Despite weather apps continuing to push back when the cloud cover would let up, several amateur astronomers had large telescopes set up on the patio of the Yavapai College’s Southwestern Wine Center late Wednesday, Oct. 22, and several dozen community members came to learn and see what they could.
“As you can see, astronomy is an outdoor sport,” Astronomers of Verde Valley President Richard Bohner said.
“So weather is a deciding factor on whether you can actually go outside and look.”
Most of the cloud cover was sporadic, so the astronomers could still see several space objects through the gaps, until the cloud cover was mostly gone about 7:30 p.m.
Through the clouds, however, the first telescope user to find something to look at was James Stevens.
He called out “Saturn” and raised his hand to announce people could come line up to see it.
“There are certain things on this telescope that I built that are very unique to this telescope,” Stevens said.
The telescope’s barrel had curved support on the inside forming a cursive x-like shape.
“You don’t get two lines … on each end of the star, bright star,” Stevens said. “It makes it all disappear. That’s why it works so well with planets.”
Stevens built his telescope himself over about six months in 2000 — a 10-inch Dobsonian called “Scrappy,” because he built nearly the whole thing out of scrap materials, claiming he spent about $45 to make it.
“Saturn’s usually the nicest [planet], but Jupiter is quite spectacular,” Stevens said. The rings of Saturn, the giant red spot and the larger moons he can view “really easy.”
The 10-inch refers to the diameter of the mirror. The whole length of the telescope is almost 6 feet, made of mostly wood that pivots and rotates on a lazy Susan-like base.
In “1956, ‘57, I started grinding my own mirrors and polishing and doing my own optics and stuff like that,” he said. “It’s quite a process, because you can get stuff within a couple millionths of an inch of being true.”
Stevens said he has another one he built that’s 17 inches, which he used to find Comet Bale-Hopp in 1996. He found it before astronomers actually named it, he said.
The biggest telescope at the event was an 18-inch one that Chris Phoenix set up right in the middle of the patio.
His favorite things to view are galaxies, but he also likes finding interstellar objects and planets. The first object Phoenix had his telescope pointing to was the Ring Nebula, aka Messier 57.
“So the star [of the nebula] was once a bit like our sun, and we had a lifespan similar to our sun,” Phoenix said. “… [In about] 7 billion years, the sun will begin to suffer from a little bit of indigestion. The core of the sun is going to be running out of the hydrogen fuel that it uses to keep itself warm. And the first thing that happens is it starts bloating up into what we call a red giant star, and it’ll get to a point where the outer layers of the star begin to escape and form a bubble of hydrogen around the whole solar system.”
When that happens the sun will collapse and go supernova to form something very similar to the Ring Nebula.
“That’s several thousand light years away, and it’s about a light year in diameter,” he said.
Phoenix said he’s been involved in astronomy basically his whole life.
“My parents got a small telescope for the 2003 Mars opposition,” when he was 10 years old, he said. “Everyone lost interest after Mars was gone, so if I wanted to look at something, I had to keep setting it up myself.”
The telescope he uses most of the time, which is same one he used on Wednesday, is even larger and taller than Stevens’. It’s made up of a wooden frame and an eyepiece near the top and covered in a black fabric.
He bought it from a man in Colorado. The mirror was made by Carl Zambuto, a world-renowned mirror maker.
“I actually offer astronomy tours in the Sedona area,” he said. “Company’s called ‘Night Owl’ tours. So this is our primary ’scope.”
Anyone interested in joining a tour, which Phoenix said he does most nights except for nights with the full moon, can email info@nightowl.tours.
Throughout the night, the astronomers pointed their telescopes to several different objects, including a binary star system called Achernar, a dual star cluster in the constellation of Eridanus, the Andromeda galaxy and the Pleiades.
“It’s best to view the Pleiades through binoculars,” Bohner said.
He said it’s hard to get all the stars in the cluster in view with just a single lens of a telescope, much easier with both eyes.
Bohner said his electronic telescope is the lightest one he’s owned so far.
He finds a targeted star manually, puts coordinates in the computer, enters the date and time and uses that calculation to find another stars, which it will automatically do with its internal motors.
“Usually it’s not perfect; It’s off a little bit,” Bohner said. “I have to center that one. … Once I do that, I hit ‘align’ again, and it thinks for a few seconds, and it’ll say ‘align successful,’ or ‘align fails.’ And … then it knows where it is. So then I could tell it go to Saturn, and it goes and it knows where Saturn is.”
Bohner said some other telescopes, like the manual ones other astronomers had at the event, will take 10 to 15 minutes to find something if it’s any bit obscurde.
Bohner’s telescope can go from object to object pretty quickly, which makes it useful for public events like the one in Clarkdale.
The club’s stargazing events take place several times a year, averaging just fewer than once a month.
The calendar is posted on the club’s website at astroverde.org.
No more stargazing events are scheduled for 2025, but schedules for the 2026 calendar will be updated in the coming months.
