Some 50 amateur astronomers gathered at a new facility near Cotton City, New Mexico, on Saturday, February 5, 2011. The event was the dedication of Shoemaker Discovery Park at Granite Gap, Gene Turner’s ambitious project that is creating a dark-sky observing community for skygazers of all types. The park constitutes one portion of Granite Gap, and is named after astrogeologist Eugene M. Shoemaker, the pioneer of understanding impact cratering and patient educator who loved bringing together science disciplines of all types. Shoemaker died in an accident in 1997, but his legacy lives on in a tremendous body of scientific work and now an activity park that will promote science education. The area already features extensive model rocketry activities with big rockets, some 6 or 8 feet tall, and with aeronautics shows utilizing large-size RC aircraft and helicopters. The park will also feature a large re-creation of an impact crater that young folks will be able to study and that will offer them the chance to detect meteorite fragments.

For an hour, members of the rocketry team launched a succession of big rockets that soared to amazing heights before coming down with deployed parachutes and landing softly. Youngsters on horseback galloped downrange to recover them one by one. A couple hundred yards away, RC aircraft buzzed through the sky, accomplishing loops and acrobatics and demonstrating the properties of flight.

When it came time for the ceremony, all of those present gathered and Gene Turner, developer of the project, updated the crowd on Granite Gap. More than two dozen observatory sites are standing at the location, and groundbreaking has occurred for a large planetarium building that will serve as a conventional star theater and also a multimedia center for presentations on all the allied subjects in play at Granite Gap — mineralogy, geology, rocketry, aeronautics, Old West history, mining, archeology, and others. “This is a place dedicated to all the so-called ologies,” as Turner likes to say. Following Turner’s talk, the celebrated astronomy popularizer David H. Levy took center stage. Levy was a close friend and collaborator with Gene Shoemaker and his wife, planetary scientist Carolyn Shoemaker. Levy described his friendship and collaboration with Gene, which included the famous discovery of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the object that broke apart and impacted Jupiter in 1994. He declared that Shoemaker Discovery Park is just the thing that Shoemaker would like to see done to promote and popularize astronomy education.

After David’s talk, I spoke about the project and what it means to bring dark-sky access to a large group of amateur astronomers in a unique way. I also described the Mineral Museum that will come along later this year, something that will include exhibits of all types of minerals, specimens from Arizona and New Mexico, and a gallery of meteorites. Not only do meteorites allow us to hold a piece of a distant solar system body in our hands, but minerals, whether they be showy yellow wulfenite blades or a bright red ruby in matrix, also show us the way nature assembles atoms in crystal structures. “Earth is a planet, too,” as we like to say at the magazine, and so minerals give us our best view of planetary geology right in our hands. And because chemistry is universal, minerals also allow glimpses of what similar substances might be like on other planets throughout the cosmos.

World-famous astroimager Jack Newton then described his participation in Granite Gap and the earlier dark-sky projects at the Arizona Sky Village and Rancho Hidalgo. He described at some length how great the sky is at Granite Gap, as it represents one of the darkest areas in the United States. Many of Newton’s greatest astroimages have originated from this area. Astronomy Senior Editor Michael E. Bakich then spoke about the planned planetarium building. The creation of the planetarium is first on the slate aside from the observatories that are popping up, and it will be finished by autumn 2011.

The dedication crowd celebrated their love of astronomy, interest in science education, and happiness over Granite Gap with a luncheon. This big project is now underway in earnest.

To see more images from the dedication, visit our Trips & Tours Gallery.