Secret Tour at Lowell Observatory!

I was going to start my job at Lowell Observatory today, but due to some paperwork not being done, I'm just stranded (LOL stranded, more like... vacationing) in Flagstaff, AZ. A little background, just in case. I am now a peer program educator at Lowell Observatory, and will be doing things like running the gift shop, giving tours, answering questions, and helping patrons find objects in one of the many telescopes that are up there. Decided to stay and look around the observatory and the coolest thing happened to me.

So there I am, looking through the exhibits, thinking, "I should see what I need  to know to give tours, so that I can move up to giving tours pretty quickly." A public educator came into the exhibit and said that a tour was starting soon and I decided to join the tour group, since I'll soon be leading them. Figured it would be a good glimpse of what my job will be like. After going to the first stop, the 116 year old telescope that weighs a few tons. The guide got this little 6 year old kid to move it saying, "you've never moved a few tons before, have you?" The kid just shrugged.

After some more talking, we went outside and the Mausoleum for Lowell caught my eye. I walked over and there was an amazing quote on the side...

"Astronomy now demands bodily abstraction of its devotee... To see into the beyond requires purity, and the securing it makes him perforce a hermit from his kind... He must abandon cities and forgo plains... Only in places raised above and aloof from men can he profitably pursue his search. He must learn to wait upon his opportunities and then no less to wait for mankind's acceptance of his results, for in common with most explorers he will encounter on his return that final penalty of penetration the certainty at first of being disbelieved..." - Mars and its Canals, Percival Lowell.

I got chills while reading this and had to share it with Tuna, so I spent a bit texting it to him. When I got done, I looked up and my tour group was gone! I decided to just wait there for the next group to come through and I would join them. It was really peaceful there, and if you looked inside, you could see that the roof over his tomb was made of blue glass, so that he could stargaze for the rest of eternity. When the next group arrived, I could tell it was a smaller group, but I thought nothing of it. 

We went to the next stop on the tour, after I had cleared my switch with them, and did the Pluto walk. It shows, at a scale of one inch = one million miles, how far away the planets were from the sun. One small child was basically giving the rest of us an astronomy lecture, which was so cool to see. He must have been about 8, and at one point asked the tour guide about neutron stars. When she said she didn't know what those were, he replied, "REALLY? Welll, they are..." and went off on a 5 minute explanation of what a neutron star was. (He was totally spot on btw)

We then walked into the rotunda museum, which houses a lot of observational equipment and exhibits about Lowell's search for his mysterious planet "x", later known as Pluto. This is usually open to the public. The next area however, is NEVER open to the public. We walked through the rotunda into Lowell's reading room. This is where he poured over his observations and talked to fellow astronomers back in the day. It had all original furniture, cushions included, and some really old telescopes that Lowell had used to find the dark site he built his observatory on. We then went and INTERRUPTED some of the professional staff members who were busy at work.

The one that really impressed me was named Kent Ford (I believe... I'll check and make sure that's right next time I go there) From the instant I peered in his office, I knew I would like this guy. He was hand designing systems for the Discovery Channel Telescope, the new telescope going up at Lowell, and his office was FILLED with pictures he had taken of Galaxies and Nebulae. As soon as I asked him if he had taken the pictures, he put away his work and proceeded to give me an AWESOME talk about how he had repaired an old, rusted out telescope and used it at home to take the pictures. He was very old school, designing by hand, and using film sheets instead of digital cameras. He explained that film has this unique quality that digital cameras can never emulate. There was a picture that was a wide enough field of view to see both the Orion Nebula and the Horse Head Nebula, and he told me that he could crop and blow up either of them to a large, wall sized poster, and all of the stars would still be round! Apparently the pixels of a digital camera make the stars appear square, due to the squareness of the pixels. I hope he'll be a good resource for my future telescope building goals! Though I don't want to bother him TOO much. 

After that, we descended down some steep, musty steps into the basement archives. This is where all of Lowell's original work and equipment rests. There were two cool things that happened down there.

The first, was getting to see the equipment and instruments that Lowell used while he was alive. He had most of the equipment he used built on site, so there aren't other versions of these mechanisms ANYWHERE. The current scientists are working on a project to categorize and photograph all the different small brass and aluminum pieces, and are later on going to post the gallery online and ask for help from amateurs around the world in identifying what they could be. Talked with the photographer, who ended up giving me this awesome lecture about how they could tell the rough age based on what materials they were made of and the precision of the craftsmanship. Basically, they started using aluminum much more than brass after WWI, and that's a pretty big indicator of when the pieces came about. I even got to step into his studio, where he was in the process of taking a picture of some kind of focal length extender (my best guess at what it was). The photographer was a "semi-retired" photography teacher, and ended up finding me later to pass on a little tidbit of trivia! Its awesome when someone can tell that you would listen to them talk about what they love for hours, cause I totally could have sat there longer, but the tour moved on!

The next cool thing was the glass plate archives. Lowell used to use glass plates instead of film to capture light and images, and it was these plates that led to the discovery of Pluto. There were over 35,000 plates in this room, and every single one was labeled with the utmost detail. From the date, to the size of the telescope, to the Right-Ascension/Declination measurements! Go scientists for being thorough! The guide then pulled out one particular slide and told us that it was THE slide that proved the existence of Pluto. I was INCHES away from the physical proof that Percival Lowell's search for the missing 9th planet wasn't in vain. We also got to see some glass plates of Jupiter, which was the clearest image I've ever seen of it (though it was black and white), and a glass slide of the Andromeda Galaxy. While she was talking, I kinda peeked around the room and found an old card catalog with NGC ___ (New General Catalog, its the catalog of galaxies, nebula, and globular clusters, as well as spots where there is nothing at all) written on it. I flipped through a few of the cards and sure enough, they were all hand written, NGC objects, with R-A/D coordinates on them and detailed descriptions of what they were. Scientists man! 

After and during the tour, I started talking to the other people around me who were also touring and found out that they were friends of a large donor to the observatory. It suddenly clicked that I had gotten a SUPER special tour, that pretty much no one gets. They were all really welcoming though, and I absolutely loved chatting with the bright youngster who was in amazement the whole time. He really knew more than they teach in the intro to Astronomy course that I took, and it was pretty impressive just how much of the concepts he actually was able to grasp. I got contact information for them, so that I could let them know of any children's programs at the observatory and mentioned that he should check out Universe Sandbox, a great free-for-all solar system creation program that gives detailed gravitational strengths, masses, distances, and velocities. Inspiring youngsters already and I haven't even started work!

All in all, a fantastic experience. I got really wrapped up in the idea that if I had started work today, I wouldn't have gotten to see all this. If I hadn't stopped on a whim to look at the mausoleum, I would have stayed with my initial tour group. And if I hadn't sent the quote to Tuna, I wouldn't have gotten left behind... Its funny the way things line up sometimes.

I can't wait to actually start work and put all my passion and knowledge to the test. Hopefully I'll be started by the end of this week or early next week! I should also be either fixing my camera or getting something I can take pictures with. It was such a bummer that I didn't get good photos of anything I saw today, seeing as I'll probably never see it again, but at least I have the memories... and those alone are pretty darn cool.

Embrace the chaos, it works out from time to time. :)

Be well, everyone!