On 2/18 we attended the Star Party at the McDonald Observatory outside of Fort Davis, TX. The first time we came to one of these Star Parties back in 2002 it just took my breath away. This is one of the darkest places in the continental US, and it’s at 6,800 foot elevation, so there isn’t even as much atmosphere to block the view. There were countless stars. The Milky Way looked like someone had taken a paint roller and put a white stripe across the sky. There were a few small meteors that shot across the sky as well.
There were several telescopes along the path to the amphitheater, and each is aimed at something interesting. We saw the following through the various scopes. Two galaxies (M81 and M82) in the Ursa Major (the Big Dipper). M81(Bode’s Galaxy) is a spiral galaxy approximately 11.8 million light-years away, while M82 (Cigar Galaxy) is an irregular galaxy at roughly the same distance from Earth. We saw the Orion Nebula (M42), which is only about 1,350 light-years away and is forming new stars. We zoomed in on the Pleiades (M46) just 410 light years from Earth - and saw there were far more than the 7 naked eye visible stars. Finally, we saw NGC1535, sometimes called the Eye of Cleopatra. It’s a dead star about the size of our sun. It ejected the outer layers into space and has a white dwarf star as a core. Our own sun awaits the same fate - but over 5 billion years from now.
It was cold (upper 30s), but calm, but we were dressed for the occasion. Overnight it dropped to 17ºF at our campsite, but we were in our warm camper van.
I tried my camera's astrophotography mode from our campground picnic table, and it did pretty well.
 |
| Night sky - you'll recognize Orion's Belt |
 |
| McDonald Observatory |
 |
| McDonald Observatory Visitor Center |
- Paul
0 comments:
Post a Comment