The Adventures of Sock Monkey Episode 3: To Tucson and Beyond! Day 1

   Now, for the past three and a half days (July 27-30), I've been in Tucson on a mini vacation. It's relatively cool down in Tucson (compared to Phoenix, that is) and is about 90 degrees in town and it gets cooler as you go up! I'll start blogging now. 

   My mom woke me up at 7 AM and after some last minute packing, we headed south towards Tucson. It took two hours to get to our first destination: Kitt Peak National Observatory. We took two tours after we were done stretching and getting some feeling back into our legs in weather that was about ten (scratch that) twenty degrees cooler than back in Phoenix. One tour of the 2.1 meter telescope (it's actually a whole lot bigger. That's just the mirror size) and one tour of the 4 meter telescope. I'll explain the mirror thing in the picture below.

Light from the stars and other intergalactic things hits the primary mirror, which is angled just so that all the light bounces back and hits the secondary mirror. The light then bounces off the secondary mirror and into the hole in the bottom of the mirror and towards the viewer. See? Makes perfect sense! 

Anyway, we spent pretty much the whole day at the observatory. Here are some pictures. 

Welcome to Kitt Peak National Observatory! 

This is U of A's telescope!

That's twenty six telescopes on the mountain! 

That's a lot of telescopes!

Almost to the top!

I feel so short now...

Snakes in space...hmm...

4 meters of solid glass covered in aluminum for a mirror?! That's big!

This is how tall Kitt Peak National Observatory is!

When we were done, we drive to our hotel, which I think was really good. It's one of the hotels that are part of the chain of Wyndham Resorts. But that's beside the point. We checked and then dropped off our stuff in the room before stopping by a supermarket for our dinner. After that, my mom and I went to the recreation center to play ping pong and here's the score. Mom: 70  Me: 6. Hey, I never said I was good at ping pong! Afterwards, we borrowed a board game and played that until we decided to go to bed. Well, I'm done with the blogging so questions, comments, etc, comment board is right over there! Other than that, thanks for reading!