Into the Great Wide Open

Day 10 - March 28, 2016

So, today was an adventure!  If you know me well, you know I hate to drive, especially when I don’t know where I am.  Interstate driving is ok, but city driving makes me crazy.  I just don’t see very well, and I’m not a great multi-tasker.  I can figure out where to go OR safely operate a car, but generally not both at the same time.  Having a GPS is immensely helpful, but still not great because I also suck at judging distances.  “Turn left in a quarter mile” means very, very little to me.  Give me, “See that car turning up there? No, the blue one.  That’s where you need to turn.” But in the spirit of wearing big-girl panties, I packed the kids up for a day of fun and leapt into the great wide open.

Our first stop was three hours away.  I’m not sure why I thought that was a good idea.  Three hours is a long way to drive for an hour’s stop, especially when you hate to drive.  But we had skipped it on the way down, which bummed everyone out, so I decided we were going back for it.  It was called Meteor Crater just outside of Winslow, Arizona.  It’s not a national park, but it is a national landmark.  I don’t know what that means, either.  Meteor Crater is aptly, though not very creatively, named.  It is the largest and best preserved meteor crater on the planet.  When they finally figured out that it was, in fact, a meteor crater, they were able to use what they learned to identify other meteor craters across the globe. The crater is just massive.  The meteor came in at something like 26,000 mph and created the crater in just 10 seconds.  It’s 600 feet deep, a mile across, and, on its floor, you could watch 20 different football games on 20 different fields at the same time with 2 million spectators sitting on the sides watching.  It was also incredibly windy.  It has been windy around here, but there were t-shirts proclaiming “I survived the winds at Meteor Crater!” so I suspect it’s usually pretty bad.  I took the kids up to a pretty high viewing area, and Max was almost blown away!  He had trouble staying standing, and even I had to brace myself against the wind to remain upright.  But the view was spectacular!

After that, we continued on with our space theme and drove into(!) Flagstaff to the Lowell Observatory.  The Lowell Observatory is where Pluto was discovered and also where they figured out that the universe is, in fact, expanding.  We don’t normally do guided tours, but that’s pretty much all we did here.  Our tour guide, Travis, was excellent, so we took both of the tours he was offering that day.  The first was all about Pluto.  We were a little early, so Travis showed the kids all sorts of cool things the museum had on display, and even a few things they didn’t.  We learned a lot about Pluto.  The guy who actually discovered it was not actually a real astronomer.  Percival Lowell had been looking for Planet X for years, but he died never having found it (though he did photograph it at one point and just missed it!).  After his death, his brother gave the observatory a large sum of money to finally find it.  No one, however, wanted to do it.  It was a boring project.  To find a planet, you take photographs and compare the dots.  Thousands and millions of dots.  So, finally, the janitor volunteered to do it. He didn’t have enough money for college, but he was an amateur astronomer, and he thought that by working at the observatory, he might just learn “by osmosis.” (I actually hate that phrase.  Osmosis requires water.)  Anyway, as Travis tells it, it worked out for him because just 10 months later he found Pluto exactly where Lowell had thought it would be, even though Lowell’s calculations were wrong because everyone assumed Pluto would be another gas giant and we all know today that it is not.  He got lots of scholarship offers and plenty of fame, and he went on to study more about Pluto and eventually got sent off on New Horizons on its journey past Pluto.  Here’s something else I learned from Travis.  Since New Horizons has enough velocity to actually escape the solar system, Clyde Tombaugh’s remains (that’s the janitor’s name) will actually survive the death of our solar system.  And since space is so vast, statistically speaking, there is very little chance that New Horizons will ever collide with anything.  His remains could theoretically survive the death of our galaxy and who knows what else.  Talk about immortal!  Another cool thing that we learned was that sometimes, Pluto is actually closer than Neptune.  The way that the elliptical orbits work out means that sometimes planets are closer and sometimes farther, but Pluto’s elliptical orbit actually brings it closer to the sun during a part of Neptune’s orbit that brings Neptune further away.  During this time, Pluto even has an atmosphere because a thin layer of this giant nitrogen lake on the surface evaporates.  Jack was fascinated.  He has been telling this to just about everyone who will listen.  The other tour was to see this gigantic telescope that, at one point, was the best that money could buy.  It was Lowell’s original telescope that he set the observatory up with.  We got to see the telescope and the dome that rotated with clockwork since there was no electricity in Arizona at the time (it was the wild west back then).  We also learned a bit about spectrometry and our expanding universe.  Even Max listened to most of it.  I was impressed.

I also learned from Mike that his father will not be stable enough for Mike to return to us.  I returned to Kingman with a heavy heart, and brought the kids to IHOP for dinner. There wasn't much chance of turning the day around after that, but pancakes for dinner is always a good start. I guess these big-girl panties will have to stay on a bit longer.