Have a wonderful holiday season and very Happy New Year. We look forward to seeing you in 2012!

Below are a few photographs of winter scenes from Chaco Canyon, New Mexico.

Fajada Butte – All of the vegetation near Chaco Wash is covered with ice following a light snowfall and dense morning fog. Remaining pockets of fog can be seen in the distance beyond Fajada Butte.Chaco Wash originates twenty miles east of Chaco Canyon on the western slopes of the Continental Divide, runs through Chaco Canyon, and joins the Escavada Wash at the canyon’s western end near Peñasco Blanco.

The Winter Solstice -This image taken at sunrise on December 21, 2007 shows a shaft of light in the corner of a room inside the great house. The light shines through a corner window. There is evidence to suggest that this corner window was a late addition, perhaps an effort to bring sun watching indoors during the winter months.

This morning I was able to observe sunrise at the great house of Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Culture National Historical Park. The weather was dicey, so I feel very lucky to have captured this amazing solar display. This effect is seen at sunrise for the days surrounding the time of the winter solstice.

The sun shines through a corner window and the image appears in the opposite corner of the room. Over the course of a few minutes the image will appear in center of the northwest corner. Due to cloudy weather the effect could only be seen for a few moments.

The solar marker is on the top level of the southeast side of Pueblo Bonito. Notice the rooms below. The ledge from where this image was taken was about 10 feet above the solar marker and 30 feet above the floor of the lower chambers.

High-resolution image are available on Flickr. There are more images of summer solstice and other events at Chaco Canyon in our blog. You can learn more about Chaco Canyon and archaeoastronomy at the park in the Traditions of the Sun website.

Update: One thing I forgot to mention…also shooting photos this morning was Justin Ladd. Check out his amazing time lapse movies of Chaco Canyon at: solsticedocumentary.com

Last week, I was part of a group of amateur astronomers who attempted to capture NASA’s LCROSS mission impact from Chaco Canyon. As I mentioned in an earlier post , I first tried my hand at astrophotography the weekend before the event.

The photograph below was taken just after the spacecraft impact early in the morning on October 7th. Unfortunately, the event was not visible from any of our telescopes. (You’ll have to visit NASA’s LCROSS site to see the effects of the impact.)

Chaco Culture National Historic Park is a great place for amateur astronomy. Its remote location, climate, altitude and facilities have made it a popular destination for night sky viewing. This weekend I was lucky enough to try my hand at astrophotography. Having (literally) photographed nearly every place in Chaco Canyon over the last decade (see Traditions of the Sun), it seemed natural to try to point my camera skyward.

The photograph below is my first attempt at astrophotography. Early Friday morning at 5AM, I’ll be trying again. I’m hoping to capture NASA’s LCROSS impact of the moon. This mission will measure the concentration of water ice in the permanently shadowed areas of the moon. Ideum developed an exhibit for NASA’s Lunar Robotics program, so we’ve been following this all along. (Update 9-5-09: NASA Just posted a viewing guide for the event.)

The photograph above was taken with a Canon 20D. Amateur astronomer Brad Hamlin set up the 18″ telescope. This image was shot with a 20mm eyepiece and 2x Barlow lens. And, yes, I did clean the image up a bit in Photoshop. Below are some other shots I took at Chaco Canyon earlier in day and the next morning.

The amazing architecture of the great house of Pueblo Bonito.

The beautiful sandstone veneer of Pueblo Bonito.

We saw elk on the way out of the park Sunday morning.  This view was from the dirt road (NM 57) in the southern part of Chaco Culture.

If you’re interested in seeing more photographs of Chaco Canyon. I’ve posted quite a few to the blog over the last few years. Check out the category “Chaco Culture National Historical Park.” You can see more photographs, including high-resolution versions of images that appear in this post, on Ideum’s Flickr photostream.

This weekend, I headed up to Chaco Culture National Historic Park on the summer solstice to see traditional dancers. The Friends of Native Cultures have been organizing the appearance of native dancers each solstice since 2000, and I’ve been lucky enough to be at four out of the last five (you can see photos from 2004, 2006, 2007, and there are lots more photos of Chaco Culture at the Traditions of the Sun Website.)

The dancers perform in the plaza of the great house of Pueblo Bonito. For those of you who’ve never been to Chaco Canyon, Pueblo Bonito is largest of all the great houses found in the park, with nearly six hundred rooms, and it was three stories in some parts. Pueblo Bonito was built around 1000 AD and was continually built on for a few hundred years afterward, until the Chacoans left the area in 13th Century. Pueblo Bonito is a truly dramatic setting and it is a very emotional experience for those who dance; Chaco is the home of their ancestors after all.

This year the group of dancers were from Acoma Pueblo (which is the oldest, continually inhabited community in the U.S.). Below are some photos from their two morning dances. There are a few more photographs, including high-resolution versions on the Ideum Flickr site.

Dancing in the Plaza.

Marking the start of summer.

The two youngest dancers hold beautiful Acoma pottery.

Here are more photographs of the Cellicion Traditional Zuni Dancers celebrating the Summer Solstice at Chaco Canyon National Historical Park. To witness the dances at Chaco was an amazing experience. As Fernando Cellicion, Director of the dance group, noted, “it is hard to describe the feeling that we have dancing at the same place where the same thing was happening thousands of years ago.”

Raydean Johnson (foreground) peforms the Turkey Dance. Also pictured: Belyle Johnson and Alexandra Nastacio.

Raydean Johnson and Xyla Johnson perform the Turkey Dance.

Dancers Xyla Johnson, Tanicia Nastacio, and Alexandra Nastacio perform the Pottery Dance.

Aldean Nastacio performs the Buffalo Dance.

Musicians Florentine Johnson (left) and Fernando Cellicion perform their original song, Redrocks.

Yesterday a few of us headed up to Chaco Culture National Historical Park to celebrate the summer solstice and to see and film dancers from Zuni Pueblo. Since 2001, the park and the Friends of Native Cultures have been organizing the appearance of native dancers each solstice. Chaco is considered an ancestral homeland for the Pueblo people, so the events surrounding solstice at the park are quite powerful.

Last year, we took pictures and met dancers from Hopi. Three years ago, we photographed the Tewa Dancers From the North for the Traditions of the Sun project with NPS and NASA. This year the Fernando Cellicion Traditional Zuni Dancers performed in the plaza of the great house of Pueblo Bonito. We saw three dances, the Turkey Dance, the Pottery Dance, and the Buffalo Dance–which the photographs below show.

We have many photographs of all three dances we’re still sorting through them. Myself or Emily will post more over the next few days.

We just back from a quick weekend trip to Chaco Culture National Historical Park. For those of you who are familiar with Ideum, you probably know that we’ve been involved with the park over the last few years, and have developed the website and a book for NASA’s Traditions of the Sun project focusing on archaeoastronomy in Chaco Canyon.

This weekend we were in the park to help photograph a possible lunar alignment, but due to cloud cover, that didn’t quite turn out as we had hoped. However, I was lucky enough to be able to capture a beautiful double rainbow over the great house of Pueblo Bonito.

The park received a great deal of much needed rain just before we arrived and during our stay. It was great to see Chaco wash flowing although we had to cross it (waist deep!) to try for our lunar alignment shot. On the hike back that evening we were treated to an amazing show as an electrical storm raged off to the east.

I hope to post some more photos from Chaco Culture later this week, we’re off to San Francisco tonight. We’re going to photograph Scramble for Africa, an installation by Yinka Shonibare. It’s part of the Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). These photographs will be used in an interactive exhibit we’re developing with the museum.

Here’s some more photographs from our trip to Chaco Culture National Historical Park on the Summer Solstice. As I mentioned in the previous post the dancers are Hopi and are from Second Mesa, Arizona.

Deer dancer makes a call.

Three girls with feathers.

The youngest dancer.

A hunter dancer.

The entire group in the Plaza of the great house, Pueblo Bonito.

It was an amazing afternoon at Chaco Culture National Historical Park. We saw two performances of Hopi dancers and took quite a few photographs.

We talked with the two leaders of the group, Bertram Tsavadawa and Ruben Saufkie. They are from Second Mesa, one of a number Hopi Villages in eastern Arizona.

Ruben told us about the importance and symbolism of the dances and their impression of Chaco Canyon, a place that they (and other Puebloan people) consider an ancestral homeland.

He also told us about their water crisis and a recent event in which he and Bert participated in. They ran from “Hopi” to Mexico City to raise awareness about the issue.

It was great to spend an afternoon watching the group dance. Here’s a few photographs, we hope to post more tomorrow.

Ruben Saufkie

Dancers smile.

Colorful feathers.

A young eagle dancer.

An even younger eagle dancer.