A trip to Arizona Sky Village

I don't know how much longer I'll be able to travel because of my health, so I recently planned a trip at the end of October-beginning of November for five nights with my wife and brother to see some genuinely dark skies again. 

After much research, I settled on Arizona Sky Village (ASV), an enclave of perhaps 25 or so 4.5 acre properties in Southeastern Arizona. ASV was founded about 20 years ago by amateur astronomers Jack and Alice Newton, the self-described "Stargeezers," and real estate developer Gene Turner. The idea was to develop a place in a dark sky location that would help preserve those skies and give serious amateurs their own physical community. Other privately owned dark sky communities in the U.S. include Deerlick Astronomy Village in Georgia, Chiefland Astronomy Village in Florida, Mountain Skies Astronomical Society Astronomy Village in California, Chirucahua Sky Village on the west side of the Chiricahuas in Arizona, Goldendale Sky Village in Washington, and New Mexico Skies Astronomy Enclave. 

Oddly, ASV doesn't have a dedicated website, although one of the owners from the UK, who also rents his house, has a pretty comprehensive, although somewhat outdated, website. We rented a different house, which was great.

Location, location, location 

ASV is situated just on the eastern side of Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains, benefiting from the location with dark skies and lots of clear nights with generally good seeing. The village is an easy 2 hour 45 minute drive from Tucson International Airport (TUS), taking I -10 east just over the border into New Mexico, then heading south on New Mexico Highway 80, crossing back into Arizona, and taking paved roads for the last 10 miles to the entrance of ASV, which contains well-graded gravel-dirt roads. (Image from Google Maps)

Astronomers rule

The first thing we noticed on arrival was all the small observatory domes. Most, but not all, of the houses at ASV have either dome or roll off observatories. As my brother commented, "You can see who's in charge here." What a great feeling! 

The village has light restrictions that require inhabitants to avoid outside lights and keep their windows curtained or covered with blinds. The only lights we could see while observing at night were headlights of the few cars coming down the long slope of Highway 80 about 10 miles away and a few distant lights on homes or ranches, none if which were at all bothersome.

The house we rented did not have an observatory, but had subdued lighting inside, just enough to do the usual household things. I would recommend a headlamp or personal USB light for close work in the kitchen or reading. It was like having lights dimmed about halfway down. 

Even the refrigerator had a red light inside, although it was quite bright so you could easily find what you were looking for.

How dark is it?

We visited for five nights in late October-early November. The sky was about as dark as it can get. However, I have been in places where it was hard to walk around. Here the ground is mostly bare dirt, which shows up better than a grassy field at night, so we really didn't need red lights to walk around. 

There was a slight overall sky glow that I don't remember from other dark sky locations years ago, and this is apparently due to the solar maximum, as was discussed in this thread on Cloudy Nights. Makes sense to me. Nevertheless, the Milky Way showed good detail, but not as fine and impressive as I remember from my observing days in wildlife management areas in central Florida back in the early 1990s. Sadly, those same sites are much brighter today.

What few clouds appeared showed up black against the sky, a sure indicator we were under a truly dark sky.

In 15x70 binoculars, the vistas were superb. M24 (the Small Sagittarius Star Cloud), the Double Cluster in Perseus, and the area in Cygnus around Sadr were simply magnificent, but that could be said for any view anywhere in the sky. 

This is a cell phone shot I took of the Milky Way through Cygnus, centered on the North American Nebula (NGC 7000).

The only time I noticed any light pollution, other than a slight glow reflected on high clouds 150 miles to the east over El Paso, was while observing the Leo Triplet galaxies (M65, M66, and NGC 3628) around 4:30 a.m. The sky background was a light gray, rather than the familiar black. It was the zodiacal light, a reflection of interplanetary dust in the ecliptic from the soon to be rising Sun that is only visible from darker skies. In this sky it was an obvious cone of light stretching halfway up the sky. That's impressive!

At right, my cell phone shot of the zodiacal light through Leo (left center), with the Beehive cluster visible above and right of Leo, and Mars above that.

High desert environment 

ASV is 4,600 feet above sea level. The peaks of the nearby Chiricahua Mountains rise to over 9,000 feet. There was no dew (yay!), but it was quite dusty, as it hadn't rained for a while prior to our visit. The view out the back sliding doors of our rented house presented a fabulous vista of the entrance to Cave Creek Canyon.

The wind at ASV tended to be from the east during the day, shifting to the west-southwest at night. It was mostly around 5-15 mph, often a bit gusty. Knowing this would be the case, I brought a wind screen and we observed from behind that. It helped a lot, especially because it got into the 40s each night.

Of the five nights we were there, the first three were pretty much completely clear, the fourth cleared up around midnight with a few scattered passing clouds that didn't interfere with observing, and it rained hard the last night. Transparency was excellent, seeing was slightly soft but without turbulence.

Observations

We packed a pair of 15x70 binoculars, 10x50 binoculars, and a 6-inch collapsible f/5 reflector telescope. It was a joy to just sit back and peruse the sky in binoculars, but having the telescope really expanded the experience. In many cases, the 6-inch performed more like my 10-inch in semi-light polluted skies (Bortle 4 or 5) back home in Virginia. And did I mention...no dew?

We didn't have any set plans for observing, but did have a list of "must-see" objects that we might otherwise have forgotten. Of course, we checked out as many classic favorites as we could. We had the summer Milky Way in the early evening and the winter Milky Way in the early morning, with lots of great sights in between. Here are a couple of examples from my observing log:

We both took a look in the 15x70s, with the NPB narrowband filter on the left eyepiece and the right eyepiece unfiltered, at the North American Nebula and the Veil. The North American is really prominent and I can trace it easily. Canada is huge and bright, the brightest part. Also noticed a large blob of nebulosity north of M39. (I think this is the three degree bubble of nebulosity in Cepheus around IC 1396 that contains the Elephant Trunk Nebula.) The Veil is great. Again, the eastern part shows up better than the western part. (NGC 7000, North American Nebula, image by Nynyny, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Took a long look at NGC 55, an 8.8 mag galaxy in Sculptor. It's a large fat slash oriented almost east-west. Good view in 150x, the 10mm with the barlow. The western end is fatter and kind of rounded off a bit before it gets to a faint star that's offset a little bit to the south, and then another faint star more in line with the galaxy but further out. There's also a dimmer star just south of almost the center of the galaxy. The center is quite elongated and appears to be more mottled on the southern edge than the northern, although it seems pretty clumpy overall. The eastern end trails off more, almost comet-like, and is visible past about a 12th magnitude star just south of the line of the galaxy on the east side. A lot of subtle mottling in this one, even in the 6-inch, making it an interesting target to study in a sky this good. It's shaped like a minnow without a tail, just a trailing body. (NGC 55 image by ESO, CC by 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

We would often look up with the unaided eye and see a meteor every few minutes. The hourly rate of the sporadics exceeded some of the Perseid watches we've had in the past from not so great skies. When taking a trip to a dark sky, don't neglect just lying back and looking up. We spent nearly half the time either doing this or looking in the binoculars. My Bino Body Mounts really helped reduce fatigue while observing, and gave us nice steady views of some spectacular star fields.

Daytime activities

Cave Creek Canyon, the gateway to the Chiricahua Mountains, is only four miles from ASV, so there was plenty to see in the daytime. I enjoy birding, and the area is a well-known birders' paradise. I added several species to my life list, although spring would be the prime time for birding. We also spotted a herd of javelinas (collared peccaries), several jackrabbits, a coyote, and numerous Coues white-tailed deer, most of which were not shy at all.

We're just casual hikers, and there were several easy trails that provided great nature watching and spectacular views. Vista Point (above) is only a .3 mile trail, but opens up to a great 360 degree view of the canyon.

The nature trail that starts at the Visitor Center is a bit over a mile one way and terminates at Sunny Flat Campground, one of many primitive campgrounds (pit toilets, no hookups) in the Coronado National Forest. The view from Sunny Flat (left) is stupendous, with the rock formations towering over the campground.

Would I go there again? Lord willing and the creek don't rise, YES!

(All images by me unless otherwise indicated.)