Let me start by saying how sorry I am for not keeping up with things. It seems, that when push comes to shove, I’d rather take a nice afternoon nap then open up the computer and do some work. So now I find myself with lots of pictures to post, lots of travel log stuff to talk about, and well… just time to start (I don’t promise this post will be a full catch up) getting to work.
It looks like I left off with our visit to Colossal Cave. That means that the next big event was probably the highlight of our time in Tucson. We hired an astronomer to give us a private tour of the heavens. Seems that this individual actually builds telescopes and it quite well known in the community of telescope folks. In fact, he headed up an event on the White House lawn back in 2009 and he was invited to Maui to live at a hotel, all expenses paid, as long as he would do a 1-hour star gazing event every night.
He found a location on BLM land between Phoenix and Tucson that had almost no light pollution. He said that the telescope he brought with him was the largest you could get that was still portable and could easily be moved by one person. Not satisficed with the telescope as is, he has been, to use one of Sarah’s favorite terms, tartting it up a bit. His latest update was to put in a camera so that we would not have to look out of the eye piece. The image from the telescope was sent to a rather large TV screen, well actually, it was sent to his I-Pad and from there to the TV screen. The resolution was amazing. He also had a very strong lazer pointer that he assured us he was trained on by the Air Force so as not to interfere with pilots. he would point the pointer at an empty portion of the night sky and then show us how not empty it actually was. We saw constellations, and galaxies galore. He sent us jpegs of the photos and I will post them here. Please don’t ask me exactly what each one is because their names did not take in my memory. The grand finale of the evening was pictures of the moon, no we did not see the flag left by the astronauts, I did ask and in fact he said it was one of the most common questions he gets.
So that was our star gazing night to remember. Oh, I forgot one other thing that happened that night. WE WERE ON NATIONAL TELEVISION! Yes, we were. It seems that Good Morning America was doing a bit about things to do in Arizona so they contacted our astronomer about filming a session. The segment aired on Friday, 30 Apr, and was in their travel section of the show. I am going to try and see if I can get the clip and post that as well. It was quite exciting and, since they filmed it, they paid for the evening. Can’t beat that.
Ok, I will now work on the photos for this post. It may take a bit before I can get them loaded so please be patient. And just to keep you up to date, currently we are in Holbrook, AZ where yesterday we visited the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert and today we are going to Winslow, AZ to stand on a corner. Photos and more info to come.
TTFN
