This is Bernie in both of these photos checking the progress of the partial phase at left in the filtered binoculars, and taking a cell phone snap at right.

Most of the country observed some partial blockage of the sun. So the early parts are very similar all over the country. The color of the sky seemed to take on a weird cast as the sun slowly disappeared. While most of the country observed this effect most all stopped and reversed at some point, for us and those along the 60 mile or so wide path, we took a dive into darkness!


But the partial phases lasts well over an hour, so we got to lounge a bit, at least those who were doing visual observations. At left Bre and Michelle lounged and enjoyed a bag of popcorn while waiting for the REAL show to begin! Our hostess Karen, who thinks of everything, had a little popcorn machine setup for us!

At right, Bre and Roy do the promotional portrait. Unfortunately, I didn't take these photos, but I can't remember whose FB page I stole them from!






Finally the moon's shadow caught up to us in Shoshoni, and it was safe to observe the sun directly. Filters were ripped off and the corona of the sun was observed with the naked eye. It was glorious! This was the first eclipse I've seen in totally clear skies, and it makes a big difference! Bernie took video, and while he seemed to be easily distracted, it is fun to note all the changes you didn't notice looking thru the camera viewfinder, like the streetlights coming on, and the visual impressions people were noting, and of course, the screaming! Click here to go to his video!

As far as my photos go, the key to get good eclipse images is to take multiple exposures with different exposure lengths to record the full range of brightness, from the brilliant prominences that stretch out from the sun's surface, to the faint outer traces of the sun's corona, and in fact, the face of the earthlit moon! You often see the unlit side of the moon when it is a skinny crescent. It is caused by light reflected off the earth, and the effect is maximized at new moon - and you can't get any newer than a total solar eclipse! The corona shot at left is a combination of 3 frames of different exposures to better show how the sun's atmosphere looked to the eye. At right are the prominences that were very visible just before the sun's photosphere returned.  The red blips at the edges are mostly hydrogen carried upwards away from the sun's surface by the intense magnetic fields of the sun. These should be considered preliminary images as they were made from jpegs. I'm still working on the raw images that should be better...

I'm closing out with a flash spectrum - as the brightest part of the sun (photosphere) is just covered, the "neon pink" of the sun's chromosphere is briefly revealed. This transitional layer of the sun has an emission spectrum, where chemical elements are revealed by bright lines, as shown at the image at left. The red, aqua and purple lines are from hydrogen. The bright yellow line is from helium. In an instrument similar to my little spectrograph, helium was first observed on the sun before being known on the earth, thus the name (helium : helios, meaning sun). Unfortunately I hadn't noticed that the camera clamp had loosened at some point of the process and a large part of the spectrum is slightly out of focus. I'm going to look at these raw images too, and try some stacking techniques to sharpen, but I might just have to wait 7 years to the next solar eclipse in April of 2024!

So all-in-all it was a spectacular event. Those that ventured back out on the roads after the eclipse were treated to massive traffic jams. We camped out another day and by then the roads were fine, almost normal again. But it was certainly a highlight of the year!

The June Tradition!

For over a quarter century now I've followed a tradition. Back in 1990, my first wife Vicki and I ran off to Vegas to get married. Pausing at the Canyon for a brief honeymoon before a road trip to the Midwest to meet my family, we noticed that a telescope set up at the rim to look within immediately gathered a crowd. We decided then that we'd invite a few friends to join us on our anniversary and have a star party. Thus was started the Grand Canyon Star Party, our anniversary in May of 1991 (4 telescopes over the week!) was butt-freezingly cold, so have held it dark-of-the-moon in June since the second interation in '92.

The early years the rangers seemed to tolerate us, and it took a decade to grow into the full partnership it is now between park and astronomer. I've managed to be the only attendee that has attended at least a night at every year's event, sometimes over the objections of my boss or my responsibilities of a care-giving spouse.

Today is the last day of this year's version, and I was able to attend the first 3 nights last weekend. It was a great time, and an affirmation of what I found the very first event in 1991 - the joy and appreciation in feedback from the tourists that may be seeing a dark sky for the first time is the highest payback that us as astronomers can receive in sharing the views through our telescopes! I ran the event for a generation (about 18 years), and it is nice to see it thriving under Jim O'Connor's and the Park Service's attentions. At left is a selfie I took in our parking lot at sunset with the venerable Celestron 14" - here with a piggy-backed 500mm lens for some late-night imaging...

This year's trip up was uneventful. An early-morning start of 6am got us through Phoenix before reaching the 115F+ temperatures that were expected. The road typically taken between Flagstaff and Canyon was closed because of a fire, so went west to Williams before north to the Canyon. Interestingly, the fire could be seen at one of the many cinder cones connected to the volcanic field with the San Francisco Mountains. The smoke from the fire made it look as though the ancient cinder cone was active again!

A quick stop at the telescope field, a run to the campground to set up the tent, a bite of dinner and then back to set up the telescope for the night. It wasn't until about sunset that I had a chance to roam and meet up with friends from over the years. At right, Bernie Sanden at left had a trick played on him - Dennis Young at right had hidden Bernie's expensive Tele-Vue eyepiece and replaced it with a cheap substitute. Before too much anguish, Dennis 'fessed up, and Bernie managed a smile at being "scammed". That is Joe Bergeron, long time artwork contributor for our t-shirt designs in blue at left...

The first night was fantastic! I had an immediate crush of public as soon as we were able to get Jupiter in the eyepiece. I had 30 people in line at my scope most of the night, so was difficult to change objects without upsetting folks in line for a while. Managed some great views of Jupiter, Saturn and Messier 13 in Hercules. The seeing was near-perfect, and, of course, as soon as the crowd departed after about 10:30, I fine-tuned the collimation of the C-14 and was able to run the power on Saturn well in excess of 300X without any breakdown!

After a reasonable night's sleep in the cool temps, I made it to the rim after nearly 24 hours there! It looked about the same as last year! Looking for a nice shot of it, over near Yavapai Point (where the star party was held for decades!), took some shots from one of my special viewpoints from where I used to set up my binoculars for hours and days to attract people's attention to the star party. Here I took a pair of HDR (High Dynamic Range) images with both the standard camera (Canon 6D) and an IR-modified camera (an old converted 20D). While the color image looks nice, I always like the alien view of an IR image, whose longer wavelengths cut haze, darkens a clear sky and turns vegetation white. The HDR image uses 3 different exposures at differing exposures to compress the shadows and highlights to see all details in the single frames...

When I had arrived at Yavapai, I noticed a little something out-of-the-ordinary. As I left my parked van, I spotted an elk as it walked past me towards the rim with single-minded-purpose! With a quick pace, looking neither left nor right, it seemed to be late for a meeting... After my own stop at the bathroom and collecting camera gear, I headed rimside too. As I approached, I found the reason for his being there! Right at the rim was a water bottle filling station and there was the elk... He had managed to open the valve and there he was slurping water from the valve!

Now realize these are NOT pets, nor raised in captivity. They are wild creatures capable of dangerous behavior if started or if fawns were around. Yet there was a crowd of people gathered around, most turning their back to it to take a selfie. The three girls at right asked me to take their photo, but I declined saying I wanted to document their selfie because they looked so stupid! There has been a huge uptick in elk over the years and they were pretty much everywhere around the park, at all hours of the day and night, so whenever driving you had to keep an eye out!

On night 2 there was a little smoke coming up from the fire near Flagstaff, but it dissipated and cleared just after sunset, never really affecting the observing. Huge crowds again, and I met some amazing people, whose story I'll save for a subsequent post. The top photo shows the 500mm lens recently obtained mounted on the scope and I hoped when the crown thinned, to take some photos to better show people what we were looking at with a few seconds of exposure. About 10:30 again the crowds thinned and I went looking for Comet Johnson C/2015 V2. It was in a very sparse field and took me a while to locate it, but a brief exposure showed the characteristic green glow, caused mostly by the dissociation of carbon in the vacuum of space as it approaches the sun. The exposure at left is a stack of 6 exposures of 2 minutes each and show a short stumpy tail that we could only imagine visually in the 14" telescope...

Those who have seen my photos before know I'm a fan of dark nebulae - seen mostly by silhouette against more distant star clouds. For that reason I show the exposure of Saturn at right - extremely overexposed at center. It happens to be crossing the Summer Milky Way and a long-ish exposure shows many of these distant dust clouds in profile. For that reason alone this is a favorite exposure from the Canyon!

Similarly, not far away, I tried the same thing on one of the coolest sights in the sky, Messier 22. A globular cluster, it contains the mass of about 300,000 solar masses, and is quite spectacular with the rich star fields in the background. In the full field at left, you can see the thin wisps of dark clouds in projection against the star clouds near the galactic center. While the 500mm is nice for showing extended clouds like this, it isn't optimum for showing details of objects like this cluster. A full resolution crop is shown at right and starts to show some details of the star cluster. It also has a lil' buddy to the upper right - what looks like an extended bright star is actually another globular NGC 6642. This smaller cluster is also nearly 3 times farther away (26,000 light years, vs 10,000) than M22, making it look diminutive.

Also nearby is a pretty pair of objects if you do wide-field imaging like this with the 500mm. You might have spotted them here before because M20 and M8 (Triffid and Lagoon Nebulae) are a common target of mine. Both glow with the characteristic red tint of hydrogen emission, as these star-formation clouds are predominantly hydrogen. The Triffid Nebula at top is so-named because it is split into 3 pieces by narrow dark clouds. It also sports a striking blue shade on top - the result of the dust and gas reflecting light from a nearby blue star.


Finally as I was considering closing down for the night, I noticed that the Andromeds Galaxy was getting high in the northeast. The 500mm is a perfect lens for the object as it barely fits in oriented diagonally. Messier 32 is the nearest bright galaxy to the Milky Way at about 2.5 million light years. It is also the farthest you can see with the naked eye if you have a dark enough sky!

Tuesday brought something rare - clouds! There was even thunder and lightning scattered around the Canyon. I spent some time along the Canyon edge. Shown here is an interesting sight - a single condor attracting a LOT of attention, not unlike a Hollywood starlet and a gaggle of press corps!

I ended up heading home after dinner, avoiding the 120+ degree heat of Phoenix by traversing it at Midnight! So I got my dose of the star party - glad I made it, always wanting more, but sometimes life gets in the way!