I walked down the road to the trail and as I neared where I thought the entry point should be, I saw many footprints in the sand. I knew I was entering the trail a bit early, but figured that it had probably seen several groups of hikers in recent days—so I took it. After about 20 minutes of rapid hiking, I got to the edge of the cliff face. There was no way to enter the canyon from there, so I walked to my left, knowing I’d intersect the real trail and just follow it in. Three loops and an hour and ten minutes later, I stumbled across the real trail while hiking back out after having given up. I had to race to get to the proper location and get set up before the moonlight from the waning crescent moon became too intense (it never did). Since my entire hike occurred in the dark (pitch black, except for the stars), I was very thankful to eventually arrive at my destination.

Much to my surprise, the moon was too dim and too low to provide the light I needed on the canyon below—that is until I had been there for another hour. I spent that time taking one test shot after another, tweaking the alignment, and shooting again. It just never seemed to be quite right. It took so long that I then had to move my equipment to maintain the shot…and realign again. Thankfully it went better this time. I shot several singles and this shot which is a series of 5 shots stitched together. Lighting was done with the same 1,000,000 spot light, which was very tricky because some of the rocks in the shot are only about six feet away while others are fifty feet from the camera. By the time I finished, the moon had risen high enough in back of the Kiva that it was nicely lighting the entire valley. The small stringer of clouds was the only one in the sky and seemed to appear at the most inopportune time, although it did add a splash of color to the scene. Had I been able to get the shot earlier, the whole Milky Way would have appeared farther to the left. Soon after I finished, the galactic core disappeared behind the large formation to the right. Hiking out in the darkness was made slightly easier due to the scant amount of moonlight. An hour’s sleep in my car as the sun rose and it was time to head for home.

The Summer Milky Way is at its prime because this is when it will stretch high over the top of the sky from north to south as soon as evening twilight ends.  Traveling just a short distance from the city lights (say a small way up one of the nearby canyons) will reveal the Milky Way as a faint band of light, and you’ll be amazed at how much binoculars will reveal. We’ll give you some tips on how to view it and what other deep sky objects that can be found there.

The Ring Nebula in the constellation Lyra

One of the objects we’ll be featuring is called the Ring Nebula in Lyra. It is probably one of the finest examples of a “planetary nebula” in the entire sky.  In a telescope it looks like a small grayish smoke ring in the sky.  In reality it’s a site of star death – an expanding shell of gas and dust lit up by the dying White Dwarf star in its center.

What about the planets?  Most are in the same part of the sky as the sun and are thus lost in the sun’s glare, but if you’re willing to look to the east at around midnight, you’ll be treated to an incredibly bright “star” rising over the Wasatch Mountains.  It’s the planet Jupiter!  Even in binoculars you might be lucky enough to see some of its moons as tiny little stars hugging close to Jupiter’s disk.

So join us Saturday, September 3 at 6:45 p.m. in the Hansen Dome Theatre for another look at the summer’s best sky treasures! Tickets are just $1. Members are free.

I allowed the better part of an hour to get there with all my gear, and when I did, I found out that the Arch was facing 90 degrees from the direction I had assumed, which meant that the whole shot was going to be much different from the one I had envisioned. Don’t even ask me about the mosquitoes! After I got set up in the stillness and waited for complete darkness to fall, the canyon winds started to gust. What was stillness one minute was a series of 30 mph gusts the next. As I shot my pan, I had to reshoot 3 of the images due to camera shake during the 40 second exposures. You can block some of the wind with your body, but just not enough. Luckily, I was able to get both a decent panorama and several good single shots of the summer triangle over the arch. Note the great rift, the dark zone stretching from the galactic core (right) to a point about mid-way overhead. I only got lost for about 10 minutes while hiking out in front of the advancing mosquito hoard, so I considered it a success.

Sleeping a little in the shade of the car as daylight arrived; I got enough rest to fuel my attempt at the two shots in Canyonlands National Park. At Mesa Arch, you have to set up in not only the exact location, but at the right height as well. That’s critical if you want to have the silhouettes of the La Sal Mountains in the opening of the arch. Then, you have to plan ahead so that the Milky Way is in the correct place when it actually gets dark or else you have to move and quickly reset. The light on the foreground was provided by a 1,000,000 candle power spotlight. (I usually use a 2,000,000, but didn’t here due to the close proximity of the arch.) I had to quickly move the light from left to right in the same motion for each shot, allowing slightly longer for objects farther away to receive the light. Each burst of light was less than one second. I took a dozen shots and then stitched them together (just as I had done at Corona Arch). Conditions were perfect and I was amazed that the arch completely mirrored the arc of the Milky Way above it. I enjoyed the solitude and I thought that it sure beat the crowd that usually shows up for sunrise. All too soon, I had to quickly pack up and drive to the trail leading to False Kiva…which presented its own challenges…

By summer, the sun moves all the way to the left side of the opening as it works its way farther to the north, giving us longer days and more direct rays. Either way, it still illuminates the opening with its first red rays, making for an amazing experience (if you can detach yourself from your camera gear long enough to look).

In Utah, we see about 9 hours of sunlight in the winter and about 15 hours in the summer. The prolonged periods of darkness in the winter coupled with a much lower sun angle (the noon-time sun is much closer to the horizon) combine to give us brisk winters. In the summer, the reverse is true.

My love of sunrise at Mesa Arch made me want to try to capture the Milky Way near it. I wasn’t sure if the Milky Way would be over the arch at all, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to check.  That’s one of the subjects of my next entry.

The summer Milky Way also holds many of the year’s best deep sky treasures. We’ll get to see open star clusters (like the Wild Duck Cluster), globular star clusters (such as the Hercules Cluster), emission nebulae (the Lagoon Nebula, a stellar nursery) and planetary nebulae (the Ring Nebula, where a star is dying). These and many other objects await even the casual observer. A large telescope isn’t necessary to see many of these galactic riches.

Come and join us Saturday, August 6 at 6:45 p.m. for a show of truly galactic proportions! Tickets are $1. Members are free.

The Andromeda Galaxy, double cluster in Perseus and Milky Way

As the Milky Way climbed higher, I was able to shift my position to capture its light intertwining with the outstretched branches.

Bristlecone and Galactic Core

During the nearly 5 hours I spent there, I enjoyed the solitude with the sentinel that has watched the slow passage of time.  Imagine existing while history unfolded! This tree remained little changed as the middle ages unfurled; it existed through the dark ages, the crusades, untold wars and conflicts and the most monumental achievements of the human race. It was only in the last 2.5% of its life that we landed on the moon! This coupled with the light from the stars that have taken hundreds and thousands of years to reach the two of us added to the special feeling of the scene. Near the end of my time with my OLD friend, I was fortunate enough to shoot the Andromeda galaxy, Cassiopeia, and the double cluster in Perseus nestled near the outstretched branches of the sentinel that no longer bear life.

The Andromeda Galaxy, double cluster in Perseus and Milky Way

The light from the Andromeda galaxy left there about 2.5 million years ago, so even my old friend is young by that standard.

Next time, I’ll post some of my experiences from a recent trip to the Moab area. Until then, take a drive out of the city and get out and see the real thing!

…a star died.

This was no ordinary star.  It was a monster of a star, at least 20 times more massive than our Sun.

Because of its enormous mass, the temperatures and pressures at its core were insanely high.  Through a chain of violent nuclear fusion reactions, this star exhausted the hydrogen fuel in its core in less than a thousandth the time that a star like our Sun would require to consume its core hydrogen.

So furious was the pace of this star’s consumption of its core hydrogen that in its prime it shone 10,000 times more brightly than our Sun.

But you know the saying, “Live hard – die young.”

And oh, how this star died.

When a star with 20 times the mass of our Sun dies, it blasts itself into oblivion as a “Type II supernova,” the most spectacular and violent explosion known in the universe.

A Type II supernova is a rare event.  Even in a large galaxy containing more than 100 billion stars, this type of supernova occurs roughly once every hundred years.

The energy released by this supernova is almost incomprehensible.  For a few weeks or months the dying star can radiate as much energy as the combined output of all the other stars in its galaxy.

Countless photons (sub-atomic packets of energy) from this supernova blazed outward at the speed of light.  They zoomed through the interstellar regions of its galaxy for thousands of years before finally clearing the galaxy and embarking on a journey through the greatest voids known to science – intergalactic space.

For more than twenty million years, a small cohort of these photons raced in one particular direction through the frigid, empty darkness.

As time passed some of the photons collided with rare, random, microscopic flecks of intergalactic dust, and ceased to exist.

Most of the photons, however, screamed onward through the emptiness at 300,000 kilometers per second, eon after eon.

For a tiny portion of these photons, a spiral galaxy, our Milky Way galaxy, loomed ever-larger before them.

This particular stream of supernova photons, having spent more than 20 million years in flight, first encountered the borders of our galaxy as early humans were beginning to domesticate dogs and invent agriculture.

For ten thousand years the photons penetrated ever deeper into our galaxy.  A vanishingly small fraction of them were bound for a solar system dominated by a medium-sized and middle-aged yellow-white star, located on the inside edge of one of the large spiral arms of the Milky Way, about thirty thousand light-years from the galaxy’s center.

Of these photons, a still smaller fraction headed in the direction of that solar system’s third planet, a pretty little blue and white world in possession of liquid water oceans and a significant atmosphere.

And of those photons an even tinier fraction were heading for the western United States, and found themselves hurtling toward Garfield County, Utah.

A trickle of these photons were destined to meet their demise on a summer evening within the boundaries of Bryce Canyon National Park.

And of this tiny trickle of photons, an infinitesimal portion of them would conclude their 20 million year trek not in an ignominious collision with the rocks and trees of Bryce Canyon, but instead they were intercepted and reflected by carefully shaped mirrors, ricocheted through prisms, and refracted by small pieces of precision-ground glass.

The final two inches of these photons’ intergalactic travels were even stranger:  They encountered the living cells of the cornea and the focusing lenses of human eyes, abruptly ending their long journey by impacting the highly evolved photoreceptive cells of the retina and creating a cascade of neural signals that moved along the visual cortex and into the brain.

Brain cells then rapidly processed the stream of blended electrochemical impulses into a perception of a dim, swirling spiral galaxy of stars, the famous “Whirlpool Galaxy,” notable on this night for the appearance of a singular, dying star that had only recently become visible.

French observer Stéphane Lamotte Bailey created this animation of the Whirlpool galaxy's new supernova using images he took with his 8-inch telescope on May 30 and June 2, 2011.

These photons had traveled for more than 20 million years to make their way into more than fifty telescopes (one of them mine) that were participating in the June 29 – July 2, 2011 Bryce Canyon “Astrofest.” This was an annual gathering of volunteer amateur astronomers sharing their love of a pollution-free nighttime sky and their desire that the public should appreciate it better.

Swarming around those telescopes, each guided by good people from the Salt Lake Astronomical Society, Bryce Canyon National Park, Clark Planetarium and other astronomy-loving organizations, were an estimated five thousand park visitors from across the globe who were discovering that the nighttime skies in Bryce could be as spectacular as the daytime views of its unusual geology.

The telescopes are preparing for the arrival of some very special photons.

We were not looking at photons emitted by a TV or computer monitor, or bounced off the ink on the glossy page of an astronomy magazine, but the actual photons emitted by a massive dying star from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

We saw that with our own eyes.  Amazing.

One of my passions is to get outside at night in some of the most beautiful places around. Since the Milky Way can’t be seen from cities, this means that I now have to travel. It wasn’t always like this, however. I grew up in North Dakota and farmed for the first half of my life. The long days that stretched into the night meant that by the time work was done, the Milky Way would often be visible, even though it might just be a little after sunset. At the time, there were few lights around to ruin the view. I miss those times. So – in order to have new experiences under the stars, I now make pilgrimages to our National Parks and Monuments to photograph the night sky over some of the most beautiful places on earth. Luckily, many of them are within about a 5 hour drive of Salt Lake City.

My approach has been to wait for clear weather, a favorable moon phase, the weekend and then just bolt from work to do a 2 or 3 day mission (yes, mission) to capture the best astrophotos I can. I won’t sugar coat it for you…you do get tired (very tired)…but it’s worth it. Hopefully you’ll agree with me. If all my ramblings do is get you to stay up a little past dark the next time you’re out, I’ll consider it a success. Don’t be part of the herd and just eat supper before dark and then turn in. Your challenge is to break from the ordinary (just a little) and start to enjoy the beauty around you a bit more. This image is what got me started…more on that later…

Jupiter and the Milky Way over Delicate Arch, Arches National Park

Through the next installments, I hope to convey some of the inspiration that I find as I pursue the Milky Way and prominent constellations in some of the most amazing places. I’ll draw on my experiences over the last three years to share some of these places and events with you—you may find that things are not necessarily in order (most likely reverse order). The first ‘real’ entry in this series will be one that occurred most recently and recounts some of the fun we had at the Astronomical League Conference (ALCON) two weeks ago.

Galaxies are the largest entities in the universe – each can contain anywhere from a few billion to over a trillion stars.  Our solar system belongs to the “Milky Way Galaxy,” a spiral collection of over 200 billion stars.  Each star is essentially another “sun,” and as we have seen recently from the Kepler spacecraft, many of these other suns have planets of their own.

A spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way. Image courtesy NASA.

From the Earth, what we call the Milky Way (that faint band of light that sometimes stretches across the sky) is actually just a portion of two nearby sprial arms in our galaxy.  We’re simply looking at our local galactic neighborhood.  But the Spring skies are different – the Milky Way seems to be mostly absent in the sky!  That’s because sometimes our planet is looking out of the plane of our galaxy, and so the band of the Milky Way seems to be laying around the horizon where it’s impossible to distinguish it from the horizon glow.

But that also means we don’t have the stars, dust and gas high in the sky to obscure our view of what lays outside of our galaxy.  We get a fantastic opportunity, when the skies are clear and dark, to peer millions of light years into what’s called “intergalactic space.”  And when you do, you will find the faint little blobs of light that represent other galaxies in space.

Of course, seeing galaxies requires a telescope (it doesn’t have to be your own!) and a star atlas so you know how to pinpoint them.  That’s just a part of what we’ll demonstrate in the Gateway to the Stars show.  We’ll give you tips on how to observe these distant relics of the universe.

However, we’ll have a chance to observe other things in the Hansen Dome Theatre – constellations, the Moon, the planet Saturn, and upcoming sky events.  Join us in celebration of Astronomy Day, but also to get a glimpse of the “island universes” we call Galaxies! Tickets to Gateway to the Stars are $1 at the ticket window.

As the May becomes June, the planets will get closer together, Saturn and Mars most notably.  All three will meet up in a beautiful triangle in August.  By the middle of May, a Waxing Crescent Moon will join Venus in the sky.  Over the remainder of the month, it will visit the other two planets as it makes its way towards a Full Moon on May 27, 2010.  Looking to the north, we see the mother bear, Ursa Major, high in the sky.  She protects her cub, Ursa Minor, sitting about half way between her and the northern horizon.

Jupiter and Mercury rule the mornings over the next few weeks.  Mercury will be most visible on the 26th  of May when it is the farthest West of the Sun that it gets to in its orbit.  But the sky will be dominated by brilliant Jupiter, sitting in the southeast at sunrise.  The Moon visits Jupiter on June 6th, and might just barely be visible with Mercury on June 10 th as an extremely thin Waning Crescent.

This time of year is also a great time to go out and look for the Milky Way.  It is a cloudy band of stars that stretches across the sky.  Best visible after midnight, the brightest parts of our galaxy will rise in the southern sky between the constellations of Scorpius and Sagittarius.

Any time of the night, there are wonders to see in the sky.  So, while you are out camping or just standing in your drive way, make sure you look up and see the sights.