Kitt Peak National Observatory, AZ

We are staying just south of Tucson in the Diamond J RV Park.  This is our third visit here over the years so I will try not to repeat....much;)

Brand new this year were the 2 visits we made to the Kitt Peak National Observatory this past week.  We have eyed the large observatory - in particular a couple of large telescopes - up on Kitt Peak the past couple of visits and finally drove up there a few days ago.  It is an hour drive from here and once to the mountain we drove up to the top at an elevation of 6800+ feet.  We really did not know much about the observatory and were surprised to find 24 telescopes up there!  Turns out Kitt Peak is home to one of the largest arrays of optical and radio telescopes in the world!

Many of the telescopes can be/are operated  remotely but there are dormitories up there to house visiting astronomers/students for hands on operation. 

Our first visit up we did a day tour of 3 of the telescopes, one of which is a sun telescope!  Very interesting.  We enjoyed it so much we decided to go back for a night program which would include actually viewing the skies through on of these telescopes.

getting ready to drive up the mountain.  The telescope visible is the 17 story high Mayall 4-m telescope

the visitor center has its own Spacewatch telescope

The McMath-Pierce sun telescope below is no longer in use and being replaced by a sun telescope being built in Hawaii.  We did get to go in for a look however, really interesting!  It will open again for the public in a couple of years as part of the tour.

in the background is the McMath Pierce solar telescope

The book below was found in a long forgotten locked closet in the sun telescope building.  It is a guest book used to sign in visitors back in the 1960s and contains the signatures of the astronauts involved in  the Apollo lunar landing years.  They used this telescope to choose the landing spot of the lunar landing module!!! 

book signed by astronauts from the Apollo lunar missions!

the KNPO 2.1 meter telescope, our second stop 

Our third telescope of the day was the largest, the Mayall 4.0 m telescope.  We had to take an elevator to the top as it sits 17 stories up!

at the top and rising above Kitt Peak is the Mayall 4.0 meter telescope with the odd looking Wynn 3.5 meter scope to the left

from the top of the Mayall telescope looking down on the array of telescopes on the mountain top

the Mayall telescope

 We went back for the night program yesterday and are so glad we did in spite of the weather up there being 32 degrees with the wind making it feel like 20!!!  That high up in a dark sky you feel like you can touch the milky way!  Just gazing up is amazing!  We had a couple of classes, one on learning how to use the planosphere so we knew what we were looking at when we looked up and then got to view 4 different objects through the visitor center telescope, one of which was to see M82 the Cigar Galaxy, a galaxy 12 million light years from earth!

first we got to see the sun set

in the telescope awaiting our turn to look through the eyepiece