Taking an astronomy trip by air

Whether you're taking a trip purely for astronomy observing, or you'd like to do some observing on the side, having something to magnify your view can really add to the experience. Here I'm not talking about scopes that pack into the car for a drive but ones that you can carry with you on an airplane. That's a big difference. Your standard "grab 'n go" scope may not make a good airline travel scope once you try to put it in your luggage.

When to go

The Southern Cross from Florida in September?
Not gonna happen!
(Naskies at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0,
via Wikimedia Commons)

The most obvious consideration for when to go is to plan it around new moon. Consult an app or website to see when it gets dark and when the Moon rises or sets. If you are likely only to observe during the early part of the night, go within the week before new moon, when the Moon rises in the early morning hours. 

Research your destination and find out what months have the best chances for good observing weather.

Consider what objects you would really like to see. For example, going to the Florida Keys to see the Southern Cross, Omega Centauri, and NGC 5128 won't work in September. Use a charting app such as Sky Safari or Stellarium to see what will be up throughout the night.

Choosing a destination 

First and foremost, you'll want dark skies that have frequent clear nights and good seeing. Harder than finding that, though, is finding a place where there are no local lights to ruin an otherwise great sky. Non-astronomy people will often rave about the great sky, with no attention paid to all-night lighting that would be a deal-killer for astronomers. Even a single LED on a nearby outbuilding can be incredibly annoying.

Unless those traveling with you are as excited about astronomy as you are, and even if they are, it's good to have alternate activities available so everyone is happy and you have some variety. If they aren't into nature and the outdoors, you'll probably be limited to a fairly mediocre sky with lots of lights. Most destinations also have a chance of cloudy nights.

I recommend a place that has a kitchen, so you can prepare your own meals. You won't spend as much money, you'll be able to be set up and ready at dusk, and you'll be able to plan the meals and snacks around your observing and sleeping schedule.

Excepting stays in really posh digs, the largest part of the budget will likely be the air travel. You might find dark skies closer than you think unless you're bent upon seeing the opposite hemisphere. After all, the constellations are the same until you change latitude significantly.

Access to a telescope at your destination

The most convenient travel solution is to have a telescope waiting for you at your destination. You could ship your equipment, but that could be expensive and any delay could ruin your chances to observe. I have read about some people doing this for very distant trips, and maybe that's a decent solution in that case.

Above: The non-profit Reach for the Stars in Tucson, AZ, rents telescopes. Check for telescope stores or astronomy clubs at your destination that might be able to set you up with a telescope.

Some astronomy-suitable vacation rentals (dark sky, minimal light pollution) come with telescopes, but while I was doing research I found that most don't. I think trying to maintain them is more of a hassle than it's worth, except for a very few number of places dedicated to astronomy observing. Most places cater to a wider variety of interests because, let's face it, the market for astronomy vacation rentals is pretty miniscule.

Above: The Marathon Motel Sky Park in Marathon, TX, provides nightly observing programs with their 20" and 24" Dobsonians, as well as powered telescope pads if you bring your own.

Still, if I had a rental property where I knew astronomers would be staying, I would probably have an 8 or 10-inch Dob available because there's not much you could do to break one of those. However, then you have to have a chair and eyepieces and a finder and all that kind of stuff that can be broken, lost  stolen, or ruined fairly easily. So I understand the lack of available equipment.

As a renter, you don't know what kind of shape the equipment is in, or what comes with it. So it's good to bring, at the very least, binoculars, and if you can manage it, a small telescope and a small collection of eyepieces.

On my recent trip to Arizona Sky Village, I had arranged several options for on-site telescopes in advance, including observing with somebody who lived in the area and renting a telescope from a place near the airport. In the end we just used what I had brought with me. I couldn't have even rented an 8 or 10-inch Dob because it would not have fit in the rental car with three of us and all of our luggage!

What makes a good air travel scope

I'm not a refractor guy, not because I don't like them, but because refractors have never really fit into my style of observing. Many people use wide field refractors, for example 80mm refractors, as travel scopes. It seems like a good idea because they're small and relatively lightweight, and many people go that route. Little Maksutovs are also a popular choice, and although they have a limited field of view, they can double as a terrestrial scope with an erecting prism.

For me, it makes more sense to bring a good pair of binoculars than a wide field refractor or "Mak" of small aperture. Binoculars can be used for birding and nature watching in addition to astronomy and don't require much else. And what can be better than lying back while you're observing? See my Bino Body Mount post for a great lightweight mount for binoculars, pictured at left, that you can easily break down and pack in a suitcase.

Therefore, If I'm going to bring a telescope, I want something with as large an aperture as possible because I already have the low power/wide field experience covered with the binoculars. But it's problematic when you have to pack a telescope for a plane trip. 

Do-it-yourselfers have built some pretty incredible travel telescopes with larger apertures. But most of us don't have the skills, the time, or the money for that. Commercial versions are pricey. So we look for mass-produced telescopes that are lightweight and small but pack as much aperture as possible. 

Can a 6-inch be a travel scope? 

I can definitively say yes. I took my collapsible Sky-Watcher Virtuoso GTI 150P (6-inch) optical tube assembly (OTA) off its bulky go-to mount and built a travel mount for it. The entire setup weighs about 25 lbs. I took it with me from Virginia to Arizona and back by air and rental car, and was really glad to have that much aperture to appreciate the dark Arizona skies. 

If you want to go with a refractor or Maksutov, fine. You'll need that, a tripod, and some eye pieces, at a minimum. If you want to sit, you'll need some sort of chair you put outside and move around. 

I don't recommend a high-end scope or even a medium-end scope for air travel, because you may never see your luggage again, it may get broken, and even if you carry on the OTA, you still have to pack it well and there's a chance you may end up having to gate check it. 

I packed my OTA in a 22-inch hard shell carry-on suitcase, packing all my warm jackets around it, and it did fine. The mount, tripod table, and associated gear all fit in a 26-inch checked roller suitcase. My wife and I carried on the eyepieces, finderscope, and two pairs of binoculars (15x70 and 10x56) in a case and a small bag that fit under the seats. You can't put lithium batteries in your checked bags, so I carried them in my "personal item" bag that fits under the seat.

For eyepieces, I brought a Celestron Xcel-LX 25mm (30x), an Astro-Tech UWA 10mm (75x), a Svbony 7-21mm zoom, and a Svbony 2x barlow, giving me a range of powers from 30x to 214x, plenty for a 6-inch.

My Sky-Watcher 150P came with a go-to mount, which I wasn't about to take apart, and it was too big to fit in any kind of suitcase I want to be lugging on a plane. I decided to put together a new mount for it, and chose the Svbony SV225 alt-az mount. It's relatively inexpensive, weighs a bit more than 5 lbs., it's sturdy, and can be compacted into a pretty small form factor. I fit it in a plastic shoebox with foam padding. I also built a tripod table which could be broken down flat, upon which I bolted the mount.

The biggest challenge was finding a chair that I could bring with me that was the right height for the telescope. I do not like observing standing up, especially for many hours at a time. The chair I usually use is a big heavy Denver style adjustable chair, which is too big and heavy for airline travel. 

I looked online and finally found a folding tripod chair where each leg folds in half, making it even more compact. It's called a GCI PackSeat. It weighs just over 1 lb. I stuck tennis balls on the bottoms of each leg to keep it from sinking into soft ground, and that worked great. It was just the right height, about 18", for my telescope once I added a stool cushion, fastening it to the chair seat with sheet stays.

Your rental may not have any outdoor chair suitable for use with the telescope, so if you're planning a trip and planning on sitting at your scope, make sure you know what height chair you need, and what they have at your destination, or bring something the right height to sit on.

Don't forget to inquire about reclining chairs if you plan on doing binocular observing. Some people use tripods or monopods, but for me they are tough on the neck for more than a few quick looks well below the zenith. The place I recently rented had Adirondack chairs that worked well.

Sizing it up 

The three main rules for traveling by air are keep it light, keep it compact, and make it easy to assemble and disassemble. If you already have some luggage, it may be fine for your scope and mount/table/tripod. Otherwise buy luggage that will fit what you're designing or buying. I found that a 22-inch hard shell carry-on roller suitcase was the perfect size for the 6-inch collapsible 17-inch long OTA with suitable padding, namely my ski pants, a hoodie, a light down jacket, some gloves, and a hat. 

Try to use stuff you're going to bring anyway for padding rather than packing a lot of foam and dedicated padding. Just make sure it's packed well enough that it's not likely to receive damage under normal handling. 

Someone on Cloudy Nights mentioned they packed their OneSky 5-inch tube in their checked baggage in a duffel bag filled with clothes, and it made it fine. It depends on your own risk aversion how you want to handle that. I feel much more comfortable carrying the OTA on.

Watch your baggage weights and sizes and make sure you stay within the airline's limits. My 26-inch roller suitcase (above) that held the scope mount, table, bino mounts, observing stool, tools, windscreen, and other gear was pretty close to the max limit of 50 lbs. 

Disassembly and assembly

You want to make sure you have all the tools and bolts and other things that you'll need to assemble and take apart your gear. I found it was a good idea to go through the whole disassembly and reassembly process once I had collected all my tools and equipment, using just those things that I would be packing. That way I would immediately recognize if I was missing some key tool or item. 

Bring a few extra critical bolts, screws, washers, and other items in case you drop them and lose them. A single bolt could shut you down if you lose it. If you need a wrench, bring a compact 3/8 inch socket wrench and bring sockets in the right sizes that you'll need. Get a cheap stubby screwdriver if you need one.

Plan for the weather at your destination

Research the environment you're going to be in. For my trip to Arizona Sky Village in late October/early November, I realized based on my research that it was likely to be quite cold at night, possibly going into the mid-30s. Therefore, I made sure I brought plenty of warm layers, wool gloves, headband, hand warmers, and anything else I would normally wear for winter observing. It rained on the last night, and the nearby mountains (left) were covered with snow in the morning. 

I recently got a heated vest that's powered by a pocket power bank. It took up very little space but kept me very warm along with a hoodie and a light down jacket. Use several layers instead of bringing one huge bulky coat. You can add layers as it gets colder.

Even if it's nice and warm during the day, it may get quite cold at night, depending on where you're observing. So do your weather research in advance. 

The Arizona high desert can have some pretty strong winds, so when I went there, I brought a privacy screen I found at a Lidl grocery store (similar to this one) and used that. It worked very well, but I had to replace the cheap steel wire shepherd's hook stakes with aluminum gutter spikes. They were lighter and a bit stronger than the shepherd's hook stakes, which bend if you just look at them wrong. I used a local rock to pound in the stakes. I set the screen up at my local observing site first (above), so I knew how to do it and could evaluate the components.

A wind screen can also double as a light screen in case you encounter some unexpected all-night lighting, or a steady stream of car headlights.

If you will be observing in cold weather, your Mukluk or Sorrel boots are great, but they take up a lot of space in your luggage. Instead, bring chemical hand warmers, for example Hot Hands, and slip one under your toes in each shoe. Unless you're observing in sub-freezing weather, they will keep your toes warm all night. If the warmers are still hot and soft when you're done observing, put them into a Ziploc sandwich bag to cut the air off, and you'll be able to reuse them the next night. I used one pair of hand warmers three consecutive nights doing that, wearing them for probably a total of 12 hours.

Observing

Bring whatever charts you're going to need, whether on an app or if you use paper charts. Don't forget a red light for when you're moving around or reading at night. Pack some spare batteries and a small charger if you think you'll need one, as well as wall chargers and charging cables. Even a non-electric setup probably has some requirements for juice. 

If you're going to be going in and out of a brightly lit house, room, or cabin, you can get a pair of red goggles that are used for laser work to protect your night vision when you go in for a snack or go to the bathroom. The darker the sky, the more important it is to protect your night vision.

What finder scope are you going to use? I packed my RACI finder with my eyepieces in a carry-on bag. I wrapped each one in bubble wrap.

Make a list of those objects that you really want to see. Maybe they're ones that you can't see from your light polluted home or typical observing site, or ones that are perhaps further south than you can ever view from home. Make sure they're reasonably high above the horizon at some point during the night from your destination location.

Above: Sky Safari Pro allows you to make your own observing lists. I made one for my recent trip to Arizona. Easy to load it in the app and cruise around to view your "must see" objects.

Dealing with an "oops"

It's a good idea to bring a small bottle of alcohol or lens cleaner and some q-tips and lens tissues. You might end up dropping an eyepiece in the dirt, as I did, and it's great to be able to just clean it right off and go right back to observing. See Televue's instructions on cleaning optics.

I brought a roll of white duct tape. I flagged the guy lines for the windscreen with them, which allowed us to see them easily at night so we didn't trip over them. I also made a repair to a plastic box that got broken on the outbound flight. 

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.)