Re: Снимки от западен Тексас

Dream Dragon wrote:
On Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:20:00 -0500, Stoil Marinov wrote:

Дъщеря ми беше за няколко дена в обсерваторията Макдоналд, която се намира в западната част на Тексас:
http://www.as.utexas.edu/mcdonald/mcdonald.html

Периодично ходи там, за да провежда наблюдения.
И всеки път е много впечатлена. Аз съм минавал с влак през района преди 15 години на път за Ел Пасо. Хълмчетата ми напомняха за района около моето село Марково. Само дето в Марково тогава не беше толкова сухо.

Времето било облачно и не са могли да вършат плануваните наблюдения, но за сметка натова са се забавлявали с един от старите телескопи.

Та ето какво ни писа тя за последното си посещение там:
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At the visitor's center, which is in the valley below the telescopes, they have a Star Party every friday and saturday. You sit in this big thing called a "kiva" (the Hope Indians used it for worship) but it's essentially a huge outdoor amphitheater, and when it gets dark, one of the observatory staff gives a "constellation tour." Now, west texas and specifically the Davis Mountains, where the observatory is, is the darkest place in the US. This is obviously why they built the observatory there. But it's hard to describe exactly how many stars you can see. There's almost no part of the sky where there's not a star. And the disk of the galaxy goes across one side of the entire sky. Jupiter and Saturn were up during the days we were there, and I've always wondered how the ancient Greeks even differentiated planets from stars. If you look up from reasonably populated area, you can't tell the difference. But out there, Jupiter was *THE* brightest thing in the entire sky. Even if you weren't looking in that direction, it was still super super bright! The guy who was giving the constellation tour used a laser pointer to point out individual stars and planets. It was pretty cool. There was only one out of the five nights that was clear enough for observing. It stormed the rest of the time unfortunately. But on the clear night, we opened up the 0.9m. This is one of the smallest telescopes on the mountain, and it's not connected to a CCD camera. They've left it old-school with an actual eye-piece that you can look through. So we pointed it at all kinds of cool stuff. We saw Jupiter, with 3 of it's moons, and you could see the different bands and colors of the clouds. Unfortunately the red spot was on the other side of the planet, so we couldn't see it. We also looked at Saturn, and you could see the rings and 2 of it's moons. We looked at a bunch of binary stars, where two stars are orbiting each other. We saw globular clusters, which are just a big ball of stars that are gravitationally bound. We saw a couple of really pretty galaxies, and some nebulae, including the ring nebula, which glows bright green because of emission from oxygen.
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А ето и снимки от мястото:
http://picasaweb.google.com/irina.marinova/McDWorkshop

Стоил

Страхотни снимки! А и с тези кратки обяснения, с това (наследено ;))
чувство за хумор - чудесен репортаж се е получил! Благодаря, че го сподели!

Поздрави!

Гери


От по-раншно пътуване до там тя ми беше писала следното:
The trip there I think it's one of the most unique drives in the entire country and very remote. There's not many places where you can set your cruise control to 80 and not have to press on the break for 4 hours. There is literally nothing around for hundreds of miles.

(80 = 80 мили/ч.)

Тук в щатите имат поговорка, че Тексас е голям, ама и той все някъде трябвало да свършва. Та това място е близо до юго-западния му край.

Дъщеря ни иска да къмпираме там. Аз и казах, че ще взема котарака в палатката, за да ни варди от гърмящите змии и скорпионите, от които гъмжи там. Той се хвърля на всичко, което шавне. А може би трябва да си поръчам таралеж от България. <g>

Стоил
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