Photographic Gold In Lost Dutchman State Park

For

The Young Professional - Congress Edition

Volume 2 Issue 2 – September 2014

A Publication of the Young Professional Network of the National Recreation and Park Association

High up on my list of things to do upon moving back to my hometown in Arizona was to get outdoors, out on the trails in the mountains and attempt to recover a dimly sensed loss of adventure, space, and desolation. In LA, I had unwittingly become a city boy trapped on an island of concrete and steel, crowded in by the throngs of young professionals and sprawling populations of homeless and huddled poor that reside within the piled up boxes and mounds of blanket shanty towns that sprout from the streets at dusk.

I had to get out into the open spaces. I had to break in a new pair of second-hand boots. I had to capture through my camera lens that essence of the land and the wide-open dark skies at night that remind a person of the price of city life – a life removed from the sublime wilderness from which we have arisen only in the last few moments in the history of planet Earth.

That deep geologic time rises sharply out of the desert floor in the form of the Superstition Mountains located east of Phoenix and is one of the most recognizable natural features on the horizon. The towering monolithic slabs were formed 29 million years ago from cooled volcanic ash and magma that spewed from the Earth’s crust and now rise some 3,000 feet above the desert floor¹. A fact communicated silently in the soul of the onlooker as the bald face of the jutting rock melts in deep reds and purples at sunset.

Since 1972, Lost Dutchman State Park has provided the gateway to this gently managed wilderness nestled between the foothill neighborhoods of the city of Apache Junction and Tonto National Forest. The park’s namesake was actually one German-born Jacob Waltz who partnered with a descendent of the Peralta family that originally developed a few prosperous gold mines there in the 1840s and who were subsequently ambushed and killed by Apache Indians ² – according to legend of course. The location of the mines and caches of gold were lost to history and to this day adventurous folk still trek the range among ancient cliff dwelling and petroglyphs in search of his fortune.

Over the next few months of visiting the park I built up my photography portfolio, sought out solitude, and on clear nights waited for darkness to practice my burgeoning obsession with amateur astronomy and astrophotography. In the Spring, recently in town from her globe trotting adventures, a friend and professional photographer chatted with me over some beers about shoots we might plan in the future and when I casually showed her an image I took of the full Moon rising over the Superstitions all soaked in purple dusklight, she got inspired. “I have a few more shots for my photo book that I need to get,” she said. “I’ll postpone driving back to LA for another day…let’s go be art nerds out in the desert!”

The next night with our combined camera gear, my telescope, and a couple of her friends we caravanned out to the park before sunset to hike about on the Treasure Loop Trail and image some of that late afternoon luster. As the dark crept in and the distant lights of Phoenix lit up the valley below, the desert nightlife began to sound out and we in turn hooted and hollered down the trail making our way to the parking lot where I rambled on about astronomy and set up my telescope.

Though the skies were free from excessive light pollution, scattered clouds eventually rolled in and blocked most of the stars and Deep Space Objects, but not before I was able to share a close up sight of Saturn and its rings traversing speedily across the field of view of the eyepiece. The girls squealed in delight while trying to snap iPhone photos and must have sounded like a pack of coyotes to any distant park ranger making their rounds. At least that is how I have begun to reassure myself on subsequent trips.

At night, camped outside the park after hours taking multiple long exposure photographs for those iconic star trails images, as the dark night’s silence is pierced by the cries of roving packs of carnivores I just try to imagine pretty girls over-excited about astronomy. Owls hoot, I sip my coffee and try to remain relaxed while my camera shutter clicks away in the darkness.

I suppose folks must be looking in the wrong places because I seem to find a little gold in those hills each time I visit.

Resources:

1 http://www.ajpl.org/aj/superstition/ 2 http://azstateparks.com/Parks/loDU/index.html

Observing Observations and The East Valley Astronomy Club Monthly Public Star Party 1/10/14

It's not that amateur astronomy is boring - no, please don't get me wrong dear reader it's one of the more fascinating areas of human intellectual endeavor.  You see... We have here a confluence of many, seemingly diametrically opposing forces: Astronomy is one of the earliest systems of human classificatory knowledge which has given impetus to a mathematics and cosmology whose scale and complexity defy all common sense and intuition about reality and yet describes it intricately, merged with borderline sci-fi technological and engineering capabilities which span the light spectrum and peer back into time towards the first few billion years and the creation of the known universe, offering a panoply of aesthetic beauty which unceasingly serves to inspire and astound generation after succeeding generation towards understanding, adventure, reverence, and ecstasy, distilled down into THE guiding metaphor for progress and the future whose implementation may well determine the fate of all life in the cosmos as we know it - all watched over by the seemingly only minded species capable of abstract languages and symbols, that builds technologically advanced civilizations on top of histories and evolutions on top of the surface of the perhaps only hospitable planet which serves as an incubator for Bios and an islanded paradise for Life in an insanely hostile and chaotic cosmos.

Pardon my French<ahem>, but that shit's pretty epic.

And yet for all the passion and exuberant joy that can be a regular fixture of the hobby, amatuer astronomy can get a tad bit ... repetitive.  When you're bound in by economic constraints, light pollution, clouds, cold...life - it can become an afterthought to drag out the scope.  When you know the Great Red Spot or a Moon is transiting Jupiter and you doubt your aperture or seeing can resolve it.  Or when our Moon rotates a little in its Libration and exposes a few rarely seen craters.  Or when Venus appears like a wee little crescent sinking down in the friscalating dusklight.  Sometimes it seems troublesome or trivial.  And so we round it out: you get your books, your catalogs, and magazines, documentaries, astronomy blogs, your podcasts and smartphone apps, and updates and email blasts, the Virtual Star Party hangouts on the internet,  gear maintenance, gear envy, aperture envy, covetousness, idolatry, ssssiiinnn.

And then there's the thing that separates us from the barbarians.  Community.  The others.  We gather together in the dark, in the cold, in the middle of nowhere and sometimes right out on the sidewalk to share our slow obsession in hopes of fascinating and educating the young, reconnecting with the old, comparing gear and observations with each other, and subtlely manipulating the financially well-to-do to be patriots and drive technological innovations up and these dang price points down.

So we do star parties and this was my first.   EVAC is an Arizona nonprofit corporation of about 200 astronomy enthusiasts who put on monthly public / local / deep sky star parties, track observing programs, host lecture series, keep an impressive schedule of elementary and junior high school astronomy outreach events and even offer a "Becoming An Outdoor Woman" activity group.  I searched them out on the web, looked at their calendar of events, and made a plan to attend their next public star party.

EVAC's public night  teams up with folks out at Gilbert's Riparian Reserve and Observatory near the Gilbert Library on Guadalupe and Greenfield.  The fact that they house a fully domed observatory on site was a total surprise to me as I've just nearly moved back to AZ and am still a n00b in all this anyway.

 

That sucker houses, amongst loads of cables and instrument panels, a 16" Meade LX200R Advanced Ritchey-Chrétien optical tube assembly atop a Paramount ME German Equatorial mount, which translates to "one badass telescope" for you laypersons.  There were a bunch of little kids cutting me in line during this part.         

Observing notes from that night:  Out on the sidewalk we spied The Owl Cluster, a Triple-star system below the star Alnitak in Orion, the Double-Double star system, Jupiter, the Moon, M45 Pleiades, and inside on the big 16" Meade - M42 The Orion nebula and in particular was able to observe a fifth star in the usual four group of "The Trapezium" at the heart of the nebula which do the majority of lighting up the famous structure.  What makes this observation note special is that in amatuer telescopes one usually only sees four of the main stars in this complex which is actually comprised of multiple-multiple star systems and I was only able to be resolved by my naked eye through the larger aperture and rather advanced-grade optical system there under the dome in Gilbert of all places.

The rest of the night was spent taking these and other photos, talking to the telescope owners on the sidewalk about their gear, my gear, what I should and shouldn't buy, the rules, goals, and general operations of the club and its members, getting out of the way of the amped up children clamouring for time at the eyepiece, showing off my star trails images, shop talk, astronomy news and upcoming events, learned about laser collimation and made some plans to bring in my scope for a tune up, rants and ramblings, etc.  It was great - everybody really knew their stuff and I didn't say anything too stupid.

So I've reached out and found some of the others and they were all super rad and if any of you 'Zoners care to join me in February the public event is gonna land on the 14th, Valentine's Day so why not bring a date?  Or maybe you'll find one there...just take a look at these mack daddies:

In brief closing, maybe amatuer astronomers experience not so much boredom as slowness.  And maybe subtlety.  And maybe were not so used to that anymore.  Hubble Hyper Satiation Syndrome maybe.  Maybe we should spend more time standing around on the sidewalk  in the dark with with our neighbors and look DIRECTLY at what our most rigorous and zany scientists tells us is really out there - waiting to be discovered and rediscovered night after bone chilling night for. your. self.  After all, you don't believe everything they tell you do you?  And you consider it your job to understand the Universe don't you?

Quadrantids Meteor Shower - Images and Field Report

(previously posted on reddit.com/r/astrophotography)

Canon XSi EF18-55mm - 30" @ f/3.5, ISO 1600, 18mm focal length, wide angle - no editing, processed with StarStax.  Two Quadrantid meteors, interfering planes edited out, about 150 stacked images

January 3, 2014 1am - 7am / grey zone northeast of Payson, AZ

~ 25-30 degrees F / seeing +10 mi, no wind / slight Light Pollution from Payson to the southwest

Driving out of Mesa at around midnight with two friends, I had 3 prospective sites mapped out around the Christopher Creek and Kohl's Ranch area which were all gated up. I did some exploring up the Zane Grey Hwy and finally found a suitable spot with good 360 degree horizon views. The faint band of the winter Milky Way wrapped around behind us and the light cloud coverage completely dissipated by the time we spread out a tarp, sleeping bags and heavy blankets, passed around hot coffee, and snuggled up for the long haul.

It was too cold to count meteors on my phone app (for science), but the peak seemed to set off around 4AM with many faint streakers all over and a few long bright burners in the NE topping out at maybe 50/70 per hour all together.

I also brought along my 8" Dob to take full advantage of the dark skies, practice my star hopping skills, and round out the entertainment for the two friends that accompanied me. We observed M42/43 and the whole Orion nebula complex in stunning detail. Then moved along to the adjoining Flame and extremely faint inferred Horsehead nebula (finally bagged it!), on to some clusters in Cassiopeia/Perseus and Canis Major, multiple elliptical galaxies in Virgo and the triplet in Leo, got a really good look at M51 the Whirlpool galaxy in Ursa Major, Saturn in the wee hours and the gem of the night that we came back to a few times - Callisto's shadow transit on the face of Jupiter at near opposition! A lucky treat that I should have had the foresight to plan into the session with the latest Jovian moon activity breakdown in Sky & Telescope's December issue.

Pretty epic night overall - frost covered everything by sunrise and we all endured the cold nobly, but foot warmers were definitely missing.  Cold weather clothing and tips/tricks post coming soon.

Get out there!

A Study In Arizonian Light Pollution

A couple tasks upon moving back to AZ: 1) star trails over Red Mountain (harder than I expected due to dang stupid airplanes)

2) hand color light pollution zones on a fold out AZ state road/topographical map

3) scout out the nearest grey zone site

#2 is in the bag.  I was gonna make it a project to work on with my niece, but I quickly realized just how much of a perfectionist I was gonna be about it so I let her off the hook.  I picked up a $3 map at the gas station on New Year's Eve and started work on it the next day.  Using my Dark Sky Finder iPhone app created by Skidmore apps which uses data from the Jshine.net Dark Sky Finder (which cribs from the NOAA National Geophysical Data Center and the Royal Astronomical Society) I scribbled in the borders between the zones from white->red->orange->yellow->green->blue-> grey (grey zones account for most the map and were left uncolored or neutral)->black as they relate to the Bortle Light Pollution Scale.

And viola...in Prismacolor.

It took the better part of two days and bled into the middle of a first date, but hey - being a nerd is cute now, right?  Anyway, next step is scouting out some grey zone sites and hopefully making it out by this summer to the black out zones above the Grand Canyon or east of Sunrise Ski Park on the New Mexico border, both on First Nations tribal lands.  Go figure.  Its a 5.5 hour drive either way, but I'd like to get a lot of shots of the center of the Milky Way under the best possible conditions - its a labor of love.

Oh, and #4) getajobbuyacarmoveoutofmyparentshouse

Fun Fact:  ~80% of light pollution is caused by retailers, specifically the parking lots of the big box stores like Wal Mart, Target, etc.  Dang capitalist pigs!

Soaked In Electric Light

So there I was, a budding amateur astronomer/astrophotographer trapped on an city island in blighted electronic night, "living" and working in downtown LA and Long Beach, CA.  A bike commuter to boot with no car and at the whim of the adventurous inclinations of friends who might oblige my sorry butt with a few outings per season to soak up the dark skies, not to mention wilderness for its own sake.  Hey, get me - I'm an anachronism! I had actually kind of forgot about wilderness for a minute there.  Growing up in East Mesa, Arizona the wilderness was always just down the road a spell.  Aside from skateboarding, outdoor recreation usually just wound up happening whether it was hiking, camping, mountain biking, trail running (you can't fall off a mountain), tubing down the dirty Salt River or wakeboarding and cliff jumping at the lake, up to SnoBowl or Sunrise for as much snowboarding as possible, and if you were smart/lucky you spent some of your formative years reading our patron saint of Southwestern wilderness and freedom for the human soul, Edward Abbey.  But after living in LA for a few years I had failed to notice that the outdoors had somehow been scripted out of my experience, I guess made up for by living near and frequenting the beach?

I got out to Joshua Tree National Park for a short weekend with an old friend with the specific intent of getting to at least a blue/green zone on the light pollution maps.  I made the mile hike in with a small Meade ETX-60 +tripod strapped to all my backpacking gear and long story short, clouds and cold because it was freakin' January.  But the next morning after a hearty breakfast we hiked up a mountain and slowly over the afternoon trek back down I could begin to feel the city gradually get flushed out of me as I looked and looked at wild nature all around me.  I felt drowsy and drunk and my eyeballs seemed to bug out  as I hiked.  I began to formulate hypotheses about the visual rhetoric of nature and its restorative effects on eyes too long trapped in the city looking everywhere at right angles and the stopped up movements of traffic.  Hypotheses about the visual rhetoric of forgotten faint lights emanating from distant dim stars and emission nebulas and light from our own star brightly bouncing off neighboring planets and what that may do to out physical eyeballs and the brains attached to them.  Hypotheses, not theories.

Then I got another friend to haul me out to the Goat Mountain Astronomical Research Site (GMARS) located north of J. Tree which is an amazing facility run by the Riverside Astronomical Society.

They really do it up right at GMARS.  2 houses with beds, bathrooms, and kitchens, 24 powered concrete pads in a U-formation (plus one pad in the middle reserved for a huge Dobsonian telescope) to set up and plug in to, 15 observatory huts with retractable roofs etc., and plenty of room for parking and tent camping and every walkway is lined with red lights every few yards.  Like noobs we arrived 2 hours after dusk which meant two things: we missed the potluck/barbeque and we would have to search for this place with no headlights for fear of annoying the already dark adapted astronomers and astrophotographers.  Cut to me leading the vehicle down the road to the west of the facility with my redlight head lamp for the last 1/4 mile.

A bit after setup one of the club members showed us around and introduced us to a few of the folks doing some imaging in the huts and in general made us feel real welcome.  I loaded up a few times in the kitchen on coffee and snacks and proceeded to really open up my new (solstice miracle) 8" Dob under dark skies for the first time.  Here's my observing notes from that cold dark night:

February 9, 2013.  GMARS facility outside Landers, CA (blue zone).  8pm-3am /~30 deg. F / winds SW @ 6 mph /new moon.

Bagged M31 Andromeda galaxy, M42 Orion nebula, Jupiter + moons, C14 Double Cluster in Perseus, C13 Owl cluster and M52 open cluster in Cassiopeia, M35 - M38 open clusters, M101 Southern Pinwheel  and M51 Whirlpool galaxies,  The Leo Triplet, M104 Sombrero Galaxy (!), M13 globular cluster, a bunch of the random galaxies in Canes Venatici/Coma Berenices/Virgo, and Saturn before freezing the night away and trying to sleep in the van.

Back2Life Back2Reality Back2LightPollution

From the limited view of my front porch I continued to learn how to star hop using my dob+red dot sight and multiple star wheels, smartphone apps, reference books, and magazine articles and excitedly planned my next excursion: a grey zone camping trip near Desert Center, CA in the Chuckwalla and adjacent Orocapai Mountains Wilderness on BLM lands near the Salton Sea.  We were coming up on summer and decided to make the 3.5 hour trip so we could see the Milky Way.  Totally worth it.  We slept outside in bags and a bivy sack in a cool 55 degrees F and dozed off while watching the center of our home galaxy blaze up thick in the southeast and roll westward over the Chocolate Mountain Air Force gunnery range.  But before sleep I added M20 Triffid, M8 Lagoon, M17 Swan/Omega, M16 Eagle nebulas, M80 globular cluster, M81 Bode's and M82 Cigar galaxies to the list plus other previously viewed faves with my trusty Dob.  The next morning we checked out sunspots with my solar filter and then spent the day hiking, 4 wheelin', exploring caves and old mining depots. complete with stone houses and cyanide solution tubs and setting up camp near a ~40 ft high abandoned railway trestle that we slowly crossed before sundown.

"The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness."  John Muir.  I think a desert may have to suffice Johnny, sorry.

Back2FoggyLongBeach

I spent the next few months pushing my iPhone's imaging capabilities, finding double stars, learning the different mares, craters, and anomalies on the moon, getting to know my new Canon DSLR and generally wondering what to do about my situation and how to change my life.  How to script wilderness and dark skies back into my life and get into rhythm with the real action of the world.

I guess Back2Arizona to figure it all out?