August 7 - 9

I headed out to the observatory Friday morning with plans to be back home no later than Sunday. The plans included more observatory construction work with John and enjoying the club Star Party on Saturday night.

The unseasonably cool weather continued through the entire weekend with daytime highs near 90 when 105 to 115 is the norm for August. The bright blue summer sky continued with a light breeze all weekend.

My work goal for Friday continued in support of the roof raising in several weeks. The rail supports in the hillside beyond the north wall were completed several weeks ago but. in anticipation of John;s friend's higher powered welding work coming up, I needed to excavate out the hills side for four feet on either side of each support as well as the entire hillside for another feet beyond the supports. I spent most of the day until dinner time using a jack hammer to break up a lot more granite and moving about 20 to 25 wheel barrels of rock and soil about 25 yards to near the head of our driveway. That was enough to partially fill in the gully that we would fall into with just a small mistake backing out of the driveway. By sunset there were about a dozen people on site setting up their equipment but the sunset was spectacular and was the kickoff to two nights of osberving that I would call magical. The air was so clear that after the sun went down the western sky went from deep blue right through all the rainbow colors, including a bluish green and then a strong green, before turning red near the horizon.

Once it was full night the sky was incredible. The Milky Way stretched from horizon to horizon and everywhere you looked there were stars. The dark galactic clouds that split the summer Milky Way were not only intense but varied in their intensity - a sight that's rarely seen. What made the night so intense was the heavy marine layer that blanketed all the coastal areas. That keeps all the artificial lighting beneath the clouds and the clouds beneath us. The layer was almost 4,000 feet which is unusually thick but the top still over 500 feet below us. A little after 10 PM there was a brilliant fireball overhead, crossing almost half the sky. It was so bright that it cast faint shadows across the ground and the trail lasted for several seconds - wow! As if that wasn't enough, far to the east we could see sheet lightning flashes in a cloudless sky. We found out alter that the origin was thunderstorms around Quartzite, Arizona - that's right - Arizona! Those storms were over 150 miles from us and yet the lightning must have been reflected off something in the upper atmosphere between the storms and us. The flashes were not very bright and stayed low to the horizon. If you have ever seen the old war movies where they showed artillery barrages over the horizon and the flashes that they made, that was what we saw. They lasted till well after I went to sleep about 1 AM. John was imaging all night but he was concerned that the lightning flashes, even faint n and low in the sky, may have interfered with his imaging. He'll know early in the week when he starts processing them at home.

Saturday was a good work day as well as some interesting nature stuff. While John continued on his finishing touches on his observing room, I installed all of the spot lights in the ceiling panels in my control room and our common room. I located four spots with a dimmer switch above my control desk area plus another red spot light just inside our entry door. The red light will be on at night to give enough illumination so that people entering the observatory will see enough not to trip but not ruin their night vision at the same time. Many people have heard of night vision but very few people have actually experienced it. It is simply the adjustment of your eyes dilating to see better at night. That is not something that is achieved by standing in a suburban back yard for a few minutes - your eyes reach their maximum dilation, or optimum night vision, after about thirty minutes in total darkness. I have had many guests come out to the observatory, look at the sky for a few minutes, and think they have seen everything. Then, over the next thirty minutes or so, they ooh and aah a lot more as they begin to see more and more fainter objects.

Now for the nature part. I saw my first tarantula in the wild on the path from the observatory to the bunkhouse. It was just ambling along, sharing the path with me. Including its legs it was about the size of my open hand. To top that off, a bit later in the afternoon as several of us were talking outside the observatory, a very large flying insect buzzed us before moving on. It was almost three inches long and was very strongly black in the front and orange on the back half. I never saw anything like that before but the desert vets said it was a tarantula hawk. Its a beetle that is on of the few living things that preys on tarantulas - parasitic wasp - they actually attack a tarantula in its hole, temporarily immobilizes it , then lays eggs in its living body, where they feed until they hatch. Then we saw a longhorn beetle, about 2 inches long with a pair of feelers as long as its body that protrude straight out of its head perpendicular to its body. That was the nature activity for the weekend. Saturday night was the monthly club star party and, by night fall, there were at least thirty people on site with their telescopes. Since I still don't have my stuff on site and John was prepping his equipment for more imaging, I decided to make the rounds socialize. Its always fun to see who has what equipment, what's new, and what kind of projects beyond sightseeing that others may be doing. I ran into an old friend named Dan who has a pad on the other side of the site and I haven't seen him in almost a year. He proudly showed me his new telescope - a 22 inch home-made Dobsonian. I know that probably doesn't mean anything to most of you. This is a telescope that has a mirror, not a lens, which is twenty-two inches across. That size mirror allows you to see some very faint objects, roughly several million times fainter than the naked eye. The home-made part means that Dan has made the entire telescope himself except for the optics. Dobsonian is the type of mount he uses and is named after a Trappist monk who invented this very simple type of mount over fifty years ago. This mount has made large telescopes for visual observing very inexpensive and available to all serious amateurs. Thirty years ago the largest mirror telescope you could find was about 8 inches; today 16 inches is considered on the small size. Dan's entire telescope weighs 80 pounds, is easily assembled, transports very easily, and is snap to operate. The rest of the night was a repeat of Friday night - down to the sheet lightning on the eastern horizon and a bright fireball overhead. The fireballs from both nights were unusual enough that I filed a Fireball Report on each one with the International Meteor Organisation, a world wide group dedicated to gathering data on meteors and expanding our scientific understanding of them.

Sunday dawned identically to the last two days. John laid down indoor/outdoor carpeting in his control room; I finished all the additional electrical conduits and outlets in my bunk room and the control/common room.

This was quite an exciting weekend with us achieving all of our construction goals as well as having a pair of extraordinary astronomy nights. This Thursday night, the Perseid Meteor Shower peaks and I am trying to make plans to be at the observatory and conduct a night's worht of meteor counts that I can submit to several pro/am groups.

Sorry there were no pictures this time around but photos will be much more interesting once we start on the rail system.