Bryce after 2 weeks

by Darrell Lee

I had two highlights this week. One was during solar viewing when a lady asked "Mr. Lee, did you ever live in Alaska?" It turns out she remembered me from Anchorage Audubon Society some 23-29 years ago!

The other highlight was solar viewing at Circleville Elementary School. We had 6 classes of from 10 to 15 4th to 6th graders come through our program for 25 minutes at a time. Steve, one of our astronomy volunteers, was a high school history teacher, so he took our solar poster with its 16" sun and drew scale planet pictures on envelopes. Then he had one kid hold the Sun poster while other kids holding the Mercury, Venus, and Earth envelopes walked scale distances away. The kid holding the BB-sized Earth had to walk 120' away, while Steve explained that Jupiter would be out in a nearby field, and Saturn would be over near a farmhouse, and Pluto would be across town. After that, we did our solar viewing with each class, and had them make bracelets with UV beads that change color when exposed to UV rays from the Sun.

A couple of nights, Jim and I have just used our refractors for the evening viewing. My 80 mm. spotting scope is only good for the brightest objects, so I use it on M31, M8, Albireo, and NGC 457. We used the refractors this week at Red Rock Canyon, a Forest Service campground where we knew there would only be an audience of a dozen people. We also used them one night when we had to set up at Sunset Point because some carpet cleaners were keeping the lights on in the Visitor Center and ejecting water into the parking lot. When we have to move our scopes a long distance, portability is a definite plus. Dark skies and 7900' elevation give decent views even in an 80 mm. scope. I'm able to show the tourists NGC205 in addition to M31 and M32 in the fov of my 480 mm. scope with a 20 mm. 1-1/4" eyepiece

I've only set up my SN-10/G-11 combination once. The rest of the time I've been using the park's CPC1100, since no one else is using it. We have three Interpretive Rangers who give evening programs, and when they come out after their talks, they give the constellation tours while we run the telescopes. The CPC1100 has never given me that knock-out view of NGC891 again. I must have had the magic combination of dark skies and excellent seeing that night. It was pretty disappointing on NGC7479 when I looked at that barred spiral. I can see why people like the C11 OTAs, as the Park's scope cools down fast (within an hour) and gives great views. Best of all, the go-to almost always has the object in the fov. There's only been one exception so far, Uranus, which was just outside the fov.

I couldn't figure out how to get the CPC1100's hand controller to find named stars like Albireo, so I have to skew manually to them. The other thing is the SkyAlign failed to align successfully once, so now I just do a two star alignment selecting named stars. It's 50% faster doing the alignment that way.

I've managed to visit Pipe Springs National Monument, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, Navajo National Monument (Betatakin), and Grand Staircase National Monument, plus hiking half a dozen of Bryce Canyon's trails. We've done night programs at Cedar Breaks National Monument and Kodachrome State Park, too. So I've seen quite a bit of the local area.

We spend 6 hours/week at the Visitor Center answering questions from cute French female tourists and big fat American tourists, so I had to walk the trails we recommend and drive the roads we recommend to them. One guy HIKED the 160 miles from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon to Bryce Canyon, and was planning to hike the 86 miles to Zion NP via backcountry trails. He didn't fit our system for tracking backcountry hikers, who leave cars at trailheads for specific numbers of days.

My astro time has been a whirlwind of activity. I'm more than halfway done, and it feels like I've just started.

The tourists are very appreciative of what we show them, and we get lots of oohs and ahs and comments that they've never seen anything like what we're showing them. Not surprisingly, they like the brightest and well-defined objects the best. Albireo, NGC 457, M11, M13, M8, and M17 are crowd-pleasers. M31 and M27 and M57 don't hold their attention very long, even though our explanations of them are much more interesting, IMHO.

We were going to hold our own private star party tonight, but the clouds rolled in to ruin our viewing.

Darrell Lee