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After lurking in this group for two years since I moved here from the northeast, I have decided to come out of the shadows and report an interesting weekend that I had in Tucson.
A friend and I flew down there to visit some relatives who were in town for a business conference. We didn't have any particular plans, but I was hoping to steal away for a few minutes to check out the vaunted dark skies outside of the city. The conference was held at a cushy gated golfing resort northeast of the city. We managed to get invited to the dinner being held on the patio of the resort near one of the golf courses.
Both being scientist types, we had some pretty severe culture shock at being surrounded by business people, but everything was very nice. There was a buzz going through the crowd that the after dinner entertainment was going to be stargazing through some telescopes. Walking through the bar a little earlier, I had noticed a very dusty 4" reflector assembled wrong and pointing at the floor so I didn't really get my hopes up too high. As dessert was winding down a couple of guys carrying tripods and cases came through and went to set up on the golf course. They were wearing satin jackets with "Stellar Vision" on the back. Apparently Stellar Vision is an astronomy shop in Tucson where you can rent yourself a professionally catered star party.
This evening they brought a Televue Ranger and one of the new ETXs with the computer control. I had never looked through either of these instruments and was pretty psyched to give them a try.
First, the skies of Tucson. There was a 1st quarter moon up and we were only about a hundred feet from the resort building, but the skies were quite respectable. The lights of Tucson in the valley below were visible, but above it was a relatively small dome. I was surprised to see a couple of those moronic spotlights announcing the opening of a car dealership or new dance club scanning across the sky. There was a flurry of interest from the conference attendees to look at the moon and Mars, but the lines never got more than 4 or 5 people.
The sprinklers on the golf course decided to go off after about an hour, dispersing the crowd and getting the scopes a little bit wet. After that they moved the scopes onto the patio and there was relativley little interest from the conference attendees. We hung out with the two guys from Stellar Vision and they scanned from object to object and took requests. They were very nice and seemed pleased to chat with some people that had astronomy interests.
It seems that the S&T review of the ETX has been gone over ad nauseum, so I will refrain, but the goto features on it and the amount of information on each object were remarkable, especially for an event like this. I had never looked through a high quality refractor before and was impressed with the Ranger. The wide field was great and I had never seen Castor split open like it was in that scope. We looked at M3, M13, M81 & 82, M51 and a few other double stars. Considering the moon, the fact that we were on a lit patio, and it was totally unexpected bonus viewing, I was quite pleased.
Later in the weekend, there was more bonus astronomy when we found ourselves with a few hours and decided to go to Kitt Peak, which is about 50 miles from Tucson. The largest collection of resarch telescopes in the world resides there and it is open to the public every day.
They offer 3 tours daily: one of the world's largest solar telescope, one of the 2.1 m, and one of the 4 m (I have forgotten all of their official names). Even if you are not on the tour you can walk around fairly freely and look at the many telescopes.
There was nobody around at the solar telescope but a a live shot of a finely featured solar face was displayed on a tv monitor. Interesting fact (I thought): the entire shaft of the telescope is jacketed with cooling water to make the portion above the ground the same temperature as that in the ground.
We were given a tour of the 2.1 m scope by a wonderful older couple who offered much information on the Native American heritage of the site, stories of construction, and appropriately snide comments about government funding.
We went to the 4 m without a tour and wandered around the rest of the site and visited the gift shop. Another interesting fact (I thought): I always wondered what astronomers at large telescopes do when the moon is bright, so I asked one. He told me that they look so deep and the field of view is so small that as long as it is not in the immediate vicinity of the moon, it doesn't much matter. They have a full viewing evening even on nights with a full moon.
They close the gate on the road to the peak at 4 pm, so we got out of there and drove down the mountain and headed over to Saguaro National Park. There are dense forests of 30-50 feet high saguaro and other cacti there, some of which were in bloom. For a guy who has lived his entire life until recently in New England it was one strange but beautiful place.
We saw a fine Arizona sunset and got to try out some new photographic equipment.