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?

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?

Sad Coincidences

So I was challenged to start a blog, but blogs are lame so I just went through the motions and tried to forget I had ever so foolishly tried to put something new into the world.  But then something strange happened: A death.

Death can knock things loose, like too much coffee.  Death can overrun obstructions and start a stopped up passage flowing as ALL inevitably does.  I had recently had enough of death or so I presumed and was busily rearranging my emotional furniture to accommodate all the new empty spaces (trying out new rituals, remaking old traditions, reinforcing family bonds, etc.) and then this other death comes along into the life of a close friend and knocks his life loose, to which I was just a bystander.  Of course, each death is remarkable in and of itself within the context of close family and friends, but this one knocked loose an object that would tumble it's way along a circuitous route into the path of my life, changing me hopefully forever.

It was a telescope!

Now let me assure you dear reader, growing up in the East Valley of Arizona I was no stranger to the night sky.  I knew Orion always came around near my birthday in the fall, I still sang "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" to myself skating around the neighborhood at night and as a teenager of the 1990's I regularly perused Hubble images in books in the local library.  But really I was a dilettante.  A dabbler at best.  I remember many a TV/movie scene of teenage boys' rooms with the small white telescope on a cheap tripod pointed at a suspiciously low angle towards the neighbor's teenage daughter's window and so never fully realized just how accessible amateur astronomy was to the lay person and what was available for observation other than the occasional pervy peepshow.  I somehow missed Hale-Bopp, had never been to an observatory, and by 16 had convinced myself of a math/physics phobia.  I wasn't a science person.

But science doesn't really care too much about the stories we tell ourselves, our delusions.  Science doesn't tell you to be a certain thing or believe a certain thing - science invites YOU to perform an experiment.  And so by a sad coincidence my grieving friend and I set up his dearly departed father's small Meade ETX-60 reflector telescope on the balcony of our shared apartment in foggy Long Beach, CA and pointed it straight at the moon.  We saw craters large and small with deep curved shadows and central peaks, we saw dark lava bed seas and jutting mountain ranges.  Somehow without any fancy iPhone apps, laser pointers or star charts we also happened upon another fateful sight that night:  Saturn, the lord of the rings, long famed for seducing noobs into the all-consuming hobby.

I spent some time comprehending just how 1) I was lucky enough to be able to view these bodies of the solar system directly from my front porch and 2) how I had never seen any of this stuff before!  I was grateful and pissed at the same time.  A similar aftertaste to my time at university.

At that moment I knew I had finally found something to share.  Something to blog about.  Something to change my life.  So here's to that old bitch, Death - for knocking things loose and giving me a whole new perspective through the fog and light pollution from my quiet little balcony in Long Beach.

And what's that old saying?

"Coincidences are what you have left over when you've applied a bad theory."