Our campsite at Davis Mountains State Park
I’m glad to have finally smelled creosote after a rain, seen desert arroyos and box canyons, explored a tinaja, seen javelinas, learned the names of desert plants, and had the chance to gaze out at the Chisos Mountains for a week.
We drove across Big Bend and up Texas 118, listening to the remainder of Treasure Island, a book that beats most for adventure, suspense, and a great antagonist in John Silver. There is not a lot out here. Some homes and ranches infrequently dot the arid landscape. Being a born and bred suburbanite makes it hard to imagine a life so remote.
One beauty of a sparsely populated area is being able to see stars. Supposedly there are billions and billions, as Carl Sagan would say, but I only ever saw about 42 in hyper-illuminated Northern Virginia. Here you can see thousands.
After settling in at Davis Mountains State Park, we went over to the McDonald Observatory for a better look at the night sky. The observatory is run by the University of Texas at Austin and is a research facility with a number of great programs for the public. We enjoyed the twilight program at which we learned how the shapes of constellations are continually, though ever so slightly, changing. We learned that there are actually 13 zodiacal constellations — one of the astronomers refferred to them as the overrated constellations. Thirteen ain’t lucky as you may have heard, so ancient folks dropped Ophiuchus — probably due to the awkward name. It is apparently some chap wrestling a snake.
We then participated in a little exercise showing where earth, the sun, and some of the planets and constellations appear relative to each other. Elise got to be Earth. She walked around a central lightpost (the Sun). For each revolution she made, the guy who was Mars had to make half a revolution. The lady who was Jupiter only needed to take one giant step. However, Danine, who was Mercury, had to race around the Sun four times for every revolution Elise made. I kept telling Elise to slow down a bit for the sake of her mother.
Once it was dark enough, we went outside where five telescopes had been set up to observe different objects in the night sky. We saw two star clusters, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Orion Nebula, Mars, and the Pleiades. The Pleiades is also a star cluster. Usually you can see four to six stars with the unaided eye. With the telescope we saw that it is made up of hundreds of stars. Oh, and it’s also the logo on Subarus. See if you can guess what Subaru means in Japanese. Danine and I were partial to the Orion Nebula, which is a vast gas cloud illuminated by the heat of the stars forming within it. Elise liked Mars, which is not red but a mellow butterscotch color.
One of the researchers, Mark, showed us all various constellations and stars. He took a liking to Elise and we learned he’d lived in Falls Church (on Poplar) for a few years in elementary school. He was very generous and gave us a few posters and some cool student and teacher booklets for homeschooling. We will head back there during the day for a tour of the really big telescopes. Elise may still want to be an archeologist, but Danine and I are ready to sign up as astronomers.
