New Mexico L.O.W.F.I

Posts Tagged ‘Carnuel’

Found this on Duke City Fix, sounds fun!

Join the astronomers of TAAS on Saturday evening, May 7, at the Oak Flat Picnic Area in the East Mountains. A short drive out of ABQ takes you to dark skies, a variety of telescopes, a smorgasbord of celestial objects, and enthusiastic docents to answer your astronomy questions!

Come before dark and use the picnic area. Dress warmly; bring extra layers.

Observing starts after sunset. FREE. Great fun for all ages.

For directions, go to:

http://www.taas.org/taas/directionsof.pdf

Other dates in the 2011 stargazing season (all are Saturday nights):

June 25, July 23, August 20

Not terribly far from my house a fire has been burning in the Manzano mountains.  I am not sure how long it has been burning now, but long enough to have burnt 275 acres.  It could have been put out days ago, but the DOD (who owns the land) wouldn’t let firefighters in because they said there might be “unexploded ordnances” left over from the 1940s and 50s.  Now, days later, they suddenly change their mind.  What?  Did the unexploded ordnances disappear over night?  It seems fishy to me.  I kind of wonder what might really have been going on over there and if whatever it was actually started the fire, rather than lightening as they claim.

While I was looking for photos of the fire I came across this page which is a pretty good page about Manzano base.  It has several illustrations, like this one -

At first glance it looks right, but having searched the area on google satellite many times there seems to be a lot of missing stuff.  Especially a lot of underground storage areas (or whatever those underground thingies are used for) there are a lot more than that map shows.  That map makes you think there is only 1 mountain with shafts going underground, but that is wrong.  The one shown is the largest and what is known as Manzano Mt, but there are also two smaller ones.  Also missing is Starfire Optical Range -

I am wondering how much land is owned by the DOD because the area where the fire is burning is not on that map.  It is actually fairly far from the base, meaning there is a lot more DOD land than what people consider to be KAFB and Manzano Base.

Just another strange little thing — the area the fire is burning at in the Manzano Mts is called Mars Canyon.  Did the DOD name it that?  While there are places in NM that resemble Mars, that area isn’t one of them.  It is very green, not desert at all.

This is a photo of a cylindrical craft I took yesterday.  That was kind of strange (though not really for me), but what is strange now is that I tried to crop it so that the object would be larger when I posted it here because it is too large to post here (it is scaled down by half), but whenever I try to crop it more it blurs the object into a fuzzy ball.  I have never had that happen before and can’t figure out why it is happening now.  It isn’t that great of a photo because the object was rather far off by the time I got my camera, but you can see the full sized cropped section here.

Anyhow, this is the story — I saw the object and got my camera and took a few photos, this was the best one.   It was heading south and I decided to watch to see if it would turn a bit west and maybe land at Kirtland because then I would pretty much know where it came from.  As I watched it seemed to fade away and then reappear a couple times, but then it just totally disappeared.  Disappearing objects are nothing new here,  but it kept me from knowing if it did turn west and go towards KAFB.