Astronomy Night at the Grand Canyon National Park

I had the fortune to visit the Grand Canyon in July 2019. I am not even going to try to explain my experience. No pictures or words do justice to how you feel when you see this place your own eyes. So, I will post only one image here:

The real reason I am writing this post is to share the opportunity I had to attend the astronomy night at the Grand Canyon Visitors Centre. We were ready to leave and go to our hotel when we noticed this:

So, we waited till 8 PM when they let us in the Visitor Centre Theatre. First, we learnt about the Grand Canyon and how it helped with the training of the first astronauts to the moon. Second, we learnt about light pollution and how the Grand Canyon is committed to become one of the darkest skies in the world.

After the presentation was over, we were led to the dark parking lot where astronomers from all over the world had set up telescopes pointing to different celestial bodies. You can move from Venus to Jupiter to Saturn. However, there were long queues before each telescope, and we were getting late to leave. So, we could see through only one telescope and I saw Jupiter with three of its moons.

Just like seeing the Grand Canyon is a hard to explain experience, seeing a celestial body is an out of the world experience (pun intended). Once I heard someone say on TV "I saw Saturn today and now my life is complete." Now I know why they said so.

Naturally, I didn't have the equipment or the training to take a picture of Jupiter. I searched online and found the below picture of Jupiter and four of its moons, which closely resemble what I saw through the telescope.

Posting the image below with link to the source page and credit to the photographer.

Jupiter & Galilean Moons (Image credit: Neal Simpson)

Neal Simpson's description of the image

Jupiter and it's four largest moons. Callisto and Ganymede are up top. Io is just above Jupiter and Europa is at the bottom. This was taken with a Canon T4i at prime focus on a 90mm Celestron C90 telescope and a photo tripod. Approximately 30 exposures of Jupiter were stacked and then combined with a photo of the moons.

Disclaimer: Image used under Creatives Commons license as mentioned on the image source page. Click here or on the image to visit the source page.