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Playa Sonrisa, Xcalak, Mexico |
A new dark sky standard: Milky Way visible through the clouds!
Our fourth trip to the Yucutan finally yielded the darkest
skies we've ever seen. I reported last year that the skies along the Caribbean coast of the Yucutan peninsula have
been completely ruined from Cancun all the way down to Tulum, (about a 1.5 hour drive) by dozens of new mega-resorts
and 3000 room hotels. This year we rented a jeep at the Cancun airport and drove about six hours south, ending up in a fishing
village called Xcalak, neatly hidden out on the tip of a peninsula and right on the border with Belize. Since there
no electric service to the town or the surrounding area for about 80 kms, we hoped for dark skies. We picked a
moonless week and hoped for clear weather. The Mayan gods smiled on us. I have never seen darker skies.
Click on the map and on each photo for more detailed images.
My old standard for dark skies was seeing my shadow cast by Venus,
but I now have a new standard. One night, it clouded over so that only the brightest stars could be seen dimly through the clouds.
We were astounded to see the Milky Way glowing clearly through the cloud cover! Another indication that there was no ground
light whatsoever was the appearance of the clouds as they moved in--they were pitch black on the bottom, since there was no
ground light to reflect back downward. On clear nights the milky way itself displayed an astonishing array of shades and
patterns--gray and white gossamer swirls like smoke from an ancient Indian fire.
I normally only take a couple pairs of binoculars on these trips since it is difficult to
transport a scope by plane. The last 20 km of roads were mostly dirt, rocks, and holes. It was pitch black during
the last leg of the trip and the jungle seemed to close in on the road as it narrowed more and more. We were constantly
surprised by strange-looking animals darting through our headlights, including lizards that stood up on their hind legs
and ran upright. We called them "cartoon lizards". Once something that looked like a very large cat slunk across the road,
just on the edge of our headlamp beam. Giant iquanas are everywhere and unafraid of people. The jungle has seven
varieties of venomous snakes, very smelly bogs, and killer mosquitoes. You don't go in the jungle.
Our hosts, Murph and Cindy, went out of their way to accomodate our
every need, including our semi-vegetarian preferences. They provided us with some of the best meals we have ever had in the
Yucutan. Murph led us a half-mile out to the great barrier reef in kayaks one day and showed us "Ermgard's Garden",
an untouched garden of corals and sea life just beneath the surface. We snorkled until exhausted and then paddled back to
shore for one of Cindy's epicurean delights--fried shrimp coated with coconut that was harvested from the beach the same
afternoon.
The "restaurant" boasts a
well-stocked bar and a modest generator provides the buildings
with enough electricity during the day to run a few appliances. The generator is supplemented with banks of solar panels
and batteries that keep the regfrigerator and cooler running all night. The generator is turned off at 10pm, and the beachfront
sinks into a soft, velvety blackness that will warm the heart of any amateur astronomer. With a pair of 20 x 80 binoculars, you
can lie flat on your back in the sand and get steady, spectacular views all night long. Dawn comes before you know it, and much too soon.
A reflector wouldn't last five minutes down here. Strong winds from the sea will thoroughly coat your mirror in a few minutes,
with no way to clean it except a thorough washing. The wind keeps the beach free of mosquitoes for about 50 yards, but if you
get away from the shore and back near the jungle to avoid the fine spray, you fight the mosquitoes. Nonetheless, we had a great
time lying in a comfortable lounge chair on the dock or in a hammock with a good pair of binoculars and star charts. One night
we counted three shooting stars, a good number for mid July. It ocurred to me that the term "dark skies" is a misnomer.
In the ideal observing site, the sky isn't dark, the earth is dark. One-hundred percent of the light comes from above.
Many of the details in Sagittarius, including the Trifid and Lagoon nebula, were easy naked-eye objects.
The small sagittarius star cloud dominated the field of naked-eye objects. Even with an 8 X 50 binocular, so many objects sprang into
view that I was disoriented and needed my star chart to sort them out. M6 and M7 appeared as beautiful, open clusters gathered
in the outline of a butterfly. IC4665 appeared as a large, coarse open cluster--very attractive and almost three-dimensiona.
Sagittarius is twenty degrees higher in the sky than in Ohio, which helps a lot with clarity.
Several lower constellations were visible that I can't normally see from Ohio, including Corona
Australis, Lupus, and the bright Ara, which looked like an extension of Scorpius's tail. The faint Telescopium was near the horizon
and I needed a binocular to pick out all the dim stars.
On our last night, we sat on the end of the boat dock and chanced to look down instead of up. At first, we thought we were seeing the reflections of stars in the sea. Then we realized that we were seeing hundreds of flickering luminescent creatures, lighting the sea like fireflies. We had spent hours on the dock without realizing that there was a light show below almost as good as the one above.
This was our fourth trip in search of dark skies, and the first really successful one. It was also a trip backward in time, for I felt that I was finally seeing the night sky as our ancestors saw it. Later, we would kayak out to the barrier reef and dive into another world, but nothing could quite compare to the sight of the milky way shining brightly through the clouds.
When you arrive in Xcalak you may find that you don't have enough gas to get back to the nearest gas station.
Asking around town produced a couple of very helpful locals with spare gas in the back of their truck. This is how you fill up in Xcalak.
Our favorite room when we travel
is always a cabana right on the beach (left). Deluxe accomodations (on the right) include a sturdy cinderblock building with an oceanview from the front balcony and a jungle
view out the back. What else is there?
This fellow greeted us at the door one morning. He gave us a look that seemed to say
we were the intruders.
We met Ferdinand and Anna who came down from Austria to dive the great barrier reef, which runs
the entire length of the southern side of the Yucutan Peninsula. A coral atoll called Banco Chinchorro is just 44 km
north of here (see the detailed map). The atoll is a wonderland of corals, fish, and three centuries of sunken ships. It is one of the most awesome
scuba spots in the caribbean.
December 2008 update: sorry to report there are now streetlights in town which slightly degrade the dark sky in that direction. Still a great place for sky watching!
For more information on this tropical paradise, see Playa Sonrisa