The Horsehead Nebula is in the constellation Orion. In astrophotography, dozens of photos must be layered together to achieve this effect. COURTESY/YASH PANSE
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Saturday night star parties at the Jack C. Davis Observatory
by Jeri Chadwell-Singley jeri c @new srevi ew.com
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RN&R
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08.25.16
series of two-lane roads lead to a building on the outskirts of Carson City, where a group of partygoers are gathered on a patio under the darkened desert sky. The sound of their voices rises and falls, mingling with music emanating softly from an open door. A man’s voice carries over the din of friendly chatter, “Anyone want to have a look at Saturn? You can see eight of the moons tonight.” Answering calls of assent ripple through the crowd as several people break away from conversations to weave through a small forest of telescopes toward the one that’s currently aimed at the gas giant and its moons. As Saturday evening progresses toward Sunday morning, the party continues—much like it has on almost every Saturday for more than a decade. This is a star party at the Jack C. Davis Observatory.
The space station The Jack C. Davis Observatory opened on the campus of Western Nevada College on May 15, 2003. Its “first light”— the debut of its telescopes—was attended by Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon. The observatory is located on the far western edge of the WNC campus, perched on the foothills of the Eastern Sierra. A walking path around the building features sculptures with artistic interpretations of the planets of our solar system. Inside the building is a classroom packed with equipment—computers, celestial globes and about a dozen small to medium-sized telescopes. Doors on either side of the classroom’s far wall open onto a narrow room with a retractable roof that houses three large, computerized telescopes. The Jack C. Davis Observatory is indeed a researchlevel facility, but it wasn’t created exclusively for academicians.
“We think of it as a community resource,” said observatory director and WNC physics professor Dr. Thomas Herring. “It’s not just for the college students. It’s definitely for everybody— anybody interested in astronomy at any level.” The observatory is open to the public, and while it’s on WNC’s campus, it’s actually operated by a group of amateur astronomers, the Western Nevada Astronomical Society. Its members are not academics, but their collective body of knowledge and respective research interests are impressive, to say the least. Some of them are contributors to peer-reviewed scientific journals. And several participate in serious astronomical research through projects like the Research and Education Collaborative Occultation Network (RECON)—a National Science Foundation-funded citizen science research project aimed at exploring the outer solar system through coordinated telescope observations of objects orbiting
