Tucson Showplace -- Author's Event

On Tuesday, January 31st, the Gem Shop sponsored an Author's Event at the Tucson Showplace. I stopped by the day before to find out more about the logistics of the event. The first logistic was moving huge bins of heavy rocks out of the way. Here is the room the day before.

Late morning on the 31st I drove the 14 miles in from the Tucson Mountain Park. It is an easy drive that doesn't require dealing with the crazy highways and heavy traffic typical of Tucson. The six authors included Brad Cross (Mexican agates), Scott Wolter (Lake Superior agates), Roger Clark (South Dakota Fairburn agates), Johann Zentz (agate encyclopedias I, II, III), Hans Gamma (Oregon jaspers), and me. I felt very privileged to be included in such a fine group. We were each asked to speak around ten minutes and explain how it was that we were standing at the podium.  The Gem Shop did a great job marketing the event.  Over 100 people showed up for the talks, book signing, and cocktail reception.  Here is the poster they had printed.

The books were all lined up and ready to be sold.

Here is a picture of the six of us seated against the wall. This is the same room that had all the bins of rocks in it the day before.

Here are all six of us.  It is interesting that three of us are not professionally trained in geology.  Johann is a music instructor, Roger Clark is a retired lawyer, and I worked mostly in medical marketing. 

Gene Mueller, from the Gem Shop.  He did a great job introducing all of us.

Johann Zenz, who is from Austria. 

Roger Clark is from Wisconsin, but is an expert on South Dakota agates. 

Hans Gamma is from Switzerland, but now resides in Arizona.  He is an expert on Oregon jaspers.

Brad Cross is from Austin, Texas and is an expert in agates from Northern Mexico.

Scott Wolter was one of the first in this country to publish a book on a specific type of agate.  in 1986 he published a book on Lake Superior agates.  Lately he has been writing books on history, inspired by the finding of artifacts that date well before Columbus, but that were not produced by Native Americans.

In my talk I relayed stories about how the museum founder, Axel Niemi, inspired me to be a rockhound.  I also formally announced that I will be producing online rockhounding adventures.  Now that I am finally home, I plan on continuing the project begun last winter.  I am looking forward to making this vision happen.

Tucson Gem and Mineral Show

I am sitting at the Sky Harbor Airport right now waiting for my flight. Friends, Gerald and Jill, and I went to see the movie, Descendants, last night. It was OK, but not what I was hoping. We stayed in the parking lot at the mall in Glendale and then headed over to Avondale this morning to turn in my RV. Gerald and Jill are continuing their adventure and have other rockhound friends coming in next week, and their daughter the week after that. I am going home to work on my online rockhounding adventures project. I have only been out here in Arizona for eight and a half days, but there were so many segments of the trip that it seems like a lot longer.

I heard that the number of total show sites in the Tucson area this year did decrease.  There are 39 different locations.  We went to four.  The main venue where I spend all my money is at Electric Park.  Here are a couple of shots of the Village Originals tent.

Outside their tent they have all the large amethyst and citrine towers, amongst other things.

The venue for my speech was at the Tuscon Showplace -- The Gem Shop facility.   I'll include more pictures of the author's event tomorrow.

At the Tucson Showplace, there are several dealers including Paul's Ocean Jasper booth.  Here is a great piece of OJ.

Out in front they have tables with ocean jasper.  Gerald and Jill are in the picture below, along with my friend, Karen Boaz.  She lives in Benson, AZ in the winter and in Au Train, MI during the summer.  We have been shopping the show together for many years.  Thanks to Karen for driving us around so we didn't have to take our RVs.

Here is a picture of a large piece of petrified wood.

I also love the table tops.

Some of the dealers sell rough rock -- lots of it.

The Gem Shop probably has the largest variety of agate for sale.  Here is just one section.

Tonto National Forest, Carefree, Arizona

Last night we camped in the Tonto National Forest, located near Carefree, Arizona -- which is around an hour northeast of Phoenix. Friends, Jill and Gerald, want me to post some of the pictures of us so I am including the pictures from the last day or so in this update. There was no cell signal when we were there, so I did not update the blog this morning. Right now we are in Glendale, AZ at a shopping mall. We are going to go to the movies tonight to see Descendants and will camp here tonight. I drop off the RV in the morning and fly back to Michigan tomorrow.

I'll catch up with some of the other AZ pictures in the next couple of days.

I carefully snapped this picture while driving.  It shows Jill and Gerald's RV and some dragoons that welcome you to Carefree, AZ.

We camped in the Tonto National Forest.  Here is one of the mountains bathed in sunset glow.

Here are Jill and Gerald, as well as Bruce their dog.  They are standing on the top of a small uplifted mound.

And me....

Today we spent the day rockhounding.  The first site had some feldspar.  While we were looking for specimens, I captured the sun coming through this cactus.

A bee cooperated for this photo.

Another cactus....

And more dragoon boulders.

The next two shots are not completely in focus since I was taking the pictures through the RV's glass window.  I'm not sure what type of birds they are, but the first appears to be some type of raptor.  He was around 16 to 18 inches tall.

This black bird had amazing red eyes.   I was going to go out of the RV to get a shot, but he flew off.

There were lots of happy cacti communities.

Gerald drove their RV 10 miles down a very rugged road to Horseshoe Lake.  The AZ rockhound guide said there would be agate and jasper.  There was some jasper, but we didn't find any of the translucent black agate that the book said was there.  Oh well -- we tried.

This is the wash we walked down looking for agates and jaspers.

This 20 inch rock had a bit of agate, but not much.

This is the best saguaro cactus I saw today.

This one was perched on some red sedimentary rock.

Kitt Peak National Observatory -- Post 2

There is so much happening out here in Tucson that I am not able to keep current to the day, or the day before as I like, to update the blog. For this posting I am going to include the rest of the pictures I took Sunday night at the Kitt Peak National Observatory. I’ll try to catch up this week before I leave Arizona to include pictures from Tucson Mountain Park, the gem show, Saguaro National Park, and the author’s event that happened last night. It was a real privilege to be included with the group of six authors. I will say that I am glad my short speech is over and that feedback was very positive.

The pictures below document the variety of telescope structures that exist on Kitt Peak. The first is the one you can see from the highway.

This odd looking structure is the most interesting telescope on the mountain. It is used exclusively to study our sun. If any of you have ever used a magnifying lens to concentrate light from the sun,, you know how hot it can get. In order for scientists to study our sun, it is necessary to cool the telescope. Thousands of feet of cooling tubes are used to control the temperature.

Here are some more of the telescope domes and other buildings on the Kitt Peak grounds.

And how about a couple of more sunset photos….

This shot is hard to make out, but it was taken inside one of the telescope domes. Once the sun goes below the horizon, you cannot use any white light on top of Kitt Peak. Thus, I was not able to use a flash.

This shot was taken inside the visitor’s center of a display showing how big some of the telescope mirrors are. The biggest at Kitt Peak is the 4 meter. When it was installed 20 years ago or so, it was the biggest in the world. Now it ranks around the 25th. Efforts are under way to build a multi-mirror telescope that will be a total of 100 meters in diameter! It is being built in Tucson.

Since we were so high above the valley and away from smog and light pollution, I just had to get another picture of the moon.

Here are a couple pictures of nebulae we were able to look at through the telescope. The first is the Eskimo Nebula, a round cloud of gas ejected by a dying star. This nebula was discovered in 1787. The second is the Orion Nebula. It is located around 1,500 light years away and is 30 light years across. It contains enough material to make 10,000 stars the size of our sun. I must admit that this was my favorite object that we viewed. Although these images were displayed on the computer next to the telescope, we were able to see the images quite clearly. The only difference is that our eyes were not able to see the color the way that digital cameras are able to pick up.

This picture, of course, is Jupiter. It is actually a computer image and is a bit larger than what we actually saw looking through the telescope. We were able to see four of Jupiter’s moons, which I thought was totally awesome!