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...