A New Toy?

A medium-sized box came in the mail today for Melinda.  I didn't know of anything she was expecting, so put it aside for her to open when she woke up for her night shift.  After she was up feeding cats, I asked her what came in the box.  She promised to show me when she opened it.  A few minutes later she walked in with a smile in her face, handing me a 70-200 Canon zoom!  It looked identical to mine, except it had image stabilization like the newer models do.  But wait - it seemed awfully light!  Then she took off the "lens cap" and revealed the secret - a new insulated drink mug!  It was amazingly realistic, even the switch controls on the side to turn on auto focus and image stabilization work, though the rubber focus and zoom rings do not, nor does the rear "lens cap" twist off (I did try, though)...  Available on Amazon for under $20 - getting pretty favorable reviews, but I'm sure Melinda's greatest reward was the look on my face of the "new lens" arriving in the mail!

The Gang is all Here!

A few days ago I advised you to look to the west
to watch the beginning of the biggest sky grouping of the year.  Last night's clouds blocked the last guest, but tonight's mostly clear skies revealed the last of the trio, Mercury, to the evening sky!  For the next week if you have a clear western horizon you should easily be able to spot the giant planet Jupiter slowly sinking towards the sun, the brilliant Venus slowly getting higher night by night, and slightly fainter Mercury popping up over Venus the next couple nights.  Jupiter won't tarry long and continue towards the sun, leaving just Venus and Mercury to rule the evening sky, Mercury staying above Venus for almost a month!  Most of the world's population has never seen the innermost planet Mercury, and this is an excellent chance to spot it during this planetary alignment.  For a starting guide, the left image was taken after sunset this evening, the right image is the same one with labels to let you know the players...  Click on the images to load the full-size view.

The best time to look for the trio is about 30 minutes after sunset.  The window lasts about 30 minutes - by that time (1 hour after sunset) they are getting too low to see.  Note that while the three planets will appear very close to each other in the sky, fitting in a single binocular field for a night or two, in actuality they are close only viewed from Earth's perspective.  Jupiter is some 550 million miles away, Venus and Mercury, while still on the far side of the sun from us are 150 and 110 million miles away.

Meanwhile, get out every clear night to take in the show.  The next triple planet conjunction is at least 2 years away, so get 'em while they last!

Returning For Another Look!

Last night, with only a night or so left of moonless dark time to examine Comet PanSTARRS (C/2011 L4) again before the full Moon wipes it out, even though it was a "school night", I had to go up and take another look.  Since we are 2 days closer to the orbital plane crossing on the 27th, with the tail look any different?  Actually, I misspoke in my last post, it is not a "solar spike" even though it is pointing generally towards the sun, rather, it is called an anti-tail, because it is on the side opposite the main cometary body from the normal tail.  This is common when we observe the comet as we cross the plane of its orbit - perspective allows us to see dust released long ago appearing to jut out from the coma apparently the wrong direction from the head. In this case, the "real" tail is the puny spray of material going the other direction from the bright "ray"  It is that ray that is the anti-tail...

Anyway, last evening I napped part of the night away, awakening about 1am to head up to Mount Lemmon's Geology Vista again.  The bright Moon was still high in the western sky as I drove about an hour to the site.  Instead of setting up the AP1200 mount and the 14", this time, anticipating a long anti-tail, I just set up a tripod and tracking platform to enable me to use normal or telephoto camera lenses without a lot of setup.  Starting out with my 70-200 Canon F/2.8 zoom, I set it to 90mm so I could keep Polaris and Gamma Cepheus in the frame as reference to measure the tail.  I took frames for about 40 minutes, taking the in-camera darks as well to reduce electronic noise.  The stack of the 8 three minute exposures is shown at left.  As in Sunday's post, Polaris is the bright star at left, and Errai is at right.  This image is rotated about 90 degrees from that image.  The two stars are about 13.5 degrees apart...  In this frame the tail extends over 7 degrees across the sky!  That is a big difference from the 4 degrees seen Sunday morning...  The ray was also barely spotted in my hand held binoculars.  Sorry for the gradients of brightness in the exposure - it is a combination of the edge of the Milky Way encroaching in the lower part of the field, and perhaps also some airglow or sky glow since this in only 30 degrees off the northern horizon...

Since anything worth doing is worth overdoing, I took another quick series of images with a Nikon 135mm telephoto. I only got in 3 frames before the growing twilight stopped me.  But the stack of frames, stretched ridiculously to get a better tail length is shown at right.  Here is is imagined to 8 degrees before it fades out...  Also visible is a couple satellite trails, and as above and in Sunday's post, the cluster to left is NGC 188.

I'm not sure I'll get another chance to see the comet this well with the full moon coming about the same time as orbital plane crossing, but it is sure fun to see this comet continue to put on a good show since it first came over our horizon in March!

Update:  I forgot to mention the tracking platform!  I got the Vixen Polarie tracker a couple months ago and you saw the first results in the time-lapse of Omega Centauri rising a few weeks ago.  The comet shot this morning was really the second time used for tracking and it worked very nicely.  Shown at left is a pic of it while shooting the above comet shot with the zoom lens.  Even though it has a weight limit of 3.5 pounds, I suspect I was pushing it with the big lens, but it seems to work fine.  You can see that when shooting very far North with a long lens like this and you can easily hit the body of the tracker, but that issue aside, I look forward to pushing it to longer exposures.  Shooting very close to Polaris with couple-minute exposures isn't pushing it much!  The 2 cables - the one on the camera goes to the intervalometer (exposure control), and the one for the tracking platform is an alternate power cord.  While it runs off 2 AA batteries, they only last a couple hours, so I power it through the mini-USB and a DC adaptor off a car battery...  Another thing to note - though the stars are out of focus, their color shows more clearly - and also seen between the end of the lens and edge of the frame is the fuzzy glow of the Andromeda Galaxy in the 20 second exposure!

Night of the Comets!

I've heard that a couple bright comets (visible in binoculars, NOT naked eye!) were putting on a good show, so with the brightening moon already half illuminated and it being Saturday night, time to hit the road!  Since I wanted dark northeastern skies, I chose to go up the Mount Lemmon Highway to Geology Vista.  While it looks out over the Tucson Valley with a pretty view of the lights, there is absolutely nothing to the north, so the sky in that direction is quite nice!  Also, since the bright moon was up till about 1am, there was no hurry to leave home - with Melinda working, I left about 11:30, bringing up a pair of cameras, the 14" Hyperstar, and the Meade 80mm APO triplet.

Setting up in the dark is one of my pet peeves - I
try not to do it, but sometimes, like last night, you don't have a choice.  It takes about an hour  to set up for imaging and get aligned on Polaris and fortunately with my new (to me) AP1200, for short exposures, I don't need to track, at least that was the plan...  Comet PanSTARRS (C/2011 L4) was up first - it is actually only a few degrees from Polaris, so is up all night!  But while readily visible in binoculars, it held its secret until you get a picture of it.  We're about to cross the plane of its orbit next week, and it has been developing a very nice sunward-pointing spike!  I didn't observe it visually thru the 14" (can't with the Hyperstar Lens in place), but even in a telephoto lens, it was impressive.  It looks darn near like a jetliner with its headlight on coming in to land!  The left picture is with the Hyperstar (660mm focal length), and the sunward spike juts out of the frame, so I tried the wider field of the Meade APO (480mm focal length), and it still shot out of the field!  North is approximately up in both frames.

So I switched to an 85mm telephoto lens - a Nikon F/1.8, shooting at F/2.8.  Shown here at left is the result.  The star at upper right is Polaris, the one at lower right is Gamma Cepheii (Errai).  Measuring with a ruler on the screen, the tail is OVER 4 degrees long, and likely to get longer as we cross its orbital plane next week (27th).  Unfortunately, it happens a couple days after full moon, and it may be difficult, if not impossible to observe well.  Also visible is the open star cluster NGC 188 to the left of the comet and lower right from Polaris.

The other bright comet out last night was Comet Lemmon (C/2012 F6).  It was a new comet to me, but has been putting on a good show in the Southern hemisphere the last few months.  It is just now moving north and can be seen rising to the left of the great square of Pegasus just before dawn.  The photo here is thru the Hyperstar again, and is a total of 8 minutes of exposure in a brightening sky.  It shows a nice blue ion tail to the right, as well as a dust tail below.  Both comets are on the other side of the sun from us, well over 1 AU(an astronomical unit is the earth's distance from the sun, about 93 million miles) from the sun and both 1.7 AU from earth.

It was great getting out seeing some bright comets (any time they can be seen in binoculars, they are considered bright!), and keep in practice imaging them.  I definitely need to improve my imaging skills, but fun nonetheless!

Look to the West!

One of the big sky shows of 2013 is about to start - the triple planetary conjunction of Jupiter, Venus and Mercury will be reaching its peak near the end of this month.  But already Venus is rising up out of the twilight as it rounds its orbit behind the sun.  Rising steadily as Jupiter sinks slowly behind the sun, fast-moving Mercury will pop out of the twilight also, drawing even with Venus a week from tonight on the 23rd.  For a couple days afterwards, all three planets will be visible in the same wide-angle binocular field of view and easily visible to the naked eye!  Rarely is a triple alignment visible, and rarely also so conveniently right after sunset (look about 30-40 minutes after sunset, with a clear western horizon).  Shown at left is tonight's view showing Jupiter still pretty high, and Venus still low, just over the roof line below.   For more information, check out the NASA page about the alignment.  And keep looking westwards after sunset the next couple weeks!

A Horse of a Different Color!

At first glance, this might appear to be a metal sculpture, thrown together of parts from around the garage.  It is, in fact, a bicycle, a recumbent variety which has an unusual riding position, more like a Lazyboy than your standard bicycle.  And while it is easy to dismiss such a bike as a toy, it is the most comfortable bike I've ever ridden!  Which is not to say that you can jump on it and ride across the state - it definitely takes some getting used to!  First the riding position is the big change you notice, until you get to the under seat steering - that is most likely the biggest thing to get used to.  In all bike riding, you subtly balance with minute steering changes to stay upright.  With the position and new steering, it seems a battle you are not likely to win at first!  But it does come to you eventually, and once it does, you notice that A, your butt doesn't get sore and B, neither do your hands, arms, shoulder or neck, used to support either part of your weight or keep your head upright on a normal bike.  After a longish ride (my longest is only about 15 miles), the only discomfort is  in your quads, which is normal after being off any bike for so long...

This bike was passed along to me by our RAGBRAI leader Carl, who was tasked to find a new home for it by a neighbor.  After a few sessions of practice and some minor repairs to fix a shifter, I look forward to getting out on it whenever we're back in Illinois.  Given the cost of bringing a bike up from Arizona (upwards of $200 on the airlines), I vowed to get one to stay up here when this one fell from the sky.  While shown here w/out bike helmet on one of my first rides (documented by Melinda), that had been remedied.  It is challenging enough to stay upright without worrying about cracking your skull too!  The only disadvantage that I'm finding is that climbing hills is a challenge, but it has a granny gear to grind through them.  Only keeping balanced at those slow speeds is more challenging too.  The way I weave around, I'm not sure I'm ready for the crowds of RAGBRAI riders yet, but I am looking forward to more time in the saddle, er, comfy chair!

More 3-D!

With all the flower pictures we've taken here in Illinois this trip, I've been working on more 3-D images.  If they give you headaches, tough!  I like them, so will continue working on them.  The idea of having your brain reconstruct a stereo image from 2 slightly different images is fascinating to me...  These are for cross-eyed viewing, crossing your eyes slightly to view the right picture with your left eye and the left picture with your right results in a center image with depth!  Do try it - it is amazing when it happens!  It may be easier to do it with the thumbnails, then click on the image to load the full-scale shot and try it again...  All these images were taken with my 100mm macro lens, including the moon/tree picture at the end...

First up is the recurved red trillium.  As I mentioned in the last blog - the flowers are unspectacular, but unusual, so it responds well to 3D, especially shooting with low angles and close up.  Both of these views are from the same pair of images.  They don't always come out this sharp, but the closeup shots, near the full resolution of the camera sometimes shows amazing details.  These are also all taken hand held, usually with a brief gap between them after waiting for the wind to subside...  And by the way, these are assembled in an early version of Photoshop Elements that came with one of my cameras - images are brought into "photomerge" and adjusted in alignment before the software assembles them side-by-side into the images you see here...

Next up is the white trillium (Trillium grandiflorum) and here the larger-scale image is better, showing the depth in the more-interesting center part of the flower.

And in a blatant attempt to improve the 3-D moon shot from the 5 Feb, 2012 post, presented here is tonight's version.  I still like last year's image better - funny how sometimes you can't improve on a single lucky shot, but I'll keep trying...