Observing the Stars

After our tour of the solar telescope, we had dinner and then we watched the sunset from the top of Kitt Peak, which is at an elevation of about 7,000 feet.  As it got darker, we did some binocular astronomy and then at about 10 PM Dean arranged for us to use an excellent 20 inch telescope in a dome at the visitor center.  This scope gave some of the best views I have ever had of galaxies and star clusters.  This is a view out the slit of the some, with the top half of the scope silhouetted against the stars.  The stars were incredibly bright, because we had less air to look through, and because we are more than a mile high. 

Looking at the Sun

This is the famous McMath-Pierce solar telescope located on Kitt Peak.  It is the largest solar telescope in the world, and was built in 1962.  It is one hundred feet tall, and the diagonal structure is two hundred feet long to the ground, and then it goes underground, for another two hundred feet to the observing room where all the instruments are.

The image of the sun is captured by a device called a Heliostat, which is mounted on the top of the tower.  It is a flat mirror two meters in diameter, and it reflects the image of the sun down the long diagonal tube, to a 1.6 meter primary mirror.  There are also two other smaller, 36 inch heliostats that also reflect an image down the tube, so there can be three instruments in the observing room gathering data.

OK, so this is unreal.  I have visited this telescope before, but never imagined that one day I would be INSIDE the telescope!  Our guide took us inside to show us the other mirrors that capture and reflect the beam in its path.  Here we are underground, and about half way down the tube.

And in case you hadn't figured it out already, the view from the top of the tower was spectacular.  We could see for more than a hundred miles in the clear air of Arizona.  This was one astounding tour!

Five Kittens, One Kitten, No Kittens

This is Grace.  Doesn't she just melt your heart?  Her story is amazing.  So you know that the mother cat had five kittens behind the garage.  I was away after the first day, but Kathy fed the mother cat for about a week, and the cat seemed to trust her.  The night I returned from Tucson, our neighbor, Judy, ran over the minute we pulled into the driveway, and said "They're GONE!"  The mother had taken four of the five kittens, and disappeared!  She left this kitten behind!  We were stunned!  Judy said that it had been more than an hour, and the mother never returned.  So we brought this kitty inside and the next morning bought a kitty nursing bottle and formula and began to feed her.  We went to the local animal shelter and asked if they had a nursing mother.  They did, but the mom already had enough adopted kittens.  Then late this afternoon I got a phone call from Judy, and she said her veterinarian said that her sister in New Jersey knew of a nursing mother with "space."  So I raced to the office on Long Island with Grace, and by now she is in New Jersey.  She will be there probably until the end of May, and then she will be returned to us.  It is much better that she lives with a litter, to learn to socialize better.  But we are missing her already!  Just look at how cute she is!

Gone, gone, gone...

Well, it finally happened, just as I had feared.  The power plant is completely gone!  When I called Kathy from Tucson after my first day there, she said "I hate to tell you this, but it is gone."  I did see a really nice sequence of photographs as the last remaining structure was toppled.  I wouldn't have been concerned about not getting the sequence, but I was really hoping for a photograph of a pile of twisted steel beams on the ground. Oh well.  It is what it is.  A couple of people have asked "What are you going to do, now that the plant is gone?"  I have photographed for the blog for 6 or 7 years, and the power plant was only a very small part of my work.  Stay tuned, I will continue to find photographs everywhere.

The Road to Portal

The thing about the western landscape is that you can see forever.  There is a classic view in so many places where the road runs in a straight line and there are mountains at the end.  I thing that perhaps the best version is in Utah.  But I saw this view on the way to Portal, Arizona.  More on Portal in a later post.  I promised Stan that I wouldn't shoot when I was driving, but when I saw this scene, I knew I had to take a few shots.  What makes this one special, is the patch of sunlight in the distance, and the road in shadow in the foreground.

The Little Green Man

I have so many posts to make up for and I was going to try and post the photographs in chronological order, but it gets confusing.  So I have decided to be random in my posts.  I am a random kind of guy, anyway, as you all know.  So this the first day of the trip at LaGuardia, waiting for the flight to Tucson.  It was raining pretty hard, and there were raindrops all over the windows but I was able to get this.  I loved that the ramp worker was wearing the bright yellow-green rain gear.  Everything else in the photograph was a shade of gray.  Oh, and the man is not little - the aircraft is really large.

The LBT

This is the Large Binocular Telescope on the top of Mount Graham, at an elevation of 10,700 feet.  It has two 8.4 meter diameter mirrors that work together.  Either of it's mirrors would be the second largest optical telescope in North America.  It is currently one of the world's most advanced optical telescopes.  It was astounding that our friend Dean arranged a visit here.  We arrived in the afternoon and got a wonderful tour of the facility by members of the technical staff.  Then we had dinner, and were down on the floor of the observatory as it began its night's work.  We had a chance to talk with the astronomers as well.  The building is 130 feet, but it is impossible to show you the enormous size of this instrument - photographs do not do it justice.  We stayed until about 11 PM, and then drove down the mountain road in the dark and arrived home four hours later. This was day one of our sleep deprivation.