Kitt Peak National Observatory

Friday afternoon Mark, Heather and I headed west to Kitt Peak National Observatory, for their Nightly Observation Program. While it was 106+ in Tucson, the air atop the peak was *much* cooler, such a welcome relief. 7k feet up, it was probably in the 80s.

We started off the program with a boxed dinner at 6:00 pm. Mark couldn't figure out why they bothered feeding us...this would become obvious later.

The program started with an overview of the National Science Foundation, and AURA, then details about Kitt Peak. There are 27+ telescopes on Kitt Peak, run and shared by several universities. Here are a few different telescopes and radioscopes and other science-y things:



There is one university of note that is involved with the research - check out the one on the bottom right of the list:
Oh, yeah. Go Terriers!

They then taught us how to read star charts, which was great. We then went outside to watch the sunset, which was very pretty. It was SUPER hazy; mostly due to wind pulling particulate into the air, and smoke from distant wildfires. It made for a vibrant red sunset, though:

After sunset, we headed to the telescope to start looking at stars, galaxies, and planets. It was SO cool. Really, no way to describe it. There are lots of great photos taken at the observatory here. It is so hard to wrap my head around the enormity of space. We were looking at things that were 3,000 light years away. Each light year is 6 *trillion* miles, so those stars were 3,000 x 6,000,000,000,000 miles away. What? And yet, we were able to see them through one of the baby telescopes on the mountain. How is that even possible?

We went inside for a bit to learn about star gazing with binoculars. When we went back outside, the sky was pitch black, and the stars were *amazing*. It was stunning. It was surprising to see how much you can observe with just binoculars. The majesty of it was somewhat shattered when our instructor Kevin said he was going to scan the area for rattlesnakes, "just to be safe." Yeeesh.

We then went back to the telescope to look at more celestial objects. Kevin checked his watch and said "oh, still plenty of time," which was when I noticed it was 10 pm and we weren't close to being done. That's why they needed to feed us, to keep our blood sugar up so we didn't pass out in the telescope buildings.

We wrapped up about 10:30. As most of the telescopes are conducting research each evening, the procedure for descending the mountain is to form a caravan behind a lead van, and drive down the first two miles with all headlights off. The lights from the cars would impact the research, which would be very bad. Before we took off, they reminded us to watch out for animals - including wild cows (?) - as they like the cooler mountain air. Lights off, large animals, windy roads. Bon Voyage!