Kitt Peak - What We Learned From the Night Sky

The following is a segment of an email that Lance wrote to our friends, Bink and Susan, regarding Kitt Peak observatory.  It captures the thrill that we felt better than what I could have written myself.

 I learned more at Kitt Peak in five hours than I did in one entire semester of astronomy at BYU.  It is a gas!  We froze our fannies off...yes our fannies are still on Kitt Peak.  We left them there because we had to come down and get warm!  But, boy what a ride!  The little lady who led us was about twenty, brilliant, four feet six inches tall, and really good at explaining how this whole thing works.  The universe and our galaxy I mean.

Anyway, Cynthia came home and dropped into bed after an hour in the truck, with me driving, and the heater going full blast coming down from Kitt Peak.  Yes, the heater works great now, and boy are we glad.  She was exhausted, happy and ready to hit the hay.  This retirement stuff is exhausting but worth it.

 

So, I am sitting under a mercury light at 12:32 a.m. signing off, but deliriously happy.  WOW, ain't life grand!?

That was Lance’s note.  Here are more of the details, and of course, details are found on the website. https://www.noao.edu/outreach/kpvc/

 First of all, we drove outside of Tucson about 45 miles up on Kitt Peak at about 6800 ft. in the air.  It was about 15 degrees cooler than in town, 90% humidity, and the wind was howling. We have almost no warm clothes left but what we do have, we had on our bodies, and we were still cold!  It was a beautiful night in spite of the temperature.  Our group was about 15 people and we were in one of the many observation towers, in a classroom and we learned about the importance of directing all of our ancillary light downward so that we can see the stars!  This is really important in astronomy because our cities make the heavens less visible to the extent that stars become passe to modern people. What a shame! We learned about star identification using a planisphere, which is a wheeled chart showing the stars on a given day.

 Our docent was a very smart, young woman named Carmen, who was an astronomy student from the U of A, and she was passionate about sharing the basics of astronomy.  We learned that basics of binoculars with simple magnification, we can see a lot!  To observe many of the features in the night sky we don’t need an expensive telescope; common binoculars will make the features appear brighter so we can see them!  I am thrilled with this new knowledge because now the heavens are within my reach, so to speak!  I am in the game!

We observed the setting sun, and the moon, Venus, Jupiter, the eclipses, the winter hexagon, several prominent stars and constellations; and that was with the binoculars.  Then we went to the telescope to see the really fabulous stuff!  We got a good look at Jupiter, its four stars, and an open constellation, a globular constellation, a dead star, and of course the moon.  Wow, the moon is beautiful.  It looks very bright and white, covered with crates of every size, testifying of the endless meteors over eons of time.   It seems that if you blew on the moon with a great gust of air, it would go Poof, like it was made of powdered sugar!  I wish that I had more time to stare at the moon with a telescope.  Sadly, we were all shivering so badly that we couldn't hold still, and our hands and fingers were frozen, which contributed to the politeness of the crowd, and everyone was eager to spend only a minute or two at the eyepiece.

A quick aside:  They do daytime tours and there are self guided tours as well.  There are about a dozen different observation towers, owned and operated by many of the big universities and companies around the globe, all utilizing the strategically positioned Kitt Peak. Not all are available for tours as it is a functioning observatory.  Each visitor used a tiny red light as now flashilights were allowed, and we had to be quiet out of respect for the day sleepers who did there work in the darkness of night.  We were the night tour, which cost us $45 each, but they fed us a pretty good, cold boxed lunch, because we were there for 4 hours and we were a long way from food and town.  Kitt Peak is on Tribal land and so all the rules of good behavior are observed.

Lance and I are determined to find a beginners book of astronomy, get our Dad’s binoculars (that I have stowed away in the cupboard of the Little House for such occasions) and do a little armchair astronomy.  We are going to Barnes and Noble today to find just such a book.

The Kitt Peak website is