What's Up for June?

[Jane Houston Jones]

June marks the beginning of our annual tour of some of the great 
national parks of the US.  Our motto beccomes "Have Telescope, Will Travel!"

During the warm summer months we take telescopes, and occasionally other 
sidewalk astronomers away from the city and into the national parks for 
a couple of the annual star parties.

In June, we'll be in Northern Arizona and Utah for the annual Grand 
Canyon Star Party and the Bryce Canyon Astronomy Festival.  During these 
events, the dark skies of the national park become rich tapestry for 
amateur astronomer volunteers who introduce thousands of park visitors 
to the dark splendor of the summer Milky Way.  Closer to home, the 
Joshua Tree Mational Park has a similar ongoing astronomy program, in 
conjunction with the Yucca Valley based Andromeda Society.  
http://www.andromedasociety.org/

Our OTASTRO website http://www.otastro.org/ has all the summer star 
party dates, but I'll recap June here:

We'll be at the Kaibab Lodge June 11 - talks at sunset, and later, 
telescopes out on the Lodge grounds. http://kaibablodge.com/events.htm  
Sidewalk barry Peckham from hawaii and John Dobson from San Francisco 
will be with us.

We'll be at the Grand Canyon - North Rim June 12-13.  The star party 
takes place at both the North Rim Lodge and the South rim Yavapai Point 
parking lot June 9-16.  http://www.tucsonastronomy.org/gcsp.html  the 
public is welcome to hear the talks at sunset and look through the 
telescopes. All the telescope volunteers have registered with the 
national park as volunteers (aka lots of paperwork) and gone through a 
brief park training and orientation.  If you're interested for next 
year, you can get information via the website above.

Then we'll head north to Bryce Canyon National Park on June 14 - 16.  
Again all the volunteers have registered and even documented what types 
of telescopes they are bringing - as there is only room for 45 
telescopes at the star party site.  this event goes on for 3 days, and 
there are activites both day and night.  It's all free, but some events 
require tickets due to space limitations.  Read all about it here:  
http://www.nps.gov/brca/planyourvisit/astronomyprograms.htm

June 22 and 23 will be our monthly sidewalk Astronomy nights in Pasadena 
and Monrovia.

Finally, my monthly video, "What's Up" for June is up on the JPL 
website.  Have a listen!  It's only 2 minutes long and is packed with 
great amateur images of planets and more.  There's lots to see this 
month!.  :-)

http://education.jpl.nasa.gov/amateurastronomy/index.html

-- 
Jane Houston Jones
Monrovia, CA
34.2048N 118.1732W, 637.0 feet
http://www.whiteoaks.com
Old Town Astronomers:  http://www.otastro.org