INTRODUCTION
As always, you can view the photographic narrative for this story below. What is a photographic narrative?
This is the story of a day spent exploring Kitt Peak National Observatory. I’d been to Kitt Peak about five years earlier on an away-rotation during medical school at the University of Arizona. Since I successfully matched there for my radiology residency, I’d been wanting to go back to explore it further. However, The COVID-19 pandemic and a local wildfire on the mountain atop which Kitt Peak National Observatory was perched meant that the observatory had been closed to public since the day I moved to Tucson. Nearly three years after the start of my life in Tucson, the observatory finally reopened to the public, and just a couple months later, I planned the day trip which is the subject of this webpage and photographic narrative. In the time that had passed since I first visited, my interest in astronomy had deepened significantly, having had the opportunity to visit Kitt Peak’s sister observatory on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and having purchased my own telescope to explore the night skies from my own backyard. You can see the fruits of this backyard exploration in my Astrophotography Gallery.
On this day trip we drove the hour-or-so route from Tucson to the top of Kitt Peak, explored the McMath Pierce telescope where the Apollo astronauts studied the moon, had a picnic lunch in the fresh mountaintop air, and ended our day exploring the Mayall Telescope, currently under a 5 year, $100 million governmental contract for the study of dark energy. As always, I captured this unique experience in the photographic narrative below.
A STORY IN PHOTOGRAPHS
