Jupiter

Yesterday I woke up to a more normal, but still exciting day. We left for Steward Observatory at 09:30. The path the was up a mountain on a winding road. The view was awesome; the mountian was rocky, full of cacti, and shaded in many colors. There just isn't anything like it in the midwest. It was such a nice view we made 2 sight seeing stops on our way up. I learned the road was made by hand by a bunch of prisoners using a few tools. This impresses me; it would be hard to make such a long, winding road up a mountain. Towards the top it gets cold as well. The temperature decreased 20-25 degrees from the base of the mountain to the top. There was a certain point up the mountain where suddenly snow was everywhere and the entire vegetation changed.

When we got to the observatory, we were shown around and taught the basics of the telescope. We filled the telescope with liquid nitrogen to prepare for use a little later. Then we went to the dormitory and settled in to where we were going to sleep. Then we went back to observatory as the sun began to go down; the absence of sun makes the area much cooler. Close to 18:00 we began to take pictures of Jupiter. Considering I first looked into a telescope a couple days ago, the images were amazingly detailed to me. However, we looked up Jupiter images on the internet and found someone with some a bit more detailed. Our goal for today is to make some images that surpass his in detail.

The rest of the night was a bit hazy, so we were unable to image Saturn, but we looked at some different nebulae and got to know some of the technology. At about 03:00 the power went out. We saw Tucson was fine, but there was a smaller town on the other side of the mountain whose power had gone completely out. In lieu of the clouds and power outage, we dicided to call it quits. We called for reinforcements to get the backup generator running to the observatory. After the generator was turned on, we got everything in order and cleaned up before going back to the dorms. Almost everyone decided to stay up for 1-1.5 more hours to get used to staying up for the next couple of days, when skies should be crystal clear. Hopefully today we will have great success.