6/22/2006 4:00:00 AM Views are looking up at Canyon this week
By Jackie Brown Associate Grand Canyon News Editor
Most visitors leave the rim after the sun goes down, but for a group gathered there this week, that's when the most spectacular viewing begins.
About 80 astronomers invite the public to share their views at the 16th Annual Grand Canyon Star Party at Yavapai Point and at Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim.
There is a program each evening at 8 p.m. and viewing goes on far into the night. The event started last Saturday and runs through this Saturday night.
"It would be easy for them to set up in a remote area and keep the views to themselves, but they want to share those views," said Dean Ketelsen, of the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association, which sponsors the event with support from the National Park Service and Grand Canyon Association. Many other associations, such as the Prescott Astronomy Club, East Valley Astronomy Club, Saguaro Astronomy Club, Sirius Lookers from Sedona and Astronomical Society of Las Vegas are also represented.
The Star Party traces its origins back to the 70s and 80s, when the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers would travel to western parks each year with their telescopes, inviting visitors to join them as they probed the ultra-dark skies. The Grand Canyon Star Party, in its present form, was established 16 years ago during Ketelsen's honeymoon, when he and his late wife, Vicki, set up a telescope here, attracting dozens of curious onlookers.
Since then, Ketelsen and others have returned each year to find that curiosity continues, with lines forming at each of the dozens of telescopes set up in the Yavapai parking lot and groups gathering as the astronomers answer questions or break out the sky atlases to help viewers understand what they're seeing. For most, the motivation is to inspire that curiosity to passion.
"Part of it is reaching out to younger kids and planting that seed," said J.C. Willette, of the Astronomical Society in Las Vegas. His own love of astronomy was nurtured in the Boy Scouts, he said. This is his fifth Star Party.
Though most are amateurs who wouldn't think of spending their vacation doing anything else, they aren't casual hobbyists. The telescopes they use range in price from the hundreds to the thousands of dollars and usually counting.
"It's like a fisherman," said Claude Haynes of Gilbert. "The rod will cost you $40 but the bass boat is a lot more."
According to Marilyn Unruh of Prescott, a telescope is, at its core, a simple device.
"It's two or three pieces of glass, and everything else is to hold it in place," she said.
Though her own preference is for simplicity "It's the process of finding hard to find things that I enjoy," she said some come equipped with computers and GPS capabilities.
And for some, a ready-made scope just doesn't do the job. Dennis Young, a professional astronomer who gives 15-20 star shows a month in Sedona, built his own. It isn't elegant but it is functional.
"They don't commercially make the style I was looking for. I'm taking it out every other day, so I need something more practical and user-friendly," he said. "I've designed it to need no tools."
He said his big investment was in the mirror, a 28-incher custom-ground from a dense glass that needs to be just an inch and a half rather than three inches thick, reducing its weight considerably.
The mirror determines aperture, or how much light the telescope can capture and project, though the larger the mirror, the less portable the scope.
He also has a collection of more than 60 eyepieces, which can further fine-tune an image.
Unruh said that mirror size was her chief consideration as well.
"Magnification power is meaningless," she said. "It's how many inches your mirror is." She chose a scope with a 16-inch mirror because it provided both a view into deep space and portability.
"I can move every piece of it myself," she said.
For those who don't know where to begin exploring the night sky, or the telescope options, star parties like these provide an orientation to landmarks in space and the chance to try out different kinds of equipment.
"The nice thing about star parties is that there are many different kinds of telescopes," said Haynes. "You get a chance to try them all out."
Though the night sky can seem vast and chaotic to the uninitiated, Ketelsen said that it becomes orderly and familiar with some study.
"It's like finding your Circle K," he said. "It becomes easy to find things after a while."
For the beginner, Unruh recommends the Messier program.
In the mid-1700s, French astronomer Charles Messier scanned the skies for comets. He found more than 20, but he found other things as well, which he compiled in a list. Fifty are locatable with just binoculars, Unruh said.
"Once you're done with Messier's list you're pretty familiar with where things are," she said.
For those who finish Messier's list, there are other, more complicated lists and challenges. Unruh's quest now is for dark nebulae and dust clouds in the center of the Milky Way.
Haynes said it is common for beginning astronomers to move from the obvious to the more subtle.
"Often at star parties we show people Jupiter and Saturn, things that are more spectacular," he said. "After a while, they become excited by things that are very subtle."
While there are currently no comets probably the sexiest of nighttime objects in sight, viewers can see Saturn and Mars close together in the west until about 10 p.m., and Jupiter, which is forming a second vast storm resulting in "red spot jr." They can also look far beyond our galaxy to hundreds of others, and, if they're patient, learn about more subtle sights like nebulae, dust clouds, star clusters and more most of them billions of years old since that's how long it takes for their light to reach Earth.
The sights don't just include the celestial. Man-man objects like the International Space Station and satellites also make for interesting viewing. Iridium flares bright reflections of sunlight from three to 10-foot panels on communications satellites "can be kind of spectacular," said Willette.
