Less Than Stellar

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"I think that I get to sit in the car now."

There was a silent pause from the darkened interior of the vehicle, followed by a tired voice:

"Uh, I think the door is locked, and you're going to stay outside with Scott."

And that was that. I was in Arizona in the middle of summer yet I was freezingly cold. I glared into the tinted window, as if that did any good, and walked back over to the telescope. My friend Scott was there, busily focusing and adjusting it. We were situated outside the dome of the forty inch reflector, which was being used by another group to image some asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. The mountain air would have been a tolerable temperature except that it was whipping around at a pretty good speed, and we were outside, unsheltered. I couldn't even sit by the car to use it as a wind block; I had to stay out and read off numbers for Scott.

"Beautiful night tonight, isn't it?" Scott muttered, bent over the eyepiece. I gazed up at the sparkling dome of stars overhead, and found that I had to agree with him. Up on the top of Mt. Lemmon, far from the glare of Tucson's city lights and partially out of the thick soup of air found at lower altitudes, the stars were crystal clear pinpoints of light. The moon wasn't up yet which added to the spectacular sight. I stared up at the sky and imagined I could gauge the distance to the stars. I stood in the chilled mountain air with my hands stuffed down in my jacket pockets, just taking it all in.

"Time?"

It was Scott. I checked my watch.

"It's about a minute until the eclipse starts. I guess we should start taking readings now."

I glanced at our target. It was Jupiter, or actually a moon of the giant planet that was named Europa. Unfortunately for us, it was located very low in the sky, a distance up from the horizon of two fists held at arms' length. This is a bad thing, since we had to look through so much of the Earth's turbulent atmosphere to receive the sunlight reflected off the surface of the tiny moon.

I had seen this was going to be a problem just a few minutes beforehand when I looked at the planet. I could certainly tell that it was Jupiter...but the image shimmered and jumped around. The object's unsteadiness was not helped by the fact that our telescope tripod had a broken leg, and all we could find to balance the thing was one of the counselor's flashlights. Add to this a damn hurricane of wind blowing around us and you can get an idea of our situation. We had planned on using the forty inch telescope, which would have been infinitely easier, but Jupiter was so low in the sky that the bottom of the observatory dome obscured it.

We were using a photometer, mounted on the eyepiece, to measure the light levels that we received from Europa. As the readings began, I shouted off numbers to the undoubtedly warm and comfortable people in the car as they came up on the tiny display. During an eclipse, the numbers should have progressed smoothly downward until reaching the maximum of the eclipse, stopped a moment, then began going smoothly back up to full. Due to the great conditions that we were stuck with, though, they did not. They went something rather like this:

"145...120...130...4..."

"Four?!" one of the occupants of the car shouted.

"Yeah, four, just write it down and be happy."

We actually did get a reading of four. I don't think I need to mention that our first project was a failure. however, I'm happy to say that our second eclipse and the project involving the spectrum of Europa, which we did to try and detect the water ice on the surface of the moon, went much better. As we returned at four in the morning, cold and miserable from our less-than-stellar night of observing, we had a few laughs from the groups who were having a little bit better luck. I guarantee they sure wren't laughing when we shouted them out of their beds at noon the next day!

When we presented our project results at the end of the week, the description of our first project did elicit a few laughs, but the results of the second and third projects made up for the problems that we had trying to measure an eclipse of a tiny moon on a cold and windy night.

Peace.
Andrew W. 9/12/97

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