Change of Venue!

As an amateur nature watcher, Tucson has been in the doldrums this Spring. With nothing but traces of rain since last October (!), it has been a bad season for even spotting any Arizona insects, and cactus blooming season seamed ultra-brief by anyone's standards - blink and they were dried up husks!

But Wednesday we arrived in Illinois for a visit and man, what a difference! There are seemingly infinite shades of green, and even a short walk no more than 40 yards from the house brought a host of photo subjects. First up was a huge Queen Anne's Lace plant growing among some shrubbery where we park. The white flower was about the largest I've seen - over 8 inches diameter. While circling for alternate views, I spotted a Candy Striped Leafhopper, resting under one of the buds. I've come to love these guys combining several featuring a face only a mother could love with an outlandish color scheme. Whenever I spot one (or more), I waste lots of time taking pics!

Our house here has flowers around it. Most every house in the Midwest does. There is a huge business in nearly every major parking lot in selling bedding plants. It seems almost a get-rich scheme with the growers - pay your bucks every season for annuals that only live out the growing season, then repeat next year. There is also an abundance of perennials that come up every year on their own - a much better deal if you ask me! But those blooming seasons for tulips, iris, peony seem much too short, and we missed all of those in the 3 months since we've been here. But the lilys! They were just starting to get active our last trip, but they are still abundant now and will continue to bloom through the summer, not only in yards, but almost as a pest weed along roadside ditches as well. We've always had them growing up in Iowa and now you see some spectacular color combinations. This closeup was taken yards from our house of a standard Tiger Lily...

There are some great stands of milkweed this year. I love to search them out and inspect them closely because of the colonies they support. Besides the Monarch Butterfly, which feeds on them exclusively, there are also Milkweed Beetles and Milkweed Bugs. At first I didn't spot much, then found this old soldier, who had evidently been through a few battles as he was missing a front leg, as well as some weirdnesses on his feet! He might well have survived the last winter as he is too old to have been born recently. According to the Wiki entry on Milkweek Bug, winter survivors come out and mate when the plants are large enough to provide shelter... No signs of eggs or babies yet - will have to explore the prairie sections of our local nature preserve as our stay progresses. Meanwhile, I finally did spot another bug, this one not missing any parts that I could see.

We're on the road for the weekend, but stay tuned for more entries!

More Time-Lapse Movies!

Of course, one of the points of the Grand Canyon Star Party is to have fun as well as do astronomy outreach to the public, but I also had some background projects to work on. Somehow, I've gotten the urge to get into time lapse imaging, in particular with night time images. I've posted some fixed tripod shots before, and linked them on Youtube to make watching them as easy as possible. But I was after something a little new to add some pizazz!

The answer came in a little telescope mount that was passed on to me by David and Elinor Levine. The scope is a little 5" that is mostly utilized visually on an altazimuth tripod mount, so the little wedge and fork is mostly unused. I made a little mounting plate for the fork so it would hold a camera. This time of year, the Summer Milky Way rises in the SE just after dark and transits about local Midnight. By shooting with a wide angle lens, and tracking slowly along the horizon with the stars, it would stay in view for the entire length of the sequence!

The third night of the star party, I finally got the chance to try it. With Melinda holding down the public with the 14" view of Saturn, I disappeared for a while to set up the tripod, tracking fork, car battery, inverter to run the fork, and a external power supply for the camera to prevent a dying battery from ruining a long sequence. Using the Canon XSi camera and Nikon 16mm at F/2.8 during twilight, I shot a image every 45 seconds, initially only a tenth of a second long, but as it got darker, the exposures got up to 40 seconds. I kept a watch on the histogram display to keep the exposure background right during the twilight times - once it was dark, it just went for the 40 seconds. After moonrise, and as folks started putting up their scopes, I stopped and reviewed the images - looked about right! It wasn't until a couple days later in Tucson that I saw how spectacular they were! The clip posted on Youtube doesn't even have levels adjusted - straight out of the camera!

The first frame just shows the Milky Way starting to show through the twilight as hundreds of people descended on the telescope field behind the Grand Canyon's visitor center. The second shot shows it in full darkness, and an astronomer's green laser points out an object for a visitor. Note that these individual frames have been contrast adjusted, while the Youtube video has not... I was able to get another sequence our last night on Tuesday, but wasn't able to get an early start, so this one with the Milky Way forming out of the twilight is by far my favorite.

A few days later upon our return to Tucson, I wanted to try an alternative version against the domes of Kitt Peak National Observatory. I'd previously scouted out a location, and arrived just as the sun was setting. Shortly after setting up all the gear, I started again and again caught the spectacular Summer Milky Way forming out of the twilight, this time with observatory telescopes in the foreground. This particular frame also shows a few orthographic clouds forming near the peak, but they soon dissipate. This sequence went for 6 hours, again till moonrise about 2:00am. The Youtube link is here. Again, someday, I'll go through the hundreds of images and push the contrast some... Until then you will have to enjoy these versions!

They Say A River Runs Through It!

While it is general knowledge that the Grand Canyon was formed by the Colorado River, 90% of tourist photos of the Canyon do not show the river itself! In some overlooks the River, at the bottom an an "inner gorge", is invisible, in other places, it may be visible through views afforded by side canyons. The view at left here is from Yaki Point, and while the inner gorge is visible, the river is not.

A few miles to the west, at Yavapai Point, the traditional home of the star party we've spent countless hours showing visitors, not only the stars at night, but the Canyon during the day to get their attention. The Colorado can be seen at 2 spots, this image through a small telescope shows "Phantom Ranch Beach" where river rafters put in to change crews or stop for a meal. It also shows the terminus of the South Kaibab Trail and the suspension bridge where hikers and mules cross the Colorado River. This little spot of the river was a popular telescopic view from the rim where you could usually see hikers or boaters and get a little sense of scale. Note the pair of hikers on the trail just above the river rafts... This is the standard view from the Grand Canyon Village area - no or very spotty views of the Colorado.

Twenty miles to the east is a little different. Out near Desert View, the Colorado comes down from Utah to the north and makes the big turn to the west. The small tributary of the Little Colorado joins in from the east, and the Canyon is much more open, making for easy river viewing. The panorama shot shown here at left is from Lippan Point, a high viewpoint with excellent horizons a couple miles west of Desert View. While viewing the river through my little telescope (480mm F/6 Meade APO lens), I was on the lookout for raft trips to take video sequences as they ran rapids along the river. But alas, no excursions were to be seen that afternoon. I did happen to take a mosaic of a bend in the river that was nice and symmetric in an artsy way, so I show it here. Unfortunately, blogspot limits image sizes to 1600 pixels, so I can't show you the full sized image 10,000 pixels across!

Another thing easily noted about the river, other than it's bashful appearance, is while it is called Colorado, Spanish for "red", the river's color is usually shades of green. That is because since the 60s when Glen Canyon Dam was built, the red silt that gave the mighty river it's color, now settles out above the dam. You occasionally see some red tints when rainfall brings in silt from the side canyons, but green is now it's normal color.

SNAKE!

One of the more interesting encounters we had was on a little rim hike we took after taking the shuttle bus to Yaki Point, a few miles east of Grand Canyon Village. After taking in the spectacular view with the other 25 people who made the trip with us, we wandered a hundred meters or so eastward along the rim looking for photo opportunities. We certainly found it! There was a little rock squirrel making a ruckus around a clump of vegetation - clearly focused at his task at hand and paying no mind to us. Then we found the object of his attention - a meter-long gopher snake! The squirrel was going to town trying to get the snake to move along - effectively throwing rocks and dirt at it while the snake was hissing and striking back. Whether defending a nearby nest or just aggravating a predator, we don't know. Eventually the squirrel moved along, then the snake finally noticed us as I moved in for a picture. We continued our walk and 10 minutes later when we returned, there was no sign of either. A stalemate this time?

Canyon Visit

We just got back from 5 nights at the Grand Canyon, attending the 21st Grand Canyon Star Party. After all those versions of the star party, one would think it would start getting boring, but no, we were sort of sad to leave after only half the event. But with our next trip only a couple weeks away, jobs and duties called, so left the paradise of Northern Arizona for the 108F heat of Tucson and Phoenix!

It was a great event! We still do a great job of getting the public excited about observing in some of the darkest skies in the country. This year we had a new venue. For 2 decades, we set up in the Yavapai Point parking lot, but in some Park changes, Yavapai no longer had evening bus service, so we moved to a commercial bus lot behind the new Visitor Center. Instead of having an outdoor slide show, sometimes with 2 strong volunteers holding down the screen against the wind, we had access to an indoor auditorium that still had that "new auditorium" smell! The staff went to a lot of work to block stray lights, put in light ropes for visitors to find us, and it came out great! I was really concerned that moving away from the rim, we would lose a lot of accidental contact from the public as they left the edge of the Canyon after sunset. In fact, the numbers were down a bit, but only about 30%. In the old days, we'd peak at 330 people looking through our scope per night. This year we hit a peak of 230 at our scope.

The skies at the site were great - better horizons, and a very large intimate area with no headlights! The pics enclosed here are for a video time lapse and shows the Milky Way as it was rising and a few hours later as it neared the meridian. The former is a 30 second exposure, the latter 40, with a 16mm fisheye at F/2.8. Visible in the distance is the outline of the VC, lit up by the light ropes, with the "Telescope Field" in the foreground, lit by power indicators and red flashlights.

For the last few years Jim O'Connor has been running the event, with park ranger Marker Marshall on that end. After 18 years I'd had enough of dealing with everything, but I'm still glad to attend - and glad to let Jim take care of the details. He has done a fine job, ably assisted by wife Susan and this year, two of their granddaughters have made the trip and are turning into astronomers in a trial-by-fire as the hordes of public descend as quickly as the twilight.

And of course, there is more than just astronomy, socializing and eating (though that seems to be a big part of the event) going on! We got out nearly every day to do some exploring, check out new exhibits, and a bit of hiking. Here is a pic of Melinda getting out on a cliff near Yaki Point. Realize this was only a few yards away from where we saw a gopher snake (future post), and I had to do a quick inspection to make sure there were no other creatures around... More to come!

It's GCSP time!

We haven't been very loyal to our blogging responsibilities lately, and we apologize.  With work schedules and sick kitties, we've had our plates pretty full.  We're putting off blogging for yet one more week while we venture north and enjoy the GRAND CANYON STAR PARTY 2011!  We promise to blog about our experiences and fun there as soon as we return!

A Relative Planet, and Her Satellites

Memorial Day weekend, and RTMC, brought us an additional bonus!  Over the past couple of years I have connected with second cousins, from my father's side of the family, through the wonders of Facebook.  I had seen that they have a vacation home near Big Bear - the site of RTMC.  While planning our trip to RTMC, I contacted one of those cousins - inquiring if they would happen to be up in that area for the holiday weekend.  As luck would have it, they would be, and we went about planning to meet up!

So, debuting for the first time in our blog - Planet and Shan, and their two little Satellites - Sedona and Everly!  They are a fun, beautiful, and loving family that I'm proud to say are related to us!

We met at a little restaurant that Planet suggested, The North Shore Cafe (on Rim of the World Drive, in Fawnskin, CA).  It's a great little place, serving something for everyone, and very amenable to lingering and visiting.   While we had never met in person, it was like treasured friends when they walked through the door! Hugs all around, even from the little girls!  Stories were shared, and lunch seemed to pass too quickly.  Before we left Planet wanted to make sure that we would be making the trip to RTMC next year, and she and Shan both extended the invitation to visit them in LA any time we can.  Sometimes meeting distant relatives can be awkward, sometimes you find that you didn't have any more in common than shared ancestors.  I am so relieved to say, this is not the case with Planet, Shan, Sedona, and Everly.  I look forward to visiting with them in the future, and hope that they will visit us in Tucson - we have too much to talk about to not get together again!