Arizona: Deep Skies and Desert 2004 Diary and Scrapbook

In April UW Space Place Director Jim Lattis led a group of alumni and friends on our second tour to Arizona as part of our Astronomical Crossroads Tour Series. Despite the wet weather, the group had a tremendous time. Following is a diary written by traveler Per Dahl '56, '57, '60. Accompanying photos have been provided by Jim Lattis.

April 2: Eleanor and I are off on an astronomical and desert-viewing tour of Arizona, sponsored by the University of Wisconsin Alumni Association, arranged by Chuck Simpson, and hosted by WAA Representatives Dr. Jim Lattis, astronomer and director of the University of Wisconsin Space Place, and Kay Kriewald. We overnight at an airport hotel near Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, and the next afternoon join the rest of the group — about 30 in all.

April 3: Our bus, driven by capable “Sam” (Samantha), heads south on Highway 10, the only one in the nation marked in kilometers, in expectation of the metric system, which never arrived. Sam brings us to Tucson's Marriott, University Park, and an evening dinner at El Charro Café, a well-known Italian restaurant, washed down with margaritas.

April 4:

Morning visit to Mission San Xavier del Bac, a Parish of the Tohono O'odham Indian tribe; “the white dove of the desert” it is considered one of the finest examples of Mission architecture in the U.S. Appropriately, Palm Sunday Service was being celebrated during our visit.

Afternoon departure for Kitt Peak National Observatory, part of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). Joining us on the bus for this visit was astronomer Arthur Code and his wife Mary; nowadays, they spend the winter in Tucson and the summer in Madison, Wisconsin. Curiously, Code was Per's astrophysics minor professor for his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin some 44 years earlier. (I wouldn't have recognized Code, and don't suppose he remembers me.)

About 50 miles southwest of Tucson, Kitt Peak, again on the Tohono O'odham Reservation, is at 7,000 feet above the Sonoran Desert, and houses the world's largest collection of optical telescopes — no fewer than 26 telescopes, with one or two radio telescopes thrown in for good measure. Sam parked alongside the 4-meter (158-inch) Mayall telescope, the largest on Kitt Peak and mounted in a 19-story dome structure. It is designed as an interpolation between the 120-inch on Mount Hamilton and the 200-inch on Mount Palomar.

From the Mayall we continued to the WIYN (Wisconsin, Indiana, Yale, NOAO) observatory. It houses a 3.5-meter telescope — one of the first “New technology” telescopes built with a super light-weight mirror, in which the mirror surface is automatically adjusted several times per minute for optimal “seeing.” Last on our afternoon program on the mountain was the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope, the world's largest and most sophisticated telescope for studying the sun. We had a simple dinner in the Kitt Peak cafeteria. As would be our fate all week, the Tucson skies proved too cloudy for a late evening of stargazing (with our own telescopes brought along, or through one of the Kitt Peak instruments).

April 5:

Morning journey to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum — a world-renowned zoo, natural history museum, and botanical garden, all in one place. Nearby we passed Old Tucson Studios, the site for the filming of countless western movies, starting with “Arizona” in 1939. Crowding the surrounding hills are the giant Saguaro cacti, requiring 75-100 years to sprout a first limb, and lasting for up to 250 years.

In the afternoon we headed to the University of Arizona campus for a tour of the Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory, where they are presently constructing the second of a pair of 8.4-meter mirrors for the Large Binocular Telescope on 10,700-foot Mt. Graham. (The first mirror is already in place on Mt. Graham.) The impressive Mirror Laboratory is located beneath the University of Arizona stadium, reminiscent of World War II's Metallurgical Laboratory beneath Stagg Field in Chicago. Nearby we paid a call at the Space Imagery Center at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, which holds every photo NASA has taken of the Solar system. We viewed stereo images of various spatial objects, and a staff person gave a talk on Jupiter's closest satellite Io and its active vulcanism.

April 6:

Depart Tucson for Flagstaff, with a luncheon stop in Sedona in the Red-Rock area, home of arts & crafts and the New Agers with their vortexes, at the south end of Oak Creek Canyon. From there we climb from 4,500 feet to 7,000 feet along Hwy 89A, and arrive at in Flagstaff's Field Center of the U.S. Geological Survey. There we were introduced to much of the same lunar and planetary material we had viewed in Tucson. Also on view in the lobby was the surprisingly large 3rd Lunar Rover, a vehicle used for training astronauts in the nearby Lunar-like terrain. Interestingly, by now Mars is better mapped than the Moon. As for manned missions to the Moon and Planets, with current technology it will require 3 days to reach the Moon, 9 months to Mars, and no less than 17 years to Pluto. There is much medical unease about the longer flights, and it was pointed out that unmanned rovers can do most of the desired work. NASA, it seems, is mostly interested in Mars and the search for water. Several other points were made: a) Venus is about as far from the Sun as Mars, and as large, yet is the site of “impossibly terrible” conditions. b) Where did all the Martian water go to? c) Our speaker also expressed disappointment over the outlook of extra-terrestrial life (even microscopic) in our Solar system, and in the initial negative response to the SETI search; on the other hand, there are lots of stars in the Milky Way, and SETI is now rather well funded.

April 7:

The Grand Canyon is far more spectacular than I had imagined. Some of us began the tour with a Bell 206L helicopter Canyon overflight out of Papillion Helicopters based at Grand Canyon Airport in Tusayan. Lunch was had in one of the lodges, with snow and thunderstorms raging outside. With snow still on the ground, the weather cleared, and we walked the Rim Trail from Yavapain Point and Observation Station to Bright Angel Lodge — a hike of about 1.5 miles. I was surprised over the unprotected (i.e., largely un-fenced) Rim Trail, with only a few feet separating one from the 4-mile drop. Nowadays, on the average 5 1/2 people are lost off the rim per year. Sunset, including the “green flash” was observed from the Desert View overlook, followed by dinner at Cameron Trading Post on the Navajo Reservation.

April 8:

The day began with a visit to the Barringer Meteor Crater, formed when a 150-foot object slammed into the Earth 50,000 years ago. Eleanor and I had seen the crater some years before, but nowadays the visitor's facilities are much more elaborate, and we participated in a rim walk in the company of a guide.

From the crater we proceeded to the research facilities of Lowell Observatory at Anderson Mesa near Flagstaff. Prominent among the facilities are the 72-inch reflecting telescope (acquired from Ohio State in 1969), a 24-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, or camera, for viewing potentially dangerous objects in near-Earth orbits, and a giant 3-arm optical interferometer. As far as dangerous intruders (asteroids) go, we have a 10-50-year warning, so there is time to displace their orbits, most likely with a nudge from a nearby H-bomb.

The afternoon was completed with an introductory visit to Lowell Observatory on Mars Hill in Flagstaff — hallowed grounds where Percival Lowell studied Martian “canals,” Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, and Vesto Slipher first studied the redshifts of galaxies. Anticipating the planned evening visit to the observatory, I had a good look at Lowell's mausoleum alongside the observatory dome housing his 24-inch Alvan Clark refractor. The mausoleum is shaped in the form of a small observatory dome in cobalt blue translucent glass tiles; it was finished in 1923 at a cost of $40,000, or twice the cost of the Clark telescope.

That evening we returned to the observatory, alas with clouds closing in, rendering hoped-for observing through the Clark telescope doubtful. Instead, we viewed the “Tools of the Astronomers” exhibit in the Steele Visitor Center, and heard a talk on the history and observational program of the Observatory in the Giclas Lecture Hall. From there we proceeded past the Planetary Research Center to the Slipher Building, where we viewed many items exhibited in the Rotunda Library. The items included paper and globe sketches of Martian “canals” by Lowell, the Zeiss blink comparator used by Tombaugh in his detection of Pluto in 1930 (in it the visitor may view the first two 14x17 inch plates with Pluto in sight), as well as the spectrograph used by Slipher in his first detection of galactic red shifts. We ended up in the dome housing the famous Clark refracting telescope. As expected, the nighttime viewing was no good, but we were treated to a good demonstration of the operation of the 32-foot telescope and its dome built of Ponderosa Pine wood — the latter moved through the use of electric motors and 1954 Ford pickup truck tires. Nowadays, the 24-inch telescope, one of the finest refractors ever built, is mainly used for public viewing and education. The next scheduled Lowell telescope will be a 4-meter reflector, to be erected at Happy Jack, Arizona, for observing Kuiper belt objects.

April 9:

We arrive back in Phoenix in time for lunch at Monti's in nearby Tempe, with a talk by Jeff Hester, Dept. of Physics & Astronomy at Arizona State University, on “Origins: A Brief History of Structure in the Universe.” We then retired, for a next-day flight back to SFO.