After parking at home for a night, we packed up for the last of the interviews for the production, and drove to Cal Tech, in Southern California, to interview Dr. Charles Beichman. He spoke of the search for exosolar planets similar to Earth, and where the findings have taken humanity so far. This very engaging man left us feeling encouraged for future discoveries around other stars like ours!

The next day we headed to Mt. Wilson, home of the Hooker 100 inch telescope, made famous by the one and only Edwin Hubble. He studied what were believed to be nebulous puffs of stars, and found them to be other galaxies. That put a whole new spin on the universe! We were escorted by the congenial site manager, Robert Cadman, and he introduced us to Don Nicholson, an long-time employee of the Mt. Wilson Institute. His father worked with Hubble and George Ellery Hale; Hale put up the solar telescopes there. Don was fun and candid, and gave us lots of behind-the-scenes insights of the famous astronomers way back in the days of males-only on the mountain. Things have changed, and what better way to show it, than to interview Wendy Freedman, the youthful and energetic Director of the Carnegie Observatories. Dr. Freedman is one very intelligent lady, with a refreshing curiosity for our universe that belies how much she knows about the cosmos. We placed her in front of the Hooker telescope with its old-fashioned buttons, lights and dials. When we finished, we shot b-roll of the big blue towering telescope. There were all sorts of additional scope parts lying in corners of the building, pointing to the not too distant past, and yet appearing so very historic. Then the fog rolled in, and we rolled out.

Saturday found us at the SETI Institute, to interview the always-delightful Seth Shostak, an astronomer searching for extra terrestrial intelligence out there in the cosmos. Seth has a comic’s wit, and his humor is matched by his deep beliefs, extra-ordinary brilliance, and an open mind for whatever is out there, awaiting discovery. He is working with the Allen Telescope Array, which will consist of over 300 radio dishes scanning the sky for sounds of other life, unidentified radio waves which most likely will be the source of intelligent contact.

Speaking of Contact, we drove out to the Array, which is a mere 2 and a half hours away, located by Mt. Lassen. There we did our very last and important interview with Dr. Jill Tarter, also of SETI. She was the person Jodi Foster’s character was portraying in the movie, “Contact” years ago. Jill is a super-smart lady, who harbors great hope at coming across extra terrestrial intelligence, and if anyone can do this, its her and the SETI folks!
Jill was kind enough to move the radio scopes to and fro for our cameras, then she maneuvered herself into position on lava rocks for our interview. She looked fantastic and we felt the same way as we wrapped up production and headed back home for a well-deserved meal and some semblance of normality.

Now, its time to log and capture and write and sew this program together! We’ll keep you posted on how things progress!

After dinner at a Mexican place Wednesday night, we sacked out until the next morning, where we had a bit of time to organize our gear, charge our batteries, and pour a bunch of Starbucks into our guts. Kris manned the helm up one of the most twisted roads in Arizona, the one that leads to the Large Binocular Telescope. We stopped on the way up to have a picnic lunch at a sunlit forested area, with none other than the cheeriest Father in Astronomy, Dr. Chris Corbally, of the Vatican Observatory; he exudes such pure sweetness that the bees pestered him relentlessly as he ate his tuna sandwich. When we finally made it up the hill, it was a miracle I didn’t toss my lunch immediately upon the spinning ground. But I was eager to use the energy to gather b-roll of the biggest pair o’ binocs ever invented. Two 8.4 meter mirrors side by side stare out into the heavens when that thing opens up. It’s way bigger than the word “large’ can describe. Inside, we were helped by Doug Officer, a congenial fellow with the clout to put us anywhere we wanted to be. We sited a few different angles inside the dome, set up the Plan-O-Cam, and conferred with the Telescope operator where we wanted the shutter to aim for the exterior/interior opening shot. I was the designated exterior shooter, which meant up I was placed on the roof of the Vatican Observatory, my camera focused on the LBT dome.

It was cold at 10 thousand feet altitude, and an icy wind chilled my bones. The orange sunset reflected back against a deep blue sky, and Dr. Corbally had to prod me off the roof when 30 minutes had flown by. I was frozen, and happy, and craving some hot fried food and cold beers when we finally got back into town 2 hours later.

Then we crashed at the home of Kris’ kin, Dean and Donna, two of the nicest Koenigs on the planet; we slept for a few hours, and got up early to hit the road home. We made it home by 2 am, and have one more road trip to go: The Mt. Wilson Observatory, and the strangely intriguing Allen Telescope Array, with the even more intriguing and strange Dr. Seth Shostak, along with the celebrity-status radio astronomer, Dr. Jill Tarter. Until next time…

We were back in Arizona, and found ourselves at the offices of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a device planned to be in operation in the great year of 2009.
The LSST is a proposed ground-based 8.4-metertelescope that will provide digital imaging of faint astronomical objects across the entire sky, night after night. We interviewed the director and on of the astronomers in their conference room, and we look forward to the great findings of this instrument.

We were off to the grand Kitt Peak observatories. We interviewed the always-pleasant Dr. Mark Giampapa, with the McMath-Pierce solar telescope in the background. When we finished, our old friend Claude Plymate escorted us on the steep tunnel-tram to the very top of the telescope; once outside, he maneuvered the mirrors, catching the sunlight and aiming it just so for Kris to shoot more award-winning b-roll. And I’ve never seen dust look so pretty as when its falling in and out of the sunlight inside the huge optic tube.

Then we cornered and forced a reluctant but wily George Jacoby into a quicky interview inside his spectroscopy room. It was cramped, funny and fast, but worth the cajoling of this humble, humorous man.

We flew to Boston, specifically to the Harvard Observatory, to interview Dr. Owen Gingirich, who is not only a brilliant and lively historian, but also a captivating writer on the movers and shakers of astronomy’s early years. In preparing for our interview, Dr. Gingerich ushered us up narrow winding steps into the historic campus dome. There, he gripped the majestically long telescope and swung it to and fro as if it were newly greased; Kris shoved the large rolling wooden bench, or “observing chair” into place, and Dr. Gingerich perched himself upon its plush burgundy cushions, where the likes of Hubble and Shapely sat, decades ago. After the interview, Kris followed Dr. Gingerich into his office and beheld several books dating back 400 years, written by the great Copernicus, with faded inky notes in the margins from readers of the 15th century! What an archive this man has, all protected and locked in a fire-proof safe. We considered ourselves quite fortunate to see these magnificent documents from a time before uniform book-binding was the norm. Apparently in those days, the pages were purchased from the printer and the buyer bound them up with whatever was handy.

After a lovely dinner that included fresh oysters with Owen and his dear, witty wife, Miriam, we all strolled back to Harvard Yard, so we could spy the comet Holmes with Owen’s binoculars. We invited a few strolling college students to get a peek, and if we had more time, probably would have spent another hour randomly calling folks over to enjoy this celestial delight.

David Dooling of NSO came a-knocking at our cabin door this morning, prepared to show us the Sunspot facilities. He took us up to the solar telescope at the top of the hill that is shaped like an unusual triangle/elongated pyramid. We took some b-roll footage for outside the building, trudging through the brush and rocks, trying not to make contact with the poison oak and trying not to collect any ticks on our clothing.
We all made sure to brush ourselves off before entering the building that housed pristine instrument tables with lasers and mirrors. The interior of the solar telescope looked like a mad scientist’s lair from some 1960s Bond film. The orange glow of the low lights mixed with the spherical hanging lights in the ceiling gave the interior a retro feel. The only thing bringing it into the 21st century was the dozens of computer screens displaying everything from calculations to mirror calibrations to a visual depiction of the sun in real-time.
David opened some of the partitions, giving us a clearer view of some of the technology in the lab used to calibrate the telescope. The camera captured mirrors and lasers and bouncing light from inside the instrument cases. Kris even got an amazing shot of the primary mirror that sits 170 feet below the main floor of the building. The “Wishing Well”, as David calls the mirror, can be seen by looking down a hole in one of the instruments on the main floor.

After the shoot was complete, David escorted us to the Visitor’s Center where we would get to see one of the smaller solar telescopes that was presented in the visitor’s center displays. As we entered the parking lot at the building, we realized that we were not the only people visiting the mountain this morning. We happened upon a PT Cruiser car show. About 50 PT Cruisers were filing into the parking lot, letting their respective passengers get their souvenirs and trinkets before the show began. We entered the packed visitor’s center which we realized was only packed in through the doorway and in the gift shop, but as we approached the solar telescope display, we found that the computer was not up and running. After about 15 minutes of trying to boot the computer, we came to the conclusion that the telescope was down for the day. Bummer! Before leaving the visitor’s center, we were enticed (just like the car-show visitors) to purchase some souvenirs from our visit. We picked up these great sunspot t-shirts with a huge grinning sun on the back. What a treat!

The crew descended the mountain in record time and was on their way to Tucson. This change in our schedule (we were supposed to be heading back to Las Cruces until Monday) was due to a change in our production schedule. Our schedule to interview Dr. Owen Gingerich at Harvard Observatory got moved up a week and the crew needed to fly out the next morning instead of a week later. Anita and Kris were set to fly to Boston Sunday morning for the interview and Krista was heading back to Chico to complete the audio files for transcription. The crew drove the 6 hours to Tucson, stopping for Sonics (mmm jalapeño poppers and cheese fries) for lunch and stopping at “The Thing” a roadside attraction about an hour out of Tucson (I highly recommend this to anyone traveling to or from Arizona!)

Once the team had arrived in Tucson and settled in a hotel a block from the airport, they planned to spend the evening with Kris’ brother, Dean and his wife Donna, owners of the Arizona company, Starizona, which sells telescopes, and telescope and camera equipment. We had no idea until we went to dinner at a local Mexican Restaurant, but it was Dean and Donna’s wedding anniversary. Congratulations to them!! The crew returned with Dean and Donna to their store where outside, some local amateur astronomers had their telescopes set up and observing constellations, distant galaxies and the comet within Perseus which has been visible this past weekend. The crew spent about 30 minutes observing with the crowd, until they decided to return to the hotel and get things packed and prepared for the following morning when they would be departing from Arizona to Boston (Kris and Anita) and back to Chico (Krista). Wish us luck in our travels!

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.

Wednesday morning, the team awoke bright and early, prepared for an early morning departure. Their sleepy eyes, in need of caffeine and about 2 more hours of sleep, crossed the street to the nearest gas station and got fuel for the car and coffee for themselves. They realized about two hours into the trip that they needed another refueling, not for the car, but for them – the first round of coffee hadn’t done the trick. To solve this problem, the team stopped once more about 40 miles from the Arizona border for coffee and a small bite to eat. While making this stop, the team contacted Jennifer Oman, our amazing NSF grant-writer and Greg Payne, local Chico artist, who were staying in Kingman, Arizona for the week. We made plans to meet them in Kingman for some coffee and a chat before we started on the final stretch towards Flagstaff, Arizona.

We arrived at Lowell Observatory at 2pm and were immediately connected with our contact, Steele Wotkyns, public information officer at the observatory. He set us up for the afternoon with Kevin Schindler, the outreach manager of the Observatory, for an interview about the history of Lowell. The observatory, established at the very end of the 19th century, was a major contributor to scientific observations around the turn of the century. For example, the 24” Clark Telescope was used by observers in the early 20th century to observe Mars. Another telescope at the observatory was used to make the first observations of Pluto. After the interview, the crew set up the PlanOCam and had Dr. Schindler and another of the outreach officers move the telescope while the crew stood outside the dome. The interview and "Plan-o-Cam" footage acquisition went as well as could be expected.

The team now rests up for another near-full day of travel through the rest of Arizona towards New Mexico. They will sleep in New Mexico tomorrow night, prepared to ascend the mountain at Sunspot on Friday. Wish us luck on the roads through the Southwest with all those big-rig trucks.

As soon as the crew (Anita and Kris) returned from the East Coast on Sunday, they didn’t even have a chance to unpack their things before heading back off to complete some of the last-minute interviews in the Southwest United States. Monday in the office was anticipated to be the day to pack the gear and get all of the final details of the trip tied up, but an early morning phone call from the Los Angeles Forest Services made our day more interesting. We were alerted to the severity of the Los Angeles and San Diego area forest fires that were raging over the previous weekend. According to the forest services, the firefighters were in chaos trying to salvage what they could of burning homes and ranger stations. The rangers told us that it would be impossible for us to go up to Mt. Wilson in the Los Angeles hills on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. Moreover, no media is permitted on the mountain until AT LEAST November 1st. This news threw our crew into a bit of a panic. Luckily, all of the trip’s changes were taken care of by 3pm that afternoon. All of our travel plans were moved up 2 days and thanks to the helpfulness of our observatory friends, we were able to move our travel plans forward, salvaging all of our interviews.

Tuesday morning, we met at the office at 7am to pack our gear into the rental SUV and prepare for the next two weeks of road tripping together. It took us about four hours and two Starbucks stops to reach our first destination, Lick Observatory in the San Jose Mountains. We met with Dr. Alex Filippenko from UC Berkeley who escorted us to the KAIT dome where the Automatic Imaging Telescope resides. The telescope, which looks like a miniature model of some of the larger telescopes that might be seen on Mauna Kea or Cerra Tololo for example, takes “snapshots” of distant galaxies, searching for changes week-by-week and year-by-year, hoping to spot a supernova burst. The telescope itself is controlled remotely and is controlled almost entirely by its own robotic system, using its mechanical components and its software to guide its nightly observations. Dr. Filippenko who we had interviewed a few weeks ago, was happy to show us the telescope and explain the developments made by his team over the last 10 years since the telescope was constructed.

We departed from the observatory after re-packing our gear and headed due east down the backside of the mountain toward the Interstate-5 freeway. We enjoyed the winding roads, lined with trees covered in gold, orange and red leaves, a pleasant autumn sight. The crew stopped in the town of Patterson, right off the I-5 and ate a celebratory lunch after hearing some good news about our progress in the NSF grant process. The NSF committee had sent the team an e-mail alerting them that their initial preliminary proposal had been accepted, the first step in the two-step NSF grant process. The team now needs to complete the full grant proposal, giving the NSF committee more information about the goals and the plans of the production already in progress.

Back on the road again, the team headed east, determined to reach the city of Mojave before deciding to settle in for the evening.

Transit to Chicago. Successful. A well-deserved rest taken.

We woke early to join the Cleveland Rush hour on our way to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. We set up in their observatory for an interview with Dr. Lawrence Krauss, Director, Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics, at Case Western University. The staff of the Museum was very accommodating, and we pulled off a quick and fabulous interview that I wish could have been longer. Dr. Krauss is brilliant yet humble, funny and insightful and he’ll definitely score points with the viewers. We packed up, and rushed off to the Naval Observatory in Washington D.C.
Six hours later, we drove up to the Naval Observatory, and met with Geoff Chester, the Public Relations Officer. He informed us of the unique nature of the unique nature of the U.S. Naval Observatory, both in history and in time. See, the original and still primary goal of the observatory is to track time. Time itself is a complex subject, but Chester made it easy to understand. A quick run-up to the Washington Beltway toward Baltimore left us hungry and exhausted. Tomorrow we face 2 more airports, a new time-zone, and a chance to visit our friends at Adler.