R'ome Gets Starstruck

Thursday, February 4, we are still in Arizona staying at the military base. We pretty much did nothing today, but mom planned something big for us to do that night. We thought we were going to freeze to death!!! No, not really but we knew going to a high mountain in the desert to look at stars would be cold.  Before we went though we decided to get a head start on freezing and stopped for Baskin Robbin's ice cream!! 

When we got up on the mountain the first thing I saw was ice and snow on the ground!!

Talk about a confidence booster!! Lucky for us we brought tons and tons of layers, at least I did. What we did next was a very weird thing.  They had all the people who were in the night observation program line up their cars in the parking lot.  We were a little confused, but later learned the purpose. 

We found some more cool mosaics!!!

Finally, we went into the visitor center, and we looked around at the exhibits.

After that we sat down, and they were playing a documentary about light pollution. The video made me sad when it told about sea turtles on the beaches in Florida. The sea turtles after hatching follow the light to get to the water. Usually the stars are reflecting off the water, and it is the brightest area. But now there is so much artificial light near the beach that the hatchlings head away from the water. They only have so much time to get in the water before they die from dehydration. My mom was like if they were trying to make her cry then they were doing a good job.  

The documentary was also kinda creepy.  They talked about how birds migrate using the stars but are getting lost in cities because of the lights. So there are people in some cities who assist injured birds and collect dead birds.  They put the dead birds in storage! The trays of dead birds made me want to hurl. By the way we were eating dinner during the documentary.

After the documentary they took us outside to see the sun set. I thought bring on the cold. Carmen our guide talked about how sometimes right before the sun fully sets it would look green and they called that the green flash. This is what you were supposed to see, but it doesn't happen every time.

This is what we saw.

 

Then Lucas taught us about planispheres which are maps of the sky. They also taught us that red light doesn't damage your night vision as much as other colors of light which I already knew from visiting a planetarium in TN with my friend Sydnie. We went outside to try using our planispheres. The first thing we saw was Orion. I confess we had already watched two lectures on the night sky, so I was familiar with many of the things he shared. The lectures fill your brain with so much information your brain hurts. Our docent also pointed out Cassiopia, Andromeda, and several others. He also showed us how to locate the North Star by Cassiopia, because the Big Dipper a.k.a. Ursa Major was behind the building. 

Then we got out the binoculars and looked to see what we could see with those. It was gorgeous to see all those stars and very little light pollution. We went with another docent who took us to this open observatory to look through a telescope.  The pictures I am about to show you are cooler than what we saw through the telescope. Though what we saw was beyond cool. We saw the Almach. 

 (That one was pretty much what we saw.  Actually what we saw was cooler!)

We saw the great Orion Nebula.

Picture is way cooler!

Then we saw the Andromeda Galaxy.

Andromeda is my favorite constellation, probably because of her myth but her galaxy is pretty cool.

Then we saw Uranus.

It was the only planet up at the time. Still a pretty blue.

We also saw the Eskimo Nebula which is sorta a dying star.

After that we waited inside the visitor center forever.  They finally said we could go to our car, but first they explained to us that they covered our headlights in order to not disturb any working scientists. 

If going up the mountain didn't fill the worry quota of my mom and Grammy then going down definitely did. All the way down Grammy was like "...slow down Pop...you're going too fast..." while Jack and I were trying to sleep. We were asleep by the time we got off the mountain. I at least don't remember getting to the bottom of the mountain. 

Though technically R'ome didn't see the stars from Kitt Peak at all the R'omers did.