Happy New Year! I’ll be posting most of my Arizona journal entries over the next several weeks, all in mostly random order, ’cause you know, random is one of my favorite words:

Today we went to the Kitt Peak observatory!

First we had to drive up Kitt Peak to get to the observatory. I could see little white domes from a while away. The observatory is named for the mountain, and I like that but it could get a bit confusing. Inside the gift shop there were Tohono O’odham baskets with very pretty designs. The observatory is actually on Tohono O’odham land.

There are 26 different telescopes being used at Kitt Peak. The largest here, the Mayall telescope, is 4 meters across! It’s one of the largest optical telescopes in the world! Kitt Peak also has the world’s largest solar telescope! I didn’t know there were so many of the largest telescopes in the world here. Aidan says that it’s freaky cool! I agree. Maybe sometime when we are back in Arizona and Aidan is old enough we can do one of the nighttime programs. I had fun at Kitt Peak and I think it would be fun to go to another observatory sometime.

Here are a couple of interesting links that show more about it.
http://www.noao.edu/kpno/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitt_Peak_National_Observatory
http://www.noao.edu/outreach/kptour/mcmath.html
http://www.noao.edu/outreach/kptour/mayall.html