400 Years of the Telescope

We departed early Thursday morning from our hotel room in Las Cruces, New Mexico heading east towards Sacramento Mountains where we would find the Apache Point Observatory and NSO’s Sunspot Observatory. We drove nearly four hours before stopping at the New Mexico Space and Science center where we got a chance to take a break, stretch our legs, and gather some pretty cool trinkets to take home with us. Kris, in the meantime, took that time to make some important phone calls/conferences to discuss the NSF grant and the Planetarium Program script. While at the space and science center, Anita and I got the opportunity to marvel at some retro rockets and jet engines that aided the US’s efforts during the Space Race. We especially had fun playing with a little contraption known as the “Whispering Dish” where the sound waves are collected and focused each time you speak on the opposite dome, located about 40 feet from where the first dome was located.

We raced off from the parking lot of the Space and Science center up to the Apache Point Observatory where we were scheduled to meet with Stephanie Snedden, Astronomer at the SLOAN Digital Sky Survey. We arrived a few minutes early and were treated to a quick tour of the mountain’s facilities by Gretchen Van Doren, Public Outreach Coordinator at Apache Point. We checked with Gretchen to make sure that our equipment would be able to be set up for the shots that we hoped to get. Due to some area and space constraints, we knew that we would be smashed into the side of the SLOAN’s platform railing in order to achieve the amazing shot that we imagined for the interview that evening.

We met up with Stephanie around 2:30pm and we discussed what we hoped to film that afternoon. She assured us that we would be able to see the “barn” enclosure’s opening over the telescope before the telescope’s preparations for the evening’s observing. This event would take place around 6:00pm, right before sunset, therefore we were given a few hours to relax and get settled at our cabin at Sunspot. We drove the additional mile up the road to Sunspot to our cabin, checked in and dropped off our luggage. We were happy to note that the cabin had separate rooms for each of us and TWO full bathrooms. The cabin also had a washer and dryer that we definitely used during the evening to wash our first 5-days of clothes.

We drove up to the Sunspot administration building and their main lab where we met with the housing coordinator, Rebecca, and our NSO contact for our Saturday shoot, David Dooling, the Sunspot Educational Outreach Coordinator. We planned on meeting him early Saturday morning to get our b-roll footage so we could get on the road early.

We returned to Apache Point Observatory and were alerted to the fact that the telescope preparations for the evening were undergoing some technical difficulties. This gave the crew even more time to relax, and per the suggestion of Gretchen, we climbed around below the SLOAN telescope platform on a search for fossils from the Pennsylvania Period. Apparently, the valley below this mountain range was once the bottom of a huge lake. Therefore, the mountains surrounding the valley were part of the beaches and hills enclosing this water mass and some of the creatures of the water got caught in the sediment of the mountains. We searched for a good half hour for anything that looked cool to take home with us. Anita found two small rocks encasing some shelled creatures and Kris found a gigantic rock that had some coral and a nautilus sitting next to each other. In an effort to not have to tote the large rock, Kris attempted to break the rock in half, which resulted in the rock dropping on his big toe, which he nursed the rest of the evening.

Returning to our actual work as videographers and not paleontologists, we met up again with Stephanie and Gretchen to film the enclosure opening and then the interview with Stephanie in front of the telescope. Both events occurred in a matter of 45 minutes and the crew felt very good about the lighting and the color that we captured right at sunset. Following the interview, Kris set up his still camera for some nighttime time-lapse photography that he would leave for a few hours and return to get early the next morning. The crew completed their full day by driving down the hill a bit to the town of Cloudcross and had a wonderful, filling meal at the Western Restaurant. They enjoyed their meals, checked their phones for messages and headed back up the hill for the night.