A Quick Desert Hike

 It's been a crazy busy week, hence the infrequent postings. The good part is that I have plenty of material now to share! It seems that every September gets so busy as we try to squeeze in all the things we wanted to do during the summer but didn't have time, plus enjoy the fall colors, get into the swing of school activities, and meet all the end of year deadlines (if you have a calendar year like me of October-September).

We make it a priority to get outside as much as possible (especially since Desert Boy is showing a tendency to become quite attached to computer and iPod games!). I cajoled the kids to go on a bike ride. That was okay, but I heard a bit of complaining. But then we came to a fun-looking arroyo and decided to take an impromptu hike.

 Desert Girl was fascinated with the sparkly golden rocks. She wanted to take them all home, but was agreeable when I told her she could pick just one and it had to fit in just one hand.

 We have had so many mushrooms coming up with the recent rains. They are quite fascinating, but I don't know hardly anything about them.

 We continued until we found a little pool of water. The kids were really happy.

 Desert Girl found some stones to throw in. I started getting a bit concerned that this could end up really messy and we would have an uncomfortable ride home.

 The kids did fine, but I ended up in a bit of mud. (As you can see by my footwear, I really wasn't planning on a desert hike! Fortunately these sandals are up to almost anything.)

 I found the new erosion from the recent rains interesting. The downcutting exposes roots, which are usually deeper than I think they will be.

 Some of the downcutting was a bit deeper, but nothing like what they recently experienced in Colorado.

 Desert Boy thought it was a lot of fun to find steep banks to conquer.

 We saw a little bit of flood debris in the arroyo bottom, but not much. Nevertheless, we made sure to have a conversation about flood safety and where you should go if water starts coming down a canyon. (up!)

The impromptu hike put us all in a really good mood. It's amazing how a little time in the outdoors and a feeling of exploring can make you feel so good!

Clouds

 With our stormy weather we've been treated to wonderful cloud displays. So many times I've wished I had a camera or was in a better vantage point. Nevertheless, I've managed to capture a sampling of the magical clouds over the desert floor. Hope you enjoy!

Great Basin National Park 2013 Astronomy Festival

Last weekend was Great Basin National Park's Astronomy Festival. I was really looking forward to it (and it was a self-imposed deadline to get up some astronomy-related road art). 

On Thursday night we attended the ranger talent show. The ranger acts all had an astronomy theme.

Some kids I know opened the show with their rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. 

 
It was just a little bit cute. Okay, maybe a lot. Desert Girl made sure she was holding her star!

 Other talents showcased included beautiful singing, violin, guitars, trumpet, a reading, and a Star Wars skit with awesome costumes. It was a really enjoyable evening. (I had the wrong lens and no tripod so stopped trying to take photos as the sky got darker and darker.)

Then we headed over to the picnic area and looked through a variety of telescopes at the amazing night sky. It was a cloudless night and quite warm, ideal conditions. It was nice having the Astronomy Festival in the fall so we didn't have to stay up so late to see the night sky.

Desert Boy really wanted to get his Dark Sky Certificate because the prize was a Milky Way candy bar. In order to earn it, he had to look through telescopes and spot a binary star,  a galaxy, a star cluster, and a planetary nebula.

For the binary star, we looked to the oldest known one, in the handle of the Big Dipper. This has been a test for good eyesight for ages--can you see that the second star in the handle is not one star, but two? These are Mizar and Alcor (and recently discovered several more stars).

The galaxy we looked at was our nearest spiral galaxy neighbor: the Andromeda Galaxy. When you think about how big the Milky Way galaxy is and that we just see a portion of it, it's pretty amazing that we can see a whole other galaxy out there with its billions of stars. When I think of geologic time as being overwhelming, I just remind myself that it has nothing on astronomy, where a distance of 2.5 million light years to the Andromeda Galaxy is considered close. It certainly helps me put life in perspective--we really are little specks, and we might as well get along!

A star cluster is a bunch of stars close together, but much, much smaller in number than a galaxy. To put this in perspective, a star cluster may "only" have hundreds of thousands of stars in it. Or perhaps several million. But it's still not anywhere close to a galaxy. Oh, my. We looked at the best known star cluster in the northern hemisphere, M13, in the constellation Hercules.

Finally we looked at a planetary nebula. I thought it was rather difficult to be able to spot planets outside our solar system, so I asked what a planetary nebula was. The astronomer explained that the old-time astronomers, who didn't have such good telescopes, thought they were seeing planets forming. In fact, they were seeing dying stars. One day our sun will become a planetary nebula. These are relatively rare, with only 1500 known. And the one we saw, the Dumbbell Nebula, was gorgeous, my favorite sight of the night. In fact, it inspired me so much that I went home and looked up more information about planetary nebulas, started watching a BBC shown on astronomy called The Planets, and made me go back to the Astronomy Festival to learn even more.

 Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate. It was cloudy and stormy Friday night. And much of Saturday. But we decided to head to the ranger programs in the afternoon and learned about telescopes and how to use a planisphere. The kids' favorite activity was making a solar bracelet.

Ranger Aileen explained how the sun emits lots of different colors, and the kids identified the colors. She then told them how below the violet light is another kind of light, one we can't see, called ultra violet. It's the one that can make our skin tan (or sunburned).

She had some special beads that would turn color only in ultraviolet light. So inside a building the beads would be clear, but outside they would magically transform in color.

The kids loved the hands on activity. Even Desert Girl was able to make her own bracelet.

We had to wait a bit to get some good sunlight to make the beads their brightest. We sure were impressed with how much they changed color!

The astronomy festival was lots of fun despite some not-so-ideal weather conditions. One other thing I should mention is that Wally Pacholka was the keynote speaker. He gave up his day job as an accountant to take photos of the night skies. He had some photographs for sale, and I couldn't resist--they are stunning. Check out his website to see his remarkable work.

Great Basin National Park also released its Astronomy Ranger Minute, which has some amazing videography.

We're already looking forward to next year's Astronomy Festival! The date has been set for September 19-21, 2014.

Stormy End of Summer

 This has been such a stormy few weeks. We're used to having monsoons in July and August, but usually most of them provide dry lightning and a little cloud cover and not much else. This year, it started raining in mid-August and has rained nearly every day.

 One afternoon after a particularly hard downpour, we were treated to a double rainbow. The kids, their friends, and I ran outside to enjoy it.

 Then came the best part for them: jumping in puddles!

 They ran and jumped, splashed, and repeated. It was warm enough that they didn't care if they got a little (or a lot) wet.

 Desert Girl really wanted to go touch the rainbow. I tried to get creative about where the rainbow ended, but it didn't end up quite like I wanted. Nevertheless, it was sure beautiful!

 We decided to go for a walk, and the kids were on a mission to find every puddle they could.

 Some of the puddles were nice and deep, allowing for big splashes.

 We don't get to enjoy puddles out here in the desert too often, so this was a wonderful treat. It didn't hurt that mud was involved!

 I was wondering if we would see any flash flooding, but the ground did a pretty good job of absorbing most of the rain. After two drier than normal years, the ground is thirsty!

 I couldn't resist a photo of the old time wagon and barn. It always looks so neat, but if I had to use it all the time, I might not think quite the same.

 The rainbow stuck around for a long time, gracing us with its beauty.

Life is good with a friend and a puddle and the freedom to run wherever you want!

Our Little Solar System

I'm a big fan of road art, and I had an idea in the early summer of a fun road art project. But it was hard to get the time, energy, and materials needed to implement it. I gave myself a deadline: it needed to be up before the Great Basin National Park Astronomy Festival on September 5-7. And fortunately it's up! Here's the newest road art on the park road.

The solar system has arrived! We begin with the sun (which later blew over so is now oriented slightly differently.)


Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. My helpers were enthusiastic for the inner planets.


Venus, our nearby neighbor. Wow, it looks small!

Go, Earth!

Oops, Mars is a little blurry. Must be a telescope error.

Intermission to drill holes in the boards!

What's after Mars? Well, we did put up Jupiter, but then we came back and put up five dwarf planets, including Ceres, which is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.



Then comes Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system!

Saturn, Desert Girl's favorite planet. Our Saturn keeps losing its ring, though.

It's a long way to the next planet, Uranus (which should be bluish, but I had lost energy by this time, so if anyone wants to paint it blue, go for it!).

And what's the last planet in our solar system?

Neptune! (which should also be bluish)

But wait, what about Pluto? Most of us were taught that we have nine planets in our solar system. Those days are gone. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union came up with a definition of planets, and Pluto just didn't meet it. So now it's a dwarf planet.

 

Little Pluto, a cold rocky planet far, far away.

The good thing about Pluto becoming a dwarf planet is that we also got a few more dwarf planets, with more probably to be discovered.

Meet dwarf planet Haumea (which is slightly oversized in the model, but we had run out of little, tiny balls).

And here's Makemake (which we have a lot of fun pronouncing).


Finally there's Eris, the largest of the dwarf planets. (And maybe the hardest to find in our little solar system, since we had to switch to a different fence.)

To space these planets, I found Dr. Jerry Galloway's website that had both a 100 foot backyard model and also a four-mile model. I made adjustments to make it about two miles long. It was a nine-planet based system, so then I looked for information about the dwarf planets and fitted them in. They might not be exact, but neither are their orbits. Several of the planets and dwarf planets change order depending on where they are in their orbit (for example, Neptune and Pluto).

Here are the distances if you're interested, along with diameter sizes scaled for a four-mile long course (I chose to make my planet diameters not to scale, as I wanted them to be visible while driving 60 mph along the road, but wanted to give you an idea in case you want to make your own solar system model):

Astronomical body	distance	diameter (inches)
Sun	0	60
Mercury	105 feet	0.2
Venus	185 feet	0.5
Earth	271 feet	0.6
Mars	413 feet	0.3
Ceres*	~600 feet	<.1
Jupiter	¼ mile	6.2
Saturn	½ mile	5.2
Uranus	1 mile	2.2
Neptune	1 ½ mile	2.2
Pluto*	2 mile	0.1
Haumea*	2.1 mile	<.1
Makemake*	2.2 mile	<.1
Eris*	2.5 mile	0.1
*dwarf planet

Running or biking on the park road will now have some new landmarks--can you make it to Jupiter in ten minutes? How about Uranus?

I consider the road art as community art, so anyone who would like to improve on the art (for example, making better planets or a ring that will stay on Saturn) or add to it (e.g., asteroid belt, other celestial objects) is welcome!