Join us on a cosmic journey, starting in our solar system and diving deep into space to explore unimaginably remote galaxies! One of our knowledgeable astronomers will be your guide on this premier hour-and-a-half long astronomy experience in Sedona.
You will meet your astronomer at a prearranged dark sky site near Sedona. All tours on protected forest lands are conducted under USFS permit. Which locations we have access to varies seasonally, so we will send you full meetup instructions upon confirmation of your booking. All our dark sky sites are within a half hour drive of Uptown Sedona.
We begin with a guided tour of the constellations. Your guide will trace out the star patterns with a laser while sharing the names and stories behind each one. Along the way, we will also point out any visible planets, the Milky Way, meteors, passing artificial satellites, and more.
Next, we zoom in on a selection of fascinating space objects with our big telescopes. We use two kinds of telescopes on the tour. Part of the time, we use high quality eyepieces on our visual telescopes. This is a marvelous way to observe the Moon, planets, double stars, and brighter deep sky objects.
However, many deep sky objects are very faint and hard to see even through the largest telescopes. For those objects, we swap out our eyepieces for special astronomy cameras and stream live views directly to our 4K OLED TV. These cameras are far more sensitive to light than the human eye, allowing us to capture amazing details. Astronomers call this technique electronically assisted astronomy (EAA), or video astronomy.
With the aid of video astronomy, you can see the pinkish red glow of hydrogen in stellar nurseries, colorful remnants of dead suns, the shimmering bluish veil of dust surrounding the Pleiades star cluster, and dust lanes in distant galaxies. Along the way, your guide will share interesting and fun stories about the sky, the objects we view, and the astronomers who came before us.
Our tour is child-friendly and perfect for families, couples seeking a romantic starlit evening, and anyone else who is curious about the universe around us!
