Grand Canyon Star Party

Photo Album Starts Here

It's a fabulous mix of beautiful natural scenery and dark skies with no light pollution. Jane and I were privileged to attend this year's Grand Canyon Star Party with its 1976 founder John Dobson. Joining us from Honolulu was our good friend Barry Peckham of Litebox Telescopes. We all travelled together in our van with three of Barry's fine telescopes for the 480 mile drive from Monrovia.

The Grand Canyon was one stop on an annual summer trek to the national parks by the Sidewalk Astronomers through the late 70's. Dean Ketelson of the Tuscon Amateur Astronomy Association revived the event in 1991.

This year we were able to observe on six out of eight planned evenings. On Monday evening, Mojo gave a slide talk on the Milky Way, and Jane spoke on Tuesday evening about the Cassini Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan.

Most of the evenings were cold (into the 30's) and very windy, but on Friday the wind died and we had excellent skies until the next storm system began to roll in about midnight. I tallied about 100 visitors to my telescope on Saturday through Wednesday, then over 250 on our great Friday evening session.

The photo album includes some pictures from the star party, some Grand Canyon photos, and a field trip to visit the USGS and Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff.

Please let me know of any misspellings or names that I can add to my captions!

Click here to see the photo album