In 1879, the year Thomas Edison is credited with the invention of the electric light, the night stars began to slowly disappear.
The Big Dipper? Gone! The Milky Way? Gone! Jupiter? Gone!
Slowly, year by year, artificial illumination from city street lights and hamburger stands, from downtown office buildings and highway billboards, from used car lots and traffic signals pretty much wiped out the ability of American city dwellers to look into the night sky and see much of anything.
It’s different around Lees Ferry on the Colorado River. Whether viewing the sky from a rustic campground on the river or from just outside your room at Cliff Dwellers Lodge, the sky is as dark as the nights were pre-Edison. Except now things are even more exciting. Cliff Dwellers Lodge has adopted the Dark Sky Initiative and as such, keeps the lodge dark for night star gazing.
Besides Jupiter and the Milky Way, besides Saturn and the North Star, besides Mars and Sirius, plus a zillion or more others, today’s night sky gazers get a near constant stream of both military and civilian satellites including the International Space Station, together with an extended view of all that’s natural.
The skies around Northern Arizona and Southern Utah are some of the darkest and clearest on planet Earth, perfect for viewing with naked eyes or with the aid of a telescope. See Saturn’s rings like you’ve never seen them before from in front of your front door at Cliff Dweller’s Lodge. Gaze at the moon – you can practically see Neal Armstrong’s footprints – from your river campsite near Horseshoe Bend.
If you have never been a stargazer and don’t know one star or planet from the other, you have no worries. There are numerous modestly priced cell phone apps available for download that utilize a GPS position system. While the apps vary, in most cases when you point your phone upwards, it will give you the name of the celestial body, its distance from planet Earth and more information than you thought you needed.
Take a look at ISS Tracker for your cell phone, which alerts you to the International Space Station as it passes.
Additionally, the Lees Ferry area attracts highly qualified amateur and university astronomers from observatories throughout the west. Simply ask someone to point out Saturn from Jupiter. In reality, it makes little difference if you don’t know their names. Just the sight of them in the black – really black – night sky is enough.
As for our moon, you’ll probably be able to figure that one out for yourself.