Columnist Susan Snyder: Boulder City is home to the stars

Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2002 | 8:15 a.m.

Kyle Carrell knelt on the ground in the moonlight surrounded by about 40 girls.

None of them was older than 8.

"Deep sky stuff is stuff you can't see in town," Carrell said as he adjusted a telescope so they could look at the fat harvest moon."You guys will be able to see the craters on it and everything."

His spellbound audience uttered a collective, "Oooooh."

Pretty good Friday-night adventure for a baseball diamond in the middle of Boulder City. Carrell was among six members of a new Las Vegas chapter of the Astronomical Society of Nevada who helped about 500 Girl Scouts earn their space exploration badges at the first-ever Frontier Council Camporee.

The Astronomical Society is based in Reno, which makes it hard for members in Southern Nevada to participate as much as they'd like, local stargazer J.C. Willette said.

So he and a handful of others have created a new Las Vegas-area chapter. The two-day Girl Scout camporee was one of their first community events. They set up half a dozen scopes of varying types and sizes on one end of the ball field at Boulder City's Central Park on Friday afternoon.

Just before dark, the 500 scouts sat in a huge semi-circle at the other end and conducted a ceremony and rally. As twilight turned to night, they ended their festivities, stood and began trotting across the field toward Willette's group.

They were giggling and chattering all at once. And they were coming all at once.

"Heeere they come," one of the guys said.

Was this how Gen. George Custer felt?

Carrell first talked about constellations and showed his group of 7- and 8-year-old Brownie Scouts what they could see without the telescope before giving them a look through it.

"The Big Dipper is right behind that light (pole) there," he said.

"Behind that light?" one little voice asked.

"I see it!" a second girl shouted. "It's right over there!"

More ooohs.

While he adjusted the scope and added filters, his daughter Katie, an 11-year-old Junior Scout, explained how a telescope works.

This one was was hers, after all.

Telescopes aren't magnifiers as much as they are buckets for collecting light. The light goes in the fat end, bounces off a mirror in the back and comes out the eye piece so people can see the stars better, she explained.

She used a red flashlight, not a regular white one, as she talked.

"If you have a regular flashlight on and wave it around while someone is looking in deep space, then they'll have to sit around a while before they can see again," she said. "Red is a lot closer to black."

Deep space was pretty hard to see with a glowing full moon and the lights of nearby Boulder City. Space phenomena should be easier to see Nov. 2, when the society hosts a star party in Death Valley. Details can be found at astronomynv.org/vegas.

Katie and her dad will be there. She fielded lots of questions Friday, including the one astronomers must come to dread:

"How many stars are there?" one Brownie asked.

"Over a million, a billion -- and even more than that," she said.