Border Patrol

We had never been to New Mexico before, except to drive across it on our way to Oaxaca. It's nice to stop and see a few things.

Rusty's RV Ranch isn't much to look at, but it's quite a comfortable place to stay. It's perhaps a ten minute drive from Portal, the largest nearby town. Portal is on the eastern edge of the Chiricahua mountain range and lots of birds hang out in the foothills. Some of the residents feed the birds, so the easiest way to find birds is to hang around the feeders.

Rusty's RV Ranch sits on a very flat stretch of desert in a valley between some low mountains. You can see for quite a distance and there isn't a tree anywhere in sight, other than some mesquite or maybe creosote bushes. Actually, that's not quite fair. Rusty has planted a few trees, but it's winter and (except when they block my view of the Eta Carina nebula :-) the trees aren't really noticeable in the overall landscape. The office has a laundromat, a shower and a giant hot tub that they call a "spa". Rusty has a garden with a fountain that attracts quite a few birds. It doesn't hurt that some of her tenants also put out birdseed. It's quite dark at night, except that every so often a car will drive along one of the nearby roads.

There are some astronomy developments nearby. Jack Newton's "Arizona Sky Village" is over toward Portal. Granite Gap is a bit to the north and "Rancho Hidalgo" is just getting set up a little bit to the southeast. I was curious about what the astronomy developments were like, so we drove by Rancho Hidalgo. The people we spoke with were very friendly. Gene Turner, the developer, very kindly offered to let us onto his land to hike to some caves where there are pictographs. He also offered to let us check out the skies through scopes at Rancho Hidalgo, if there weather improved. Alas, it hasn't, really. Tonight will be better than forecast earlier (clear or partly cloudy instead of cloudy), but seeing will still be bad.. Tomorrow we're leaving. It's too bad we won't get the chance, since Gene has a 30" scope which is big enough to show colours in quite a few nebulae.

I have put some pictures from our hike up at https://picasaweb.google.com/100719842898341494426/20120121Pictographs#

Apparently the worst light pollution at Rancho Hidalgo tends to come from the Border Patrol, who occasionally feel the need to safeguard astronomers from dark skies. The border patrol certainly makes their presence obvious. We may have been x-rayed by the border patrol while driving down the I-10 west of Las Cruces, a rather long way from the border. We had to stop while in the midst of their sensor array, which, if it was x-rays, could mean we got a rather large dose. It looked like they were building a much larger vehicle inspection facility at the site.

I went by Granite Gap and the Arizona Sky Village today. Granite Gap isn't actually developed yet. When completed, it will be a moblile home and RV park. Quite a few observatory buildings are in place, but the RV pads didn't appear to be laid out yet. There was at least one "Park Model" set up; that appears to be a mobile home. The existing Park model is 400 square feet; new ones will apparently be 450 square feet. The observatory sites should be reasonably well protected from headlights on Highway 80, but headlights on the 145 might be visible. RV pads are $2500 for a 99 year lease (until development starts, after which they will cost more).

The Arizona Sky Village is quite a different sort of development. Lots are quite large. Most appear to have both a home and an observatory building. The road in is washboarded to an extent that is very annoying in a small car, though would probably be OK for a pickup. Houses are far enough apart that it doesn't look like a community: more like a gathering for iconoclasts and hermits. But that could be an illusion; it's really hard to tell what a community is like just by driving past.

If seeing had been better this week, I might have been (foolishly) tempted by a pad at Granite Gap. Foolish, because it wouldn't be very convenient for us to come down to New Mexico for any length of time for most of the next ten years at least, and who knows what our lives might be like by then. It would be investing against an uncertain future. The reason it might have been tempting anyway is simply that the price is low and the skies are likely to stay dark, which isn't true of many other places in the US and Canada that aren't also very cold in the winter.

The countryside here is very pretty. The Chiricahua mountains have lots of interesting rock formations. There are many cave sites that were once occupied. There is lots of good hiking and many sites to view the 300+ bird species that live or pass through the area. Having visited once, we may well return.

Tomorrow we are off to Albequerque, where we will likely stop to buy new tires. Our car still has its orignal equipment tires, which have never been very good. They are now more than three years old and getting rather worn, so it's time to replace them before we try driving through mountains (or even across prairie) in the snow. We've decided to get all season radials for now and we'll probably buy chains once we're back in Canada.

Look waaaay up, and I'll call Rusty

We're currently hanging out at Rusty's RV Ranch near Rodeo, New Mexico (also near to Portal, Arizona.

No, we don't have an RV, but Rusty rents them for $50/night. The one we're in is quite comfortable. It even has in-bed electric heat, which is a nice thing when the temperature goes below freezing at night.

The reason for coming to this area was to do a bit of stargazing from a dark place. Jack Newton and a partner set up the Arizona Sky Village near Portal a few years back. They chose this location for its dark, transparent skies and good seeing. We haven't had ideal weather: the night skies have certainly been dark with pretty good transparency, but for the most part the seeing has been pretty bad. That's not the end of the world: bad seeing doesn't affect the views of large bright nebulae and galaxies all that much. Of course, having only a 110mm refractor severely limits how much one can see of faint, diffuse objects, but the scope is better than what Messier had to work with, so I really shouldn't complain.

Our neighbours at the next site, Bev and Wally, are from the Thousand Islands region of Ontario. I spent an hour the first evening showing Bev a few constellations, the zodiacal light, Jupiter, the M31 and M110 galaxies in Andromeda, the double cluster, the Orion nebula and a few others of the usual sights. That was fun, and gave me a chance to get myself oriented. Seeing was poor, so after Bev left, I looked for awhile longer at Orion and a few other sights, then went to bed.

I got up again around 3:30 am to look at the morning skies. Seeing was still bad, but much better than in the evening. I poked around a bit in Virgo looking for galaxies, but the views weren't great and the refractor is awkward to use near the zenith. I moved over to Ursa Major and found M81 and M82; I might have just seen dust lanes in M82, or I could have imagined them. The M108 galaxy and the Owl nebula fit easily in the same field of view with my 24mm Panoptic. Adding more magnificaton only served to make the outer parts of the Owl disappear; I couldn't bring out its eyes. I also failed to spot M109 near Phecda, and the Whirlpool was just a faint smudge. My brain tried very hard to find spiral arms in M101, but the way they kept shifting around, I don't think I saw any real structure.

I tried looking at Mars, but the poor seeing hid any features.

Eventually the moon rose: a very thin waning crescent. The earthshine was pretty to look at, as were some of the craters along the terminator. However, as the moon was shimmering a lot with the turbulence, after looking at it for a few minutes I went to bed.

Last night was better. I poked around a bit in the evening, looking at open clusters in Casseiopia. The refractor is better for that than my larger dobs, partly because of the lower magnification and wider field of view and partly because it gathers less light. In the dobs, most of the clusters are fully resolved and some don't fit within the field. Having the cluster stars resolved makes it hard to distinguish them from the general background of the milky way. With the refractor, many of the clusters look like grey fuzzy blobs, perhaps with a few resolved stars, and they stand out much better from the milky way background. I need to do more of that sort of observing to learn to properly appreciate the smaller scope. However, seeing was awful over most of the sky. The clear sky clock forecast improved seeing in the early morning, so around 8:30 pm I went to bed. I got up again at 3:30am and had two hours of good seeing and clear skies.

Under good skies, I was able to see any Messier object I looked for. I started low in the sky, trying to find the Eta Carina nebula, but trees and the low angle conspired to keep me from finding it in the scope. I thought I found it in binoculars a couple of times, but even that was uncertain. I moved up the sky to M68, a globular cluster just below Corvus. I found it right away as a grey smudge with the 24mm Panoptic; putting in the 13mm Ethos resolved a few stars, but the whole cluster appeared so much fainter that I enjoyed the view more with the 24mm. That was true of many of the objects I looked at over the course of the morning. I moved over to M83, the Seashell Galaxy, which I had never seen before because it is so low in the sky from BC that it gets lost in the soup. I found it easily and could even see how it got its name: a line of stars along one edge of the galaxy shape looks a bit like a snail, with the galaxy appearing as a shell on its back. A hint of spiral structure in the galaxy (at least with averted vision) adds to the impression of a shell. Moving up the sky again, M104, the Sombrero Galaxy, was also an easy find. I could see the central bulge and a very faint hint of the sombrero shape, but the view wasn't great. Still, I thought I could make out some of the nearby NGC galaxies, so I was encouraged to move back down to Corvus to look for NGC4038 and 4039, the Antenna galaxies. I'm pretty sure I found the pair, plus NGC 4027, but all I could see was a bit of fuzziness around the core and even then, only with averted vision. So they didn't look like much. I wandered over to Leo and quickly found M95, M96 and M105 as a nice set in the 24mm eyepiece. The contrast between the edge on and face on spirals was pleasing to look at. M65 and M66 were likewise easy to find below Chertan in Leo's back leg. The third member of the triplet was no more than a very small region of fuzziness around its stellar core.

I tried looking at Saturn, but seeing wasn't quite steady enough to let me find the Cassini division with such a small scope.

Once I moved into Virgo, I immediately got lost. My refractor has no finder scope, so I'm never quite sure where it's pointing. That's rarely a big problem when I'm looking for a solitary object or group of objects: I just sweep around until I find what I expect to see. WIth so many objects in Virgo, the problem is that there are always one or more galaxies in the field of view, but it's very hard to know which ones I'm looking at. That is further complicated by the fact that I don't know the scope very well yet and I have no experience with the skies from this site, so I don't know how faint an object I can expect to see. Suffice to say that I saw a lot of galaxies in Virgo: certainly more than Messier listed, but I have no idea which was which. I wished I had with me the excellent photo published in SkyNews or Sky and Telescope last year; that would at least have clearly distinguished face on from edge on spirals and both of those from the ellipticals, which would be a big help in trying to identify groups of galaxies and so get oriented. Oh well, perhaps I'll get out to Hope Slide with a big scope after we get back and get a chance to learn the Virgo cluster better.

I would have loved to move up into Coma Berenices, but it was right at the zenith where it is almost impossible to point this scope, so I gave up. I made another attempt to find the Eta Carina nebula, which had risen a bit higher in the sky by then. When I realized that I was looking for it in the northwest when I should have been looking nearly due south, I decided it was time to go to bed. All in all, quite a satisfying two hour session. It would be nice to be here sometime when seeing is good, rather than just OK.

Anthropological Observations

I don't understand why it should be much more difficult to get a prepaid cellular data plan for Michelle's iPad in the US than it is in Mexico.

In Mexico, we gave cash to Telcel and they gave us a data plan. Due in part to our limited spanish, the process took two hours, but once it was set up, it worked for the rest of our stay. Having the data plan was very, very convenient.

In the US, we apparently have to get the plan through AT&T. They insist on having a credit card to pay for the plan, which is tolerable. They also insist that we enter a zip code and that the zip code matches the home address on the credit card. That's where it all falls apart, since as Canadians residing in Canada, we don't have a zip code.

Apparently one can sometimes get around this by purchasing a prepaid Visa gift card and supplying its number to AT&T's data plan registration form on the iPad. However, it's not always obvious which zip code to use. Probably that of the shopping mall where the Visa card was purchased, but maybe somewhere else.

It seems like a simple problem to solve:

• AT&T offers a service we want
• AT&T wants money for the service
• we want to give AT&T money and receive the service, but they refuse to take any form of payment that we can offer. Ideally, we would pay cash.

But apparently cash doesn't work in AT&T's brave new economy.

Mexico City

We left Mexico City on Saturday. The air was so thick with smog that buildings 100m away were partially obscured. I was a lot more congested than I had been the day before, and I was coughing quite a bit; I'm pretty sure it was because of the smog. That was a huge change from every other day we were there. When we arrived on Tuesday, visibility was very good and the air seemed fine throughout the week. Presumably a different weather system came in: I can't imagine that Saturdays would be so much worse than weekdays.

Overall, we really enjoyed Mexico City.

Our hotel (the Hotel Milan) was very nice and the neighbourhood was full of good restaurants and street vendors. We ate very well most meals. Sufficiently well that we typically only ate two meals a day.

The subway costs 3 pesos (about 25 cents) per person per trip, no matter how far you ride it. The light rail system that extends out from the metro also costs 3 pesos. Buses are 5 pesos per trip, sometimes less. There are taxis everywhere. They cost quite a bit more and Lonely Planet warns that Mexico City has fake cabs that rob their passengers, so we didn't take them often. However, when we did, we found the drivers to be very friendly and they always took a direct route to our destination. Cabs in Mexico City are metered, unlike in Oaxaca where you need to negotiate the fare before getting in. Overall, it was very easy to get around. We were also within walking distance of many attractions, so we got quite a bit of exercise.

And the museums!

We went to the National Museum of Anthropology twice and still only saw a little over half of it. We visited hardly any of the second floor, which focuses on the culture in various parts of Mexico. We mostly stayed on the ground floor, which has artifacts from pre-hispanic sites from all over the country. And there are a lot of them. Many of the museum's exhibits appeared to have been refreshed fairly recently, so quite a bit had changed since our previous visit in 1995. I was surprised to find that the famous (huge) "Aztec Calendar" was in fact a record of conquests and not a calendar at all. The Mayan section also had many recently excavated artifacts from sites near the Guatemalan border.

This visit to the museum was also much more interesting for us, because we have learned a lot about the history of meso-america since our previous visit and so we had context for comparing artifacts from many of the sites.

It's a pity that reports of roadblocks and robberies in northern Veracruz kept us from going there: I would love to have seen some of the Olmec sites in person (though the best one at La Venta is now mostly under an oil refinery). It was interesting to compare and contrast the Olmec artifacts with roughly contemporary ones from Oaxaca. For example, the olmecs may have done a bit of cranial deformation, but most of their sculptures show people with normally rounded heads. There were also quite a few Olmec sculptures showing men with beards. In Oaxaca on the other hand, it seems like most of the nobles had flattened skulls and almost none were bearded.

Something that struck me this visit was how much the deliberately deformed skulls resemble Neanderthal skulls. The sloping forehead, protruding jaw and wide cranium seem very similar to me.

We took perhaps 400 photos in the museum (and perhaps 20 of the rest of Mexico City). I've put a few of the more striking ones up at https://picasaweb.google.com/100719842898341494426/20120110MuseumOfAnthropology#

In the Mayan section of the museum, Michelle found what may be the original smiley emoticon:


The photo below shows the smiley in context:

What a tangled web we weave

I'm getting behind again.

On our way to Mexico City, we went to Teotihuacan, then to Tula to see the ruins of Tollan, which was the capital of the Toltec empire for awhile.

The Toltec empire arose after the fall of Teotihuacan, but either fell apart before the Mexica (aka Aztecs) came into the area or was destroyed by them. After the Mexica had been around for awhile, one of their kings burnt all their history books and rewrote their history to make them the heirs to the Toltecs. The Mexica adopted Toltec artistic styles and religious practices.

Some legends have it that the Toltec king Kukulkan left Tollan when the people decided to replace Quetzalcoatl as their chief god. The new supreme deity was Huitzilpotchtli, who required human sacrifices. Kukulkan took some loyal soldiers and made his way to the Yucatan, where they either founded or conquered Chichen Itza. Or maybe Kukulkan was mythical and Chichen Itza just had close trading relations with the Toltecs. Whatever the case, Chichen Itza is quite different from other cities in the Mayan areas and seems to have a lot of Toltec influences in art, architecture and religion.

A lot of art and architecture in the ancient cities is quite similar across most of the sites we have been to. I was struck by how many of the sculptures we saw at Tula were stylistically quite different from what we have seen at other sites.

A few of our pictures are at https://picasaweb.google.com/100719842898341494426/20120109Tula

There is lots of Toltec stuff at the National Museum of Anthropology, which I will write about later.

While we were at the ruins of Tollan, there was a large grass fire burning in the gulley just outside the reconstructed part of the city. It looked like a deliberate burn had gone out of control. A fire truck showed up near the start of our visit, then left shortly before we did. It looked like they had managed to regain control. Deliberate grass fires seem to be very common in Mexico: we have seen them everywhere we have been, from Chihuahua down to Oaxaca. It struck us as ironic that this grass fire was very near to a ruin known as the "burnt palace".

Flat heads and piercings

Today we spent eight hours visiting Teotihuacan. We saw maybe half the archaeological site. Much of the old city is now under people's houses or businesses, but even the designated archaeological site is huge. Maybe 85 thousand people lived in Teotihuacan at its height, and they liked to build stuff.

We got to the site just before 8am. We had hoped to be there about an hour earlier so we could take some photos in the dawn light, but you know how it goes. Wouldn't have mattered if we had arrived earlier, since the gate guard wasn't ready to take our cash until about five minutes after we got there.

The first order of business was to climb the temple of the sun, the largest ancient pyramid in the Americas. The goal was to take a few pictures of the entire site from on high, with the early morning light providing good contrast. A very friendly dog decided to join us in the climb. Michelle got stuck one level from the top and declined to go higher, so only the dog and I were on top of the pyramid when a dozen hot air balloons came floating past. One daredevil pilot, instead of going past the pyramid, decided to go directly over the top. I wasn't sure whether his balloon was going to climb fast enough to clear the top of the pyramid, so I took cover on the far side as they drew near. No need to worry though: they cleared the top by at least twice my height.

In the excitement, I quite forgot to take a complete set of photos of the site. Oh well, it's on google maps :-)

When we visited Teotihuacan in 1995, we knew very little about mesoamerica. It was nice to visit the site and the associated museums knowing a bit more. I was quite interested to see sculptures representing the nobles of Teotihuacan with flattened foreheads. I knew that the Mayans and the people of Monte Alban would tie stones to the foreheads of young nobles so as to deform their skulls; I hadn't realized that had also been the practice in Teotihuacan. The giant ear plugs were also worn by all three cultures. The things people will do to be fashionable!

The Mexican archaeological ministry, INAH, has been busily excavating and restoring buildings at Teotihuacan since our last visit. Unfortunately, that meant the Temple of Quetzalpapalotl was closed for restoration and we were unable to revisit its carvings and murals. As a more than sufficient consolation, we had the time to visit three palaces that were away from the main site and that have spectacular murals. I have to give credit to the Lonely Planet guide to Mexico: without their decriptions of the various palaces, we would never have known to make the effort to visit them and be astounded that such vivid paintings still exist after being exposed to wind and weather for more than a thousand years.

One thing that struck us as quite odd is that there is no restored ball court at Teotihuacan. Every other major mesoamerican site we have visited has had a ball court somewhere quite close to the main ceremonial complex. They have excavated things from Teotihuacan that they think are related to the ball game, but if they have found a ball court anywhere on the site, they aren't advertising its existence.

We saw quite a few birds onsite as well, but didn't get any pictures, nor did they hold still long enough for us to have much hope of identifying what we saw.

I've put a few general pictures from today up on picasaweb: https://picasaweb.google.com/100719842898341494426/20120108Teotihuacan

We thought about bringing the dog home with us, but decided that Cordelia would object.

Up, up and away

So the kids here actually get their Christmas presents on January 6th, the day the three kings supposedly visited the baby Jesus.

In Oaxaca, many children write their christmas wishes on a piece of paper, then go down to the Zocalo and buy a helium balloon. They then tie the list to the balloon and let it go, carrying their request up to heaven (or to the three kings, santa or whoever is supposed to receive it; I'm not clear on the exact mythology).

So tonight I set up my telescope just before sundown to look at the moon. I was amused and surprised when the first balloon drifted across the face of the moon. Over the course of the evening, I spotted at least ten more balloons passing near or in front of the moon. One of them I spotted well after sunset. On several, I could spot the note hanging from the balloon (but not well enough to read it.)

I hope the kids' wishes come true, but I wonder where all those balloons end up.