Four Nights in the Sonoran Desert

In late March of this year, a very good friend from Kansas City, Fiske Miles (http://www.fiskemiles.com/sitemap/sitemap.php) came out to Arizona to put the 22-inch Dobsonian telescope he recently built to a dark sky test. (The skies here in Arizona are much darker than those in the Midwest, although the air is usually much more turbulent.

Fiske's Awesome Telescope (Photo by Fiske Miles)

In astronomical parlance, we would say that the “seeing” in Arizona is moderate to poor most of the time, but the “transparency” is excellent. In the Midwest, the opposite is true-usually pretty good seeing and moderate transparency.) Fiske’s web site has a wonderful history of building his telescope. (To put things in perspective, if Fiske had built this scope 150 years ago, it would have been the largest telescope in the world.)

Fiske is a true “renaissance man”, a man of many talents, ranging from cabinet making to birding to astronomy to gourmet cooking. He has a voracious appetite for books and is one of the most intelligent and well-spoken people I know.

Fiske drove his motor home out from Kansas City and arrived in Cave Creek on the afternoon of March 24, a Wednesday. (He has put together a really great slide show of his trip at this URL:)

http://picasaweb.google.com/fmiles01/ArizonaAstronomyTrip#slideshow

I had already packed my Honda Element to the gills with my equipment (Celestron C-11 telescope and mount, sleeping gear, cooking equipment, food, water, etc.) and about 2:00 pm we began the drive west to one of Saguaro Astronomy Club’s (SAC) favorite winter/spring sites, “The Antennas.” This site is about 110 miles west of Phoenix off Interstate 10. We arrived well before sunset and had plenty of time to set up and then relax as we waited for the sky to darken.

This hour or so between sunset and darkness is one of my favorite times of day during an astronomy expedition to the desert. As I relax and let my thoughts settle and compose my spirit, I watch with fascination as the Belt of Venus makes its brief appearance. (The Belt of Venus is common in the desert, and  rare in the Midwest. Fiske had never seen it before and was amazed when I pointed it out to him. It is a rather thin band of purplish sky on the eastern horizon that appears for a few minutes after sunset. It is formed by the shadow of the earth extending through the upper atmosphere, so it is not visible for more than a few minutes.) The Belt of Venus is like distant herald trumpets announcing the beginning of a wonderful night of ancient photon-fall from the skies.

Wednesday night was a moderately good night for Arizona-it started out superbly clear, but by midnight, high thin haze began to rob us of the sky’s pristine sparkle and by 2:00 am, the sky was all but suffocated by the tiny ice crystals high in the sky. In the few hours we had of good seeing, I bagged a number of faint open clusters in Puppis and Canis Major while Fiske put his 22-inch Cyclops through its paces, gobbling up faint galaxies, dim nebulae, and other distant wonders of the universe.

Thursday was windy all day (so windy in fact that it almost blew Fiske’s telescope over!), and stayed windy until 10:00 pm that night. During the afternoon, a friend of mine from SAC joined us, Joe Goss. Joe uses a 14-inch Celestron (the big uncle of my scope). We were sitting in Joe’s RV chatting and waiting for the wind to die, which it did not do. So I went to bed. But about 10:00 I could hear Joe setting up his telescope and aligning it on the north celestial pole, when suddenly I heard him and Fiske say, “Hey, the wind has died!” And sure enough, as if someone had hit a switch, the wind was dead. I hopped out of bed and had the C-11 running 15 minutes later. It was a wonderful night of more faint clusters in the southern Winter Milky Way and a gaggle of galaxies in Draco and Gemini for me, and more of Fiske’s telescope gobbling up photons like a huge PacMan on a rampage. Joe was doing his usual thing– searching for LTG’s (little “tiny” galaxies-I can’t use the word he actually uses on a family friendly blog site!).

Our observing site (Photo by Fiske Miles)

On Friday morning, Fiske and I took a short hike around the area to enjoy the incredible beauty and richness of the desert plants in full bloom. The Sonoran Desert is unique in all the world for its moisture (6 to 8 inches a year of rain) and non-freeze climate, so plants thrive in this harsh world and compete fiercely for pollinators by offering up dazzling flowers to any bees in the area.

Friday was the best night of all, and we were joined by two more SACers-Chris Hanrahan and Darrell Spencer. Chris also brought a friend from work, a young man who had never done any stargazing before.

Five Friends United by Starlight: L to R, Steve Kennedy (maker of Fiske's mirror), Fiske, Chris, Joe, and me (Photo by Pat Goss)

Saturday started great, but ended up clouding up between 2:00 and 4:00 am.

We all got in some wonderful observing (Chris managed to bag about 40 galaxies with his 12-inch Dobsonian telescope), but that was really not what made this 4-day safari so fun for me.

What really melted my butter was the quiet industry with which each of us worked during the night. I have been a member of astronomy clubs where the star parties were noisy affairs with folks talking up a storm, laughing, eating and drinking, but not doing a whole lot of observing. But in Arizona, our group is seriously dedicated to collecting radiation that is as old as vertebrate life on earth. We all work on observing “projects” (like Chris’s pursuit of the Herschel 400 observing award, or my pursuit of trying to observe every known open cluster in the Milky Way, a project that is almost completed, or Joe’s pursuit of the LTGs-he has observed 800 galaxies just in the constellation Virgo-and Fiske’s unplanned but very intentional exploration of the sky using Sky Atlas 2000 or Uranometria to find juicy bits of star flesh to consume in his mega-light-eater, and Darrell’s boyish enthusiasm from seeing things he has never seen before and realizing just how far away some of that stuff is).

During our nightly work, we would occasionally call out to each other, “Hey, Fiske, what are you looking at now?” And the reply would come back, “Omega Centauri.” Wow! I have to see this in Fiske’s astronomical naval cannon, so I ask if I can sneak a peek. And like any good-hearted amateur astronomer, Fiske has as many of us as wish to take a look at this awesome globular cluster low on the southern horizon, a star ball of over a million suns blazing away from 18,300 light years away. The meager remains of a once proud galaxy that the Milky Way cannibalized billions of years ago, it is an awesome sight even in binoculars and appeared from The Antennas site as a naked eye glow as large as the full moon!

Or I would invite Darrell and the others over to see a particular tiny but rich open cluster in a dazzling star field, or Joe would let us munch on one of his LTG’s, or Chris would share views he was enjoying.  We never crowded in on each other, but always were polite with each other, seeking permission before copping a view through a friend’s finely-figured and expensive glass.

Often on our desert safaris, we take breaks around midnight to 1:00 am and sit around someone’s RV or campsite and drink coffee or cocoa and snack on food to keep us energized and alert for the glorious hours still ahead of us. We talk of our views so for far the night, and what we hope to see yet, and then, of course, tell astronomical “war stories” and discuss the latest developments in eyepieces or software. Often, we will hear the lonely and painful sounding yelps of coyotes way off in the distance, or gasp at the appearance of a sudden bright meteor.

I have heard it said that God does not deduct from a man’s life the hours he spends looking at the heavens. If that is true (and I suspect it may be) I should live to be 130!

To all my star-gazing brothers and sisters everywhere, I bid you peaceful nights, stunning views, mind-numbing realizations of what you are seeing, and many extra years tacked onto your lifetime for all the hours you spend bathed in pre-historic radiation. May your skies be clear and tranquil, your eyes fully dilated, and your heart made light by the Light from above!