Astronomy magazine Editor David J. Eicher filed this report from his trip to Arizona Sky Village:
Friday opened up great adventures on our journey to the Arizona Sky Village (ASV). Senior Editor Michael Bakich and I continued our stay at Rancho Hidalgo, the newest development of ASV creator Gene Turner and his associates. The ranch lies just across the New Mexico border from ASV near the little town of Animas. Gene and his girlfriend, Loy Guzman, have opened their house to us and provided spectacular meals, one after another. These included a large feast for many who joined us Friday night, including well-known astroimagers Jack and Alice Newton. The sense of hospitality and community between the ASV group is really second to none.
Last night we had another amazing round of observing with Gene’s 30-inch Starmaster Dobsonian scope, which I’ll describe in a moment. But before we got to that, we had the day to fill. As it turned out, that wasn’t a problem.
Following a very nice lunch at the cute little Portal Café (where we saw Astronomy for sale), and a visit to a few folks at the ASV site, we returned to Rancho Hidalgo and took Gene’s Jeep over a long, winding, and sometimes perilous road up into the mountains. Descending into a large “bowl” depression with mountains ringing us on several sides, we started off on a long walk up to some isolated rock formations. Gene showed us several caves ancient Native Americans — possibly Mimbres and Anasazi — used as shelter and as community centers at least 800, and as many as 2,000 years ago.
Inside some of the caves and around the rock outcrops, we found dozens of artifacts, mostly stone chips that ancients had worked. To see debris lying undisturbed for centuries is an astonishing thing.
Following our gala dinner, we visited the nice observatory belonging to Adam and Tracy Clayson, our observing friends from Toronto. They have a house at ASV with a 30-inch Obsession scope and an impressive roll-off-roof structure that gets you under the whole sky. The meteors started rolling out nicely.
We moved to Gene’s 30-incher to go after some serious deep-sky objects. We looked at the Perseus Galaxy Cluster, with its high-energy weirdo galaxy NGC 1275. We enjoyed the beautifully bright lenticular galaxy NGC 1023 in Perseus, an underrated object. We then moved on to one of the Holy Grails of deep-sky observing, and saw it well as an amorphous glow underlying a group of tiny stars — the obscured galaxy Maffei 1. Discovered by the Italian astronomer Paolo Maffei in 1968, it is a nearby galaxy lying just a little farther away than the Local Group galaxies.
We then started a run on nearby galaxies including NGC 404, the dazzling little elliptical galaxy lying beside Beta Andromedae; the outlying Andromeda Galaxy satellites NGC 147 and NGC 185 (quite a contrast of shapes and surface brightnesses); NGC 925, the beautiful thin spiral galaxy in Triangulum; and IC 10, the distorted irregular in Cassiopeia that is both a weird starburst galaxy and — at 2.2 million light-years away — a member of the Local Group.
We rifled off a whole list of nebulae, planetary and otherwise, that simply stunned us. Some of the highlights included NGC 1514 in Taurus, a strange shell of gas surrounding a bright central star; Hind’s Variable Nebula, NGC 1554–5, a large, angular mass of nebulosity with a bright, arc-shaped central shell that surrounds the orange star T Tauri; the emission nebula NGC 1491 in Perseus, with its sheaf of gas floating over an 11th-magnitude central star; and a killer planetary nebula, NGC 246 in Cetus. This last one is a keeper: a large, ghostly shell with several bright stars across its face and a dark rim inside, surrounded by an irregularly-shaped, bright and mottled disk that reminded us of a pumpkin (maybe because of the season). It’s a great object.
Pulling into the boundary between night and morning, we kept at it and looked at an array of objects. Some of the best were the under-observed globular cluster NGC 288 in Sculptor and the Veil Nebula in Cygnus, always a spectacular sight.
It’s now Saturday morning and we have another day ahead of us and then another beautiful night of observing. Today we’ll be heading to Hachita, New Mexico, nearby us, where we’ll explore a turquoise mine and a ghost town from the boom days of the 1870s and 1880s, when lead, silver, and copper mining ruled these mountains.
More tomorrow.
Editor's note: Check out our gallery of images from Dave and Michael's trip to Arizona Sky Village.
Previous post: Arizona Sky Village, Day 1