June marks the beginning of our annual tour of some of the great national parks of the US. Our motto beccomes "Have Telescope, Will Travel!" During the warm summer months we take telescopes, and occasionally other sidewalk astronomers away from the city and into the national parks for a couple of the annual star parties. In June, we'll be in Northern Arizona and Utah for the annual Grand Canyon Star Party and the Bryce Canyon Astronomy Festival. During these events, the dark skies of the national park become rich tapestry for amateur astronomer volunteers who introduce thousands of park visitors to the dark splendor of the summer Milky Way. Closer to home, the Joshua Tree Mational Park has a similar ongoing astronomy program, in conjunction with the Yucca Valley based Andromeda Society. http://www.andromedasociety.org/ Our OTASTRO website http://www.otastro.org/ has all the summer star party dates, but I'll recap June here: We'll be at the Kaibab Lodge June 11 - talks at sunset, and later, telescopes out on the Lodge grounds. http://kaibablodge.com/events.htm Sidewalk barry Peckham from hawaii and John Dobson from San Francisco will be with us. We'll be at the Grand Canyon - North Rim June 12-13. The star party takes place at both the North Rim Lodge and the South rim Yavapai Point parking lot June 9-16. http://www.tucsonastronomy.org/gcsp.html the public is welcome to hear the talks at sunset and look through the telescopes. All the telescope volunteers have registered with the national park as volunteers (aka lots of paperwork) and gone through a brief park training and orientation. If you're interested for next year, you can get information via the website above. Then we'll head north to Bryce Canyon National Park on June 14 - 16. Again all the volunteers have registered and even documented what types of telescopes they are bringing - as there is only room for 45 telescopes at the star party site. this event goes on for 3 days, and there are activites both day and night. It's all free, but some events require tickets due to space limitations. Read all about it here: http://www.nps.gov/brca/planyourvisit/astronomyprograms.htm June 22 and 23 will be our monthly sidewalk Astronomy nights in Pasadena and Monrovia. Finally, my monthly video, "What's Up" for June is up on the JPL website. Have a listen! It's only 2 minutes long and is packed with great amateur images of planets and more. There's lots to see this month!. :-) http://education.jpl.nasa.gov/amateurastronomy/index.html -- Jane Houston Jones Monrovia, CA 34.2048N 118.1732W, 637.0 feet http://www.whiteoaks.com Old Town Astronomers: http://www.otastro.org