"Space, The Final Frontier"

Tuesday May 28 Wasatch Mountain State Park, Utah

Tripometer 3778

We arrived at Wasatch last night after spending the bulk of Memorial Day weekend at Great Basin National Park near Baker, Nevada.  Great Basin is one of the least visited parks in the National Park system - I think because it’s “out of the way” and lacks infrastructure in and near the park for big RV’s.  It was a pretty special spot.  We camped at 7300 feet with Wheeler Peak looming right above us, snow peaked at 13,063 elevation.  We toured Lehman Cave which is a unique limestone cave in the park, full of stalagmites and stalactites.  There are over 40 discovered caves in the park.  

We also hiked Strawberry Creek where we saw lots of old carvings in the Aspen trees along the trail.  It turns out that the area was populated with thousands of raised sheep in the mid 1800’s to mid 1900’s and the Basque immigrant sheep herders that lived here carved notes into the Aspens as a way of communicating with each other.

Great Basin is a Dark Sky park and we attended a talk by the rangers one night at their astronomy amphitheater.  They had several really nice telescopes for attendees to star gaze.  We viewed Messier 4, a globular cluster in the constellation of Scorpius.  It’s around 6000 light years away and over 12 billion years old.  It’s a cluster of over 100,000 stars.

The ranger started his talk by pointing out that it’s hard for the human mind to conceive of the numbers and distances involved when discussing space.  He provided perspective by putting a million, a billion and a trillion into seconds and asking…how many of you think you’ve been alive for a million seconds, a billion seconds, a trillion seconds?

1 million seconds =  11.5 days

1 billion seconds =  31.7 years

1 trillion seconds = 31,710 yeas

I’ve used a similar "seconds" example before when discussing money, and the vast difference between a millionaire and a billionaire.

So back to the Messier 4 cluster that we were viewing through the telescope - 6000 light years away.  1 light year is 6 trillion miles…that’s a 6 with 12 zeros behind it.

Here are some fun photos shot and edited by Eloise while we were in Great Basin.