Since it was Sunday, Don and Galen had scheduled some free time for those who went to church. Corinne and I skipped out on that[the only times I ever go to church is during choir tour, soo...] and opted for some free time.

In the afternoon, we left for Bandelier National Monument at about 2 and got there at about 3. [sarcasm]We got to watch an *ever* so spiffy movie about the place...[/sarcasm] Anyway, after we were subjected to the movie, we headed out to the trail to look at stuff. Donna, Cathy, and Corinne followed the tour guide, while the rest of us just took a self-guided tour. We got to see some kivas which seemed to be thesee giant rooms where they would dance or something. We went crawling around in some of the caves and we got to look at a lot of pictographs. We then hiked up this road and a bunch of ladders to the ceremonial cave. - except for JW who couldn't because of his knee and Jim who again stayed behind to play chess;) There was this circle we sat around and relaxed at and some of us then crawled into the small cave underneath.

On the trail back to the visitor's center, we ran into a ranger who had blocked off part of the trail. Apparently, up ahead was a mother bear with two cubs up in an apple tree who were throwing fruit down to her. another ranger got an airhorn and scared her across the trail and the people on either side then got led behind the trees to the other side so we could continue.

We then drove up to FHO where we had sandwiches on the concrete platform:o) Holly introduced us to her love of..burping? ellie would not stop singing the Pepsi Song.... *shrug*
We were able to set up and align our telescope by 10! Woohoo! Anyway, Corinne and I got a little more organized and took down some more information on binaries and Messier objects with times, drawings and other observations. I went into the dome at about midnight for the rest of the night. In there, we were looking at a few different nebulae and got a nice picture of the Triffid. We had some random conversation and to counter Ellie's N'Sync and Spice Girls, we had some TMNT [Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles] sing-a-long:o) We then got some comet coordinates from Don, which didn't really help. We tried to realign the telescope to a few stars and eventually, we were able to get some pictures of the comet:o) Then the moon came out and so did some clouds, so we weren't able to get any more good exposures. We start performing some stuff on the picutres we had taken, such as subtracting darks, etc., and chatted. After FTP'ing some of the pictures over and shutting down, we closed down the dome and headed home:o)
Daryl picks some awesome radio stations:o) The ride back down was full of sing-a-long - Joy to the World, Freefalling, Pretty Woman, etc.=)

<- Previous Day | Next Day ->

Back to the main page!

This page last updated November 13, 2000.