A Night On Kitt Peak

Last night I was fortunate enough to accompany a U of Arizona student on a trip up Kitt Peak. He was trying to observe an exoplanet transit with the 0.9 meter telescope (he got data...has to analyze it to see if he saw the planet). We also took some pretty pictures (again, pending analysis) with the telescope. 

Fortunately, there were times I could sneak outside with my camera and take some pics. The Moon was waxing gibbous so it's light would dominate until it set. Fortunately, there are still interesting things you can photograph. Mars was at opposition last night so I took a couple of pictures of Mars and Spica as they rose over the domes.

As twilight ended, I setup  for a shot I have wanted to do for a long time. I walked down to the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope. This famous telescope looks like the number 7 on its side. It is polar aligned which means that the tunnel points straight toward the north star (less than half the tunnel is above ground...it's really a cool scope!) I set up my camera at the base of the telescope where the tunnel went underground and set my intervalometer to take a whole bunch of 30 second exposures which I then stacked to produce the star trails shown below. The one star at the tip of the telescope that stays still is the North Star.

I then went back to the 0.9 meter scope and setup  for a star trails shot pointing toward the 4 meter telescope. Some clouds started rolling in and I stopped after a while thinking my photo wouldn't come out. I processed it anyway and the moving clouds created an interesting image. Maybe I should have kept taking more images to make the trails longer!

Did some visual observing for a while and then after the Moon set, went for some images of the Milky Way rising.

Great night, but got very little sleep...say, that sounds like a good idea.

Reprinted with permission from the Half-Astrophysicist Blog.