The Great 08 Summer Telescope Tour

'The Great 08 Summer Telescope Tour' will begin on July 2nd with some much-needed star gazing time at two of the nation's significant optical imaging observatories in Arizona by this blogger.

The first stop will be the first international 'Dark Sky City' of Flagstaff, Arizona to visit Mars Hill and Makeout Point at the Lowell Observatory the first days of July to be followed by a one-day Mini-Vision Quest to the magical blue-green waters of the Havasupai Indian Reservation inside the Grand Caynon walls.

An extended side roadtrip to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory Very Large Array [VLA] on the plains of San Agustin in the Land of Enchanment - New Mexico will be appear on the travel agenda to contemplate radio astronomy. This visit will come on the heels of a recent visit to the 'Quite Zone' around the Robert C. Byrd Telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory [GBT] in Green Bank, West Virginia.

The third leg of 'The Great 08 Summer Telescope Tour' will be to the University of Arizona in Tuscon, Arizona to the Mars Phoenix Lander Mission Science Operations Center prior to climbing "the mountain" to the Kitt Peak National Observatory.

The final leg is a return to the East Coast to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport for a meeting of the Virginia Aerospace Advisory Council at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on July 14 to discuss the new Taurus-2 rocket. The meeting at Wallops will be followed by the Space Frontier Foundation's NewSpace conference in Washington, D.C. to July 19.