Star Party

Last night up at Timberline they had a Star Party put on by the Forest Service and an Astronomer and a couple of his students. It started at 9:00 pm with a mini-lecture and then everyone was able to go look at the moon through two different types of telescopes.

It was pretty cool. You could clearly see the craters on the surface and the different variations of the moon.


We then waited for the moon to set at 10:20. During that time they showed us different stars in the sky, Big Dipper, Scorpion, Teapot, Northern Cross, Summer Triangle, North Star, Andromeda, and then as it became darker the Milky Way, which was totally amazing. The Milky
Way stretched across the whole sky from horizon to horizon. Beautiful.

We now know that the North Star is 45 degrees on the horizon. That it does change and we had a mini lesson about the Egyptian Pyramid's and how the peaks lined up with the North Start at the time they were built. We learned that when looking at the stars you are looking back in time, which is a difficult concept to get. That planets and explode but we won't know about it until sometime in the future when we can actually see that it has happened.



Did you know that "Shooting Stars" are really specs of dust that are hitting our atmosphere at a high speed and burning up.

I tried to take pictures of my own, but they didn't turn out. Also Jupiter came out later in the evening. It was amazing that you could see the rings around the planet.

It made for a very long day as we were up at 5:00 am with Lacey, picked blueberries came home did a few things, had dinner and then turned around and headed back up to the mountain.

If you ever want to go star gazing, head up to Timberline. It is absolutely stunning!