(meteorobs) Perseids and the Night Sky from Utah

Skywayinc at aol.com Skywayinc at aol.com
Sun Aug 19 14:26:12 EDT 2007


Well . . . I have just returned from my two-week  stint in the "Beehive 
State" (Utah).
 
While I don't want to sound like George Costanza  in the final episode of 
Seinfeld (when he complained to Jerry about the quality  of their private plane 
flight to Paris), I was actually a little  disappointed  in the overall quality 
of the night skies that I  experienced in Utah.  On my best night (Friday, 
August 10),  I estimated my limiting magnitude at the zenith at +6.8.  On the  
Bortle scale, this was somewhere between a 3 and 4 category.  I could not  see 
M33 naked-eye, probably because of its low altitude.  Our  observing site was 
in the parking field just outside of the visitor's  center at Bryce Canyon.  
This location, however, was only a few miles north  of the Best Western/Ruby's 
Inn (where we were staying)  and the Inn's immediate surroundings are 
brilliantly lit up.  So  even from three miles away, there was some semblance of a 
faint light  haze toward the north and northeast. 
 
One of the park rangers (Kevin Poe) said that I  would certainly find darker 
skies if I traveled south about 15-miles to  Rainbow Point, where the 
elevation at the summit reaches to 9,115-feet.  I  passed on that, however, citing my 
inexperience in negotiating a  dark, unilluminated two-lane roadway in an 
unfamiliar terrain.   Kevin told me that from that location, however, airglow, the 
zodiacal band and  the gegenschein are readily visible.  Perhaps I would have 
seen a  Bortle 2 or even a class 1 sky from Rainbow Point, but considering 
that such  sights were fairly common from areas 50-miles north of Midtown 
Manhattan just  35-years ago, only demonstrates the extremes that one must go to 
today just to  get a view of a truly dark sky.  
 
Being situated at an altitude of about 7,600-feet,  I was  impressed as to 
how steady the seeing was.   Except when right down near the horizon (as was the 
case with, for example,  Capella) the stars did not appear to twinkle or 
scintillate at all. There were  several large telescopes set up by the Bryce 
rangers, and I  was especially impressed by the views of the Great Globular Cluster 
M13, as  well as the open clusters M4, M6 and M7.  The latter three are 
objects that  I do not see very often from home because of light haze and low 
altitude, but  from Bryce I had a dark sky backdrop and was positioned about 
4-degrees farther  south in latitude, so I took full advantage of these  conditions. 
   
 
We first saw the Perseids two nights before the  predicted peak, coming at a 
rate of of about one every three or four  minutes.  The most spectacular one 
was an "Earth-grazer" of magnitude -6,  appearing about an hour after sundown, 
going straight down the Milky Way from  Cygnus toward Scorpius. It left a 
vapor trail that lasted about 3-seconds. 
 
On the peak night (Sunday, August 12), the  evening started out with a layer 
of high cirroform covering much of the  sky.  The stars . . . and especially 
Jupiter . . . all looked like  fuzz-balls.  I felt like the "Rao Curse" had 
again followed me, this time  all the way to Utah.  Park ranger, Angie Richmond 
started the evening  off giving a very nice PowerPoint presentation for campers 
on astronomy,  then we all adjourned back to the parking field.  Over the 
span of the next  several hours, the sky slowly cleared and when most of us 
called it  quits at around 3 a.m., it had become mainly clear.  It was not  as 
transparent as Friday, however, and I estimated the LM at only around  +6.4.  
 
We saw several bright,  slow-moving Earth-grazers . . . appearing mainly 
below the Big Dipper and  across Bootes . . . before midnight.  Thereafter, we 
settled into a  pattern where we averaged a Perseid every minute or two.  The 
"clumping  effect" was very noticeable, with two or three Perseids firing across 
the sky,  followed by a lull of several minutes before the sky "bore fruit" 
once  again.  Most of the meteors appeared whitish, and about magnitude  +2.  
Very bright meteors seemed few and far between, although just before  we packed 
it in for the night, a dazzler of about -5 magnitude cut a nice path  across 
the Great Square and left a nice vapor trail for about five  seconds.    
 
I gave a talk about the Perseids to the campers,  who numbered about 200 . . 
. which gradually dwindled as the night wore  on.  I also spoke about light 
pollution as I usually do at such gatherings  (see below).  I tried not to sound 
"preachy" but I did tell the folks who  were gathered around me that the 
starry sky over their heads definitely should  be considered on the "endangered" 
list.
 
Overall, my family and I had a very good time  although I came away feeling a 
bit concerned because the Utah night skies . . .  especially those on August 
10 . . . were pretty much the kind of skies that  were regularly available to 
anyone who treked just a couple of hours north  of New York City back in the 
late 1970s (now, of course, no more).  

I wondered what the night skies from Utah  would look like in about 30-years? 
 
 
Ranger Chad Moore, who heads the night sky team at  Bryce, told me that all 
lighting in the park would be swapped out  for more efficient and full cut-off 
fixtures in the coming year.   But what concerns me is what happens outside 
the boundaries of Bryce  Canyon.  
 
A big first step would be getting nearby  Ruby's Inn to turn off a lot of its 
lights, but I don't see that happening  anytime soon.
 
Will Utah morph into the kind of night environment  that the Northeast US has 
evolved into during the next 30-years?  Only time  will tell.
 
-- joe rao
 
--------------------------------------------------------
    From:   _Chad_Moore at nps.gov_ (mailto:Chad_Moore at nps.gov)   To:   Joe Rao 
(_jrao at news12.com_ (mailto:jrao at news12.com) )  Date:   Tuesday - August 14, 
2007 3:00 PM  Subject:   Re: Perseid Meteor Shower at Bryce Canyon   Mime.822 
(1996 bytes)           Dear Joe,
Thank you  very much for coming to Bryce. We enjoyed your company and 
assistance.  Glad
you got to meet some of our astronomy staff and see our excellent  dark
skies. Keep in touch.

Chad Moore
NPS Night Sky  Team
Bryce Canyon National Park
PO Box 640201
Bryce Canyon, UT  84764.  USA.
435-834-4904
www2.nature.nps.gov/air/lightscapes

"There  are certain values in our landscape that ought to be sustained
against  destruction or impairment, though their worth cannot be expressed
in  money terms. They are essential to our life, liberty, and pursuit  of
happiness, this Nation of ours is not so rich it can afford to lose  them,
it is still rich enough to afford to preserve  them."
Newton B. Drury
Director NPS  1940-1951




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