The Grand Canyon Star Party 2025
So, the Senior Product Specialist for Sky-Watcher USA, Kevin LeGore, has been attending the Grand Canyon Star Party for the last 20 years (and uses vacation time to do so) as it is one of his favorite star parties in the country. He also has a tight little outreach crew of folks who have been attending even longer (including some of the originators of the event), some of the park rangers and volunteers who organize it, and this year - a couple new faces.
Grand Canyon has relaxed some of its rules regarding comercial interests and while the event itself is always geared towards the public and free astronomy education, Sky-Watcher attended this year to see what all the fuss was about and just how big of a footprint we'd like to have next year.
Enjoy the pics!
HAC125DX setup at sunset for live imaging
We had to soak in views of the canyon during the day of course
Bringing the daytime Moon, Venus, and impressive hydrogen alpha views of the Sun to the people
Kevin repping the new gear and his latest t-shirt design for his outreach group: FOCUS
Park ranger Rader Lane got an asteriod named after him! David Eicher from Astronomy magazine also gave a great talk on galaxies
Awesome talks each night before dark - here was David Eicher on Galaxies. There was also a dude playing Claire De Lune and other astro-inspired classic tunes on the piano, but I was too busy setting up to get a pic
Kevin's better half has taken a shine to customizing all things glow in the dark, even her nails!
Of course we played around with Kevin's super expensive night vision binocular set up
We played with them a lot
Father and son stoked on some free gear
Heliostar 76mm and 100mm bringing the h-alpha Sun to the people
Duh
Cell phone pic through the eyepiece of the Heliostar 76mm h-alpha scope
Richard Wright Jr. (@accidentalastro) with his SmartEye self-stacking eyepiece from Pegasus Astro
Cell phone pic of the Needle galaxy through said SmartEye eyepiece
Live imaging setup with the Starizona tricked out edition of the new HAC125DX minigraph
Kevin has also become quite the cocktail drink mixologist so we all joined for early dinner each afternoon for burgers, brats, and dark sky daiquiris. Outreach enthusiast @astr0nick listening to Richard from afar
A portion of the Grand Canyon crew including sprite hunter Will Young (@DeepSkyDude)
A couple of prim-looking star gazers (yours truly and my trusty adventure partner/gf)
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Check out our What's Up? Webcast recap of the event with
more details, stories, and photos!!