Following the dedication of Astronomy magazine’s observatory, and of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh’s telescope at Rancho Hidalgo, New Mexico, desert adventure awaited us. Astronomy’s publisher Kevin Keefe had joined me to trek out to visit developer Gene Turner and Loy Guzman, our hosts at Rancho Hidalgo. With the many guests from the night before now departed, we set about exploring nearby attractions surrounding the Hidalgo site — Portal, Arizona, with its Cave Creek Canyon and delightful birds, Turner’s Arizona Sky Village settlement, and some Native American sites near Hidalgo that still sport amazing relics dating to 1,000 years ago or even older.
Editors note: You can see the full image gallery of Dave and Kevin's trip to Rancho Hidalgo in our Online Reader Gallery.
The Chiricahua Mountains are amazingly beautiful, and we stood in awe of the perilous ride up the mountain that holds the 24-inch Cassegrain telescope associated with Arizona Sky Village. After exploring the vistas from that high altitude (much higher than the 4,600-foot desert floor below), we retreated to visit the desert itself.
Kevin and I were astonished to see a tarantula (two, actually) for the first time in the wild. We hiked for an hour and a half to reach a rocky shelf on one of the small mountains close to Hidalgo to find the area inhabited by various Native Americans, including Mimbres, from before 1,000 years ago to about the year 1,300 a.d. Tools and numerous stone chips from fashioning arrowheads and other implements lay abundantly on the sand in great areas of concentration. Inside one complex of caves, we found red and black petroglyphs seemingly telling of rivers, mountains, and long-forgotten messages of the ancient past.
This September we had an extremely late monsoonal flow (pictured at right) that threatened our observing on Friday night. But we stuck with the plan, feasted on a bountiful steak dinner, and then prepared Gene’s 30-inch Dobsonian (pictured above) to go after a laundry list of deep-sky objects. For Kevin, it would be a special treat, his first night under a premier sky with a really large telescope. Memories of M13 as seen with a small reflector at his summer camp way back when aroused comparisons with what we might see, until darkness fell, we had generally clear sky, and M13 was the first object dialed up. “My God!” Kevin exclaimed. It was a stunning view of the cluster, resolved cleanly across the face and with numerous lines of bright stars arcing from the central glow. A nice way to start the night, indeed.
We then gave Kevin a taste of the Sagittarius mainline, the arch of bright deep-sky objects from the galactic center northward. The Eagle Nebula (M16) looked fine, although the dark “pillars of creation” were a little subtle, as the sky was still darkening. The Lagoon Nebula (M8) did not fail to impress, as its star cluster, bright central glow, and rivers of dark nebulosity filled the field of view abundantly. We popped in an oxygen-III filter just to give the image a little more kick, to knock up the contrast. We then skittered over to the Trifid Nebula (M20), whose twin glows of emission and reflection nebulosity were superb. The Omega Nebula (M17) had such stunning surface brightness that it practically blew our heads off.
Not to be lost in Sagittarius and Serpens forever, we scooted up to the Wild Duck Cluster (M11), which was so richly stunning that its triangular shape looked wedge-like, set with the single, right orange jewel in its center. From there we shot over to the Dumbbell Nebula (M27), and by now the sky was getting dark enough to be superb. M27 was so brilliant — the brightest part a complete dumbbell but the fainter “ears” of nebulosity completely filling the object into an eerily glowing oval. It was like a superb photo without the color.
A long list of smaller planetary nebulae followed, many in Aquila and Cygnus, with NGC 6781, NGC 6905, NGC 6804, NGC 7008, and the Ring Nebula (M57) leading the way.
We observed many more objects, although some hopping back and forth around the sky was necessary due to very dark clouds that slowly washed over parts of the sky. The view of the Andromeda Galaxy and its satellites was incredible, the nucleus glowing brilliantly and the dust lanes sharply defined, with rich starfields on all sides of the major action. We took the galaxy question to the other extreme, too, by looking at the distant galaxy NGC 4319 and the nearby quasar Markarian 205. In the end, I think Kevin was satisfied with his first night of dark-sky, big-scope viewing. After lots of looking, it was a cool ending to a hot day in the desert, and we returned to Milwaukee on Saturday in time to get back into rhythm for another week at Astronomy magazine starting Monday morning.
We’ll continue to keep you posted on activities at Astronomy’s observatory and on images made from the facility in the coming days.
Photo credits: Gene Turner (30-inch); David J. Eicher (tarantula and monsoon)