After visiting the White Sands and feeling OK, we stopped in Alamogordo at the Golden Corral for lunch and then decided we would take a look at the Sacramento Mountains, which form the East edge of the Tularosa Basin. There were three reasons for this,
- It was there and it would be interesting to explore the very different environment up in the mountains.
- The National Solar Laboratory has its main observatory in a place called Sunspot, on Sacramento Peak and can be visited.
- Our route with the trailer would take us across the Sacramento Mountains and we would be able to check out the steep climb to Cloudcroft, 16 Miles from Alamogordo.
The road to Cloudcroft is 16 miles long and climbs over 4000 feet not too bad in a car, but we were worried that the Chevy would overheat with the trailer on the back (in the event we had no trouble with the rig in going through Cloudcroft). The drive up was very beautiful and when we reached Cloudcroft we branched off to follow the mountain range south to where the Solar Laboratory is. We were now in dense pine forest, on a road which stitched back all over the place, evey now and a gain you could see down to the Tularosa Basin below, or rather you could have if it was not full of sand blowing in the wind. Even though we were in southern New Mexico we were now high enough that there was snow at the side of the road.
We eventually reached the Solar Observatory and took a tour.
The Observatory has a number of telescopes, all of them for looking at our sun.
Although the astronomers there do look directly a the sun and have done a lot of valuable research into the way the sun behaves, its atmosphere (Chronoshpere) and sunspots, much of the work is done using spectroscopes, where the sunlight is passed through a prism and broken up into the separate colours which make up it spectrum. This is extremely valuable for finding the composition of the sun, the fluctuations in temperature and what is happening on its surface. The big (I mean huge) Dunn Telescope can revolve the surface of he sun down to an area of about the size of a Continent! This means that it can record spectroscopic data of the edges of sunspots and the centre of sunspots and use it to find out more about the sun. Pretty clever. On our visit we were allowed on to the viewing floor of the telescope, unfortunately the telescope had to be shut down because of the wind blowing sand particles around. (yes the same sand that we had seen in the morning was blowing up onto the mountain, 5000 feet below and 2o miles away).
As well as the variety of telescopes there it also has a fabulous view over the high Desert Plains, just above Lee Oliver State Park, unfortunately the view was restricted to about 2 miles because of the blowing sand.
So although it was fun it was a little disappointing not to have done everything we wanted to.
On the way back though we did see a herd of deer, and for the first time a herd of Female Elk (no male in sight though).
