RAGBRAI 2012

Yes, I know I've not posted in nearly a month.  Of course, I was on the road with the bikers for the first week, and since it ended 2 weeks ago I've been caught up in the return to Tucson, and I've also been under the weather a bit from Olympic fever...  Nothing serious, was over it yesterday when it ended!

Also, it is difficult to write about "RAGBRAI immediately afterwards.  You need to stew in the memories a bit and let the pain and sweat and heat fade a bit and let the friendship and good times percolate to the front of your conscienceness.  After 15+ times at the event (this was the 40th edition), I can remember some truly miserable times, but I keep going back for more!  What does that say about me???

While I've been with "Team Toad" for nearly 20 years after my accidentally joining them (subject for another post) in 1993, the only other member of that first trip is our fearless-leader Carl and morale-officer Curt.  New faces come and go over the years, some permanently, unfortunately...  But every year Carl manages to find a few new riders to join in and it is a blast every time, experiencing the week with new personnel.  This year we had RAGBRAI veteran Katy join us, Lynn rode most of the week, 2 days with his great-niece Elizabeth, Romy and son Nick joined the whole week, with S.O. Julie jumping in for 2 days.  Newbies Bryan and Carole joined us from Tucson - I've known Bryan for a couple decades, and they finally pulled the trigger in joining us.  The trip across Iowa to the start in Sioux Center was uneventful this year (unlike the flat tire 2 years ago), but we knew we were headed into the "hot zone" with some pretty excessive temperatures and drought conditions in the western part of the state.  We stopped frequently for food, bathroom and fuel breaks to help break up the trip, and we got into town late in the afternoon.  The pictures here show new college grad Anne at left, who is moving to Tacoma as I write this to start her new job (cool shades!).  And at right are Lynn, Maggie, Dean, Romy and Nick enjoying the cross-state bus ride.

Our hosts in Sioux Center provided us with a spectacular shaded back yard, which felt a lot cooler than the upper 90 temps would indicate.  This is our standard "tent village" that we lived out of - a normal back yard being plenty of room for the dozen or so souls that were part of the group.  Carl at front center gave up the tent this year and mostly slept out in his cot - here getting a pre-emptive nap in after doing the bulk of the driving across the state.  The strategy worked pretty well - the normal need for a tent, other than keeping out rain of which there was little this year, is to separate you from the mosquitoes.  The one good thing about the drought conditions is that there were absolutely no bugs the entire week, so Carl's strategy worked out well!

About the time we turned in shortly after sunset (our group doesn't do much late-night partying!), we were treated to a fireworks show through the trees in the not-too-far distance (in these small towns, nothing is too far away!).  The next morning, after everyone had left and I was alone to scout out breakfast and restock coolers, I saw and interesting-looking pair of flatbed trailers.  A new type of calliope?  No - one of the labels reveals it to be the firework platforms.  The company is located just a ways over the Missouri river in Yankton, SD, so it is easy enough to set up the display at the warehouse, tow it to the location and back afterwards for cleanup - no muss, no fuss.  Uninteresting to some, but cool to me!

And speaking of interesting - I grew up in small-town Iowa, and while mostly you have to make your own fun, there are a few jewels out in the prairie!  Mentioned significantly in the RAGBRAI literature for our first overnight town of Cherokee was the Sanford Museum and Planetarium.  How could I not stop by and pay it a visit?  It was really a  nice little museum - they had a permanent display of some of the local geology mixed with what regional fossils tell us of the early flora and fauna.  There were also displays of early people (Native Americans) that lived in the area.  A temporary exhibit consisted of very nice images taken by a professional photographer on a summer sabbatical tour of the National Parks.  Of course, the main interest to me was the planetarium - the first one in Iowa, dedicated in 1951.  It was a small dome and projector, but the director of the facility gave a nice sky tour as part of an almost continuous tour for the RAGBRAI crowd that cycled through the facility.  It was a nice respite from the normal sorts of overnight town attractions.

Later that night, as all the team members wander in, find a church or civic group that serves dinner and we take advantage of our host's shower,  we sat around and reviewed the high points of the day.  I had joined Carl, Curt and Anne at the Community Center, just down the hill from where we were staying.  As we waited in line, we ran into Dean and Maggie coming out - turns out that instead of the long wait for the upstairs dinner, we should go downstairs where another group was serving.  We had pork sandwiches, cheesy potatoes, macaroni salad and home-made cookies for dessert for $8.  While they seemed a little chintzy on portions as we came through (they were trying to get to their listed 8pm closing time), by the time we finished eating, they reached closing and we all got free seconds.  It was a breast cancer benefit, and many threw in a couple bucks more for the second trip.  Cherokee was the first of several days where the hosts put us up not out in the yards, but in the air-conditioned interior.  It is a godsend sometimes (don't forget the highs were near or over 100F for much of the first half of the ride) to get out of the heat, at least for a good night's sleep.  Of course, the close proximity of snoring teammates affected the latter, but I'm not complaining!  To close out the evening, Carl and Katy formed a duet for our entertainment, singing some folk and popular tunes.  They are good!

While I have fun on RAGBRAI, realize that as a support driver, I don't often get on the bike route.  My duties involve keeping the cooler stocked and cold, keeping the requested snacks on hand and getting fuel as needed.  Occasionally riders have mechanical issues or breakdowns and I can come into play, but most of the towns have bike mechanics to keep them rolling  Often some riders want to be picked up or dropped off on the route - there is a "mid-town" where the support drivers are allowed access to the route.  On that next day Katy wanted a pickup, so we set up an appointment in Schaller, Iowa, the popcorn capital of Iowa!  While waiting I got to enjoy some of the amenities of the route, never seen on the support route.  Shown at left here are ladies from the Lutheran church serving the infamous "porkchop on a stick".  Back when I rode the route I'd had a "Pork Chop Man" chop, but these were pretty good for $5.  That is me on the right enjoying it.  Of course free popcorn was supplied to anyone who wanted any!  And while only Katy wanted the pickup, 3 other riders joined in for a "sag" to Lake City.

The next couple days were a blur of heat and more heat!  We enjoyed a couple days of temperatures more like those of Arizona, with the added humidity of the Midwest.  It peaked out at 105F as I recall.  Fortunately our hosts invited us inside for sleeping on the miserable nights.  Lynn was our studly biker - camping and sleeping outside through the worst of the heat.  Speaking of hosts - they were uniformly great this year!  We've had hosts that I've met at the door as they were leaving saying "fridge is full of beer - make yourselves at home!" as they head out to serve meals to riders.  Others you rarely see after pointing out the shower and bathroom, some hang out with you - sit and talk into the night, cooking you dinner and running a couple loads of laundry for you! This year's crop were all friendly, most offered drinks and snacks.  Nancy in Marshalltown had some killer chocolate chip cookies, and in Lake City we had a feast of burgers, brats, beans and watermelon.  The hosts that were the most fun were Roland and Joanne in Webster City, shown here at left flanked by Maggie and Dean(who supplied the picture).  They were just delightful - Roland is retired, but working as a substitute teacher, looking forward to the upcoming school year.   Joanne was a live wire - she was the only one from the household (including our team) who went to the Three Dog Night concert that night, telling us about it the next morning.  She proudly showed us her "HOT" sticker she was awarded by a 20-something fellow, and the pictures of her smooching with him are likely posted on Facebook somewhere!

While I specialize in the mundane tasks of driving and shopping, I try to keep an eye out for interesting items - in the case of Marshalltown, the HyVee grocery store had an interesting Coke display shown at left.  I've seen more elaborate displays over the years, but it was kind of cool.  Marshalltown signaled a change in the ride.  It was still a hot day, but that was about to change and a band of severe weather came through.  Fortunately it was about 10pm, so all the riders were in and mostly under shelter when it hit.  My tent was trying to take the shortcut to Cedar Rapids, left hanging from a single puny stake, but was rescued after the worst had passed.  The storm dropped the temperatures dramatically, and yes, all of us camped outside and even though my feet and lower part of my sleeping bag were in a puddle of water on the low side of the tent, it was about the best I slept all week!  Similarly, temps stayed a good 10-15 degrees lower the rest of the ride making it a little more pleasant.

Marshalltown also marked the addition of some young blood to Team Toad!  Dean and Maggie's grand kids joined the group!  I suspect that it was their first time camping out, and I'm not sure how much sleep the Grandparents got, but it was fun to have them along!  Here Linus and Becca are being put to work to break soggy camp in our Marshalltown back yard. At right Becca looks a little sleepy yet at  7am.

Our stay in Cedar Rapids seemed a slice of paradise!  Our host (a workmate of one of our team, I believe) had a pool in the back yard for us to enjoy and gather 'round!  It was great!  Maggie dropped Dean off at the midpoint town and brought the kids to enjoy the pool - they really enjoyed it, and I got to supervise for a bit when Maggie went to pick Dean up across town.  What a bunch of fun kids! Linus, by the way, is not named after the Peanuts' character, but rather was named after Linus Torvalds, who developed Linux (Linus' dad is a software engineer!).  Interestingly, Linus Torvalds was named after the famous scientist Linus Pauling, one of only 2 people to receive 2 Nobel prizes for different fields, and the only recipient to receive 2 unshared Nobels!  Fascinating what you learn on Wikipedia! 

The riders slowly accumulated to our grand back yard, and all agreed it was so nice that instead of going out for dinner, we'd call out for pizza!  And as pizza arrived, so did the visitors as we were close to the home base of Team Toad (Toddville, about 6 miles north of downtown Cedar Rapids). First Carl's wife Terri and lil' Billy came by (that is Bill at left with his Dad).  While not little in any sense, he first came with the Toads when he was about 5, so I'm still allowed to call him Little Billy, which we all did in those days.  I remember well riding with them and Carl would extend a helping hand to push him up the hills - not needed any more!  And besides those two, Sue Ellen, whose scrooge-of-a-boss wouldn't give her time off this week, stopped by to visit too.  She has promised to be with us next year.  Sue Ellen is at far left in the pizza panorama, followed by Anne, Carl, Romy, Julie, Nick, Billy, Terri and Curt.  What a nice evening!

Dean and Maggie had gone out with the grand kids for dinner, Becca showing me her lavender tongue.  Seems I had been shooting the growing crescent moon every night as it shown down on us, but this shot, taken about the right moment during the twilight best showed it against the darkening sky and canopy of trees.  But this day, just about the longest of the week, even after twilight we still had riders out.  Both Katy (who is known to get caught up in some of the celebrations along the way, shall we say), and the Bryan/Carole team were still out, both arriving about the time full darkness arrived.  Katy had eaten, but Bryan and Carole were grateful for the last pieces of pizza, now long cold.  They also took full advantage of the pool, soaking and swimming laps after I had turned into my sleeping bag.

Friday arrived - headed to the last overnight town Anamosa and the home base for Kurt and Anne.  At left Carl, Curt and Anne are shown leaving our poolside digs.  And the picture at right is Bryan and Carole on their Hase German tandem.  No, they are not on their way to rob a bank, but rather, Carole is avoiding sun exposure w/out liberal amounts of sunscreen...

Of course, we stayed at Curt and Val's house, so Kurt and Anne could sleep in their own beds...  This, at 42 miles the shortest ride of the day for the bikes, was only about 20 miles by car!  So I got in pretty early.  I got to spend a little time with Val, who rode a time or two back in the day, but retired from the biking long ago.  She is a mover and shaker in Anamosa, so on her way to church to serve meals, she gave me the 5 minute tour of town, while putting out fires with the issues at the grade school (about 500 people camping on their grounds) and dropping me off at what is just about the highlight of this little town.  A picture appears at left - can you figure it out?  Built of native limestone from a local quarry, it has been called "The White Palace of the West"  A spectacular structure, it is quite imposing and impressive.  One hint is the little hut on the right side - a guard tower!  Yes, it is the Anamosa State Penitentiary!  A maximum-security prison, it holds about 1200 inmates and employs nearly 400, our buddy Curt among them.  He supervises a kitchen staff drawn from the inmates.  I'll try to do a separate post, it really is an interesting place!

The rest of RAGBRAI is a blur - the last day always seems to be a rush to finish and get on towards home.  Curt and Anne stayed in Anamosa after seeing their own beds, as did Lynn.  Dean and Maggie also retired in Anamosa after bringing Linus along on a "tag along" attachment behind Grandpa.  I camped in Kurt's yard, even after being offered a couch - only my 4th night in the tent for the week!  I dropped off Carl in Charlotte at my step-mom's house, only 20 miles or so from the end, then headed to my Uncle John's house to meet up with a cousin who was there briefly.  Melinda joined me to drop off the bus in Clinton just as Carl rode up.  He waited for Bryan and Carol, then they headed back to Cedar Rapids in a nearly-empty bus.  Melinda and I were off to a great niece's birthday party, then we headed back to St Charles, home by 11pm.  It was a long week, but as usual, full of fun memories - the discomfort from the heat is already fading...  Can't wait to do it again!

Midwest Observin'!

Somehow I developed and cultured an interest in astronomy while growing up in Iowa.  I think it was some combination of youthful eyes and a dark countryside that may no longer exist some 45 years later!  We're currently in the Midwest enjoying time away from the desert, though here they are suffering a drought, so it is not so different from Arizona. 

About the one benefit of the drought for a skywatcher is that it has been clear most nights.  They do suffer from moderate humidity which affects viewing a lot more than people realize.  The big drawback around here is the constant embracing glow of light pollution.  You really can't get away from it and the humidity seems to enhance it, scattering even more light into the sky.  But we've been dutifully getting out a few times to look skyward.  The other good thing about the drought is that the nights are absolutely bug free!  Normally the bulk of summertime observing is spent swatting at mosquitos!  Makes for nice evenings this trip...

The big motivation, particularly from the northern tier of states, is that there was a big solar flare last week and the charged particles were to hit us over the weekend and cause some northern lights!  Rare in Arizona, I've not seen a reasonable display in decades, so with the above news we kept our eyes out during the reunion trip over the weekend.  But despite our attempts, none were seen.  Sunday, just about our last chance to see them and with the geomagnetic activity listed as high on Spaceweather, when it got dark (about 10:30 in these parts with Daylight Savings Time), we hit the road for a dark northern horizon.  We settled for a spot just north of Marengo, about a 45 minute drive from our home here.  Of course, we got there just about the time the clouds did, and while there were lights (I think from Harvard about 6 miles to the north), my first exposures showed a greenish band right next to the horizon that might well have been a little auroral glow - very little!  It is perhaps just imagined at left above the tree line and below the clouds...  Interestingly, not knowing the area very well, literally 30 seconds after we stopped to set up the camera, a county sheriff stopped, wanting to know if we needed any help!  Once the clouds socked us in, we headed back home...

The next day dawned clear and relatively dry.  We got an invite from a local amateur astronomer to join us out at an observing site the local club uses about an hour southwest of town.  We invited some friends to join us and we headed about 10 miles southwest of Dekalb.  But still, it was 70 miles west of Chicago, the largest source of light pollution in the Midwest, so the sky was highly affected by skyglow.  Even so, the Milky Way was easily visible, just not nearly as good as an Arizona sky, not that we expected it to be.  Here is a 30 second tripod shot.  A cornfield defines the southern horizon - for those of you reading from the southern states, you can see the Scorpius just clears the horizon here...  Of course, no aurora visible here, except the lights from the Illinois city of Aurora (har-har!).

So we've taken to our alternate form of observing - watching some of the birds we don't normally see in the desert.  We don't have a good choice of optics for birdwatching - the small telescope normally used isn't here with us, though we have a Nikon 500mm mirror lens that we used for the following shots.  First up is a Belted Kingfisher (shown at left) that we spotted on a walk down to the river near Tekakwitha Forest Preserve.  They are always shockingly large when you spot them, and they are pretty shy, so don't stick around long.  The Fox River is amazingly low this trip with the lack of rain, so actually I've seen a lot more aquatic birds along the river this trip.  I think it is because many of the wading birds can now walk along the bottom and fish.  If it were a foot deeper, that wouldn't be possible.  And speaking of which, almost every time I go down the bike path to the river, there is almost always egrets or herons fishing.  Here is one of the former, visible on the same trip that we saw the Kingfisher.  This one walked so close to us that I had to wait for him to walk against a darker background to keep from imaging him against the water reflecting skylight.

We're also spotting a heron that fishes along the canoe beach right down from our house every day.  While not as satisfying as spending time under a dark night time sky, the hunt to chase down and image these prey makes for entertainment here.

The Old Gang Of Mine!

Astute observers of the last post might have noticed that we are currently in the Midwest.  It is our annual trip to try to convince Melinda that the "dry heat" of Tucson is a good thing.  She remains unconvinced, so we continue returning to the glorious humidity (and greens) of Illinois and Iowa.

One of the main reasons for our visit this time is that we came up for my 40th reunion of Calamus High School graduation!  For those of you not in the know, the town of Calamus, population about 400, is a railroad town named for a weed that grows in the area.  Located in Clinton County (far eastern Iowa), the area is mostly rural with large family farms - homes to most of my classmates.  Being a small town, my graduating class only had 23 students (about 100 in the entire high school).  Just a few years later the school consolidated with Wheatland, the next town to the west, so the days of small schools like in those days are mostly over.  At left are the old senior class photos, and at right was our local classmate host Dave, and Roger, now a longtime Denver resident.

This year's reunion dates were picked to coincide with "Calamus Fun Days", a celebration of life in the small town.  There was to be a parade on Saturday morning, and our task for Friday evening was to prepare a float for the classmates to ride in the parade.  I've never been to, nor heard of Calamus Fun Days - I don't think it was held 40 years ago when I lived there, but we dutifully showed up to share in the preparation work load.  We obtained a flatbed trailer, and decorated it in blue and white (school colors) bunting and paper pom-poms.  Mix simple tasks with plentiful amount of Bud Light, and fun and frivolity was had by all.  Over half the class showed up, and after the obligatory group shot, John mooned the spouses taking pictures...  Our athletic star and valedictorian Paul showed off by demonstrating that his letterman's jacket still fit! 

After float preps were finished, most of us walked the block and a half downtown to Steffen's Tap - THE place to be in Calamus (and likely the only place open after 5pm).  They had a street dance, complete with smoker fixing pork chop sandwiches and brats that were absolutely fabulous, and plentiful cold beer to help with reminiscing about the good ole' days.  We finally departed for our motel room 12 miles to the east about 11:30pm.

Saturday dawned perfectly clear, though pretty warm and humid - perfect parade weather!  What kind of parade can small-town Iowa throw?  Well, it was pretty cool - pretty much anyone with an old car, tractor, local fire departments, or people running for political office were welcome to jump in!  Throwing candy to the kids along the route seemed to be the popular thing to do.  We had a couple more alums come for the day's festivities, making 15 attendees of the 23 graduates - 2/3 of our class!  I rode the float with classmates while Melinda took pictures from the sidelines.  The  time stamps on the image files reveals the parade lasted 15 minutes from the one location.  Of course, since we were moving, it seemed longer... 

In the crowd were 2 of my sisters and a brother that had come to enjoy the festivities and see their black sheep brother.  Afterwards we adjourned to the nearby city park for more bar-b-qued pork products and games for the kids.  My great niece Alivia (shown at left) came to collect a bag of candy from the parade and some good swag from the kid's games.  Also joining us on Saturday was my high school buddy Jeff (at right), who couldn't join us the evening before.  After 20 years (since the last reunion I had attended), it was great to see and catch up with him - as it was with all my former classmates.  With a class this small, it seemed that over the years you got to be almost best friends with all of them.  No one ever warned us that as graduation approached so fast 40 years ago that you would so quickly lose contact with these people with which you spent so many years.

After lunch, some chose to take a tour of the old school, though much of the old building had been renovated and most of the high school no longer exists.  The highlight was the hallway near the cafeteria that had the pictures of graduating seniors from the past (our year shown at top of post).  Some played a round of golf at the local country club, while we hung out with our local classmate and host Dave Schau.  We finally finished off the weekend with a class dinner at the country club, laughing over the photos from a pile of old yearbooks.  The consensus seemed to be that we would meet again in 5 years - Melinda and I had a great time and are already looking forward to it!

Heard on the Radio!

Evidently, people still listen to the radio - at least given the number of folks who let us know they heard us on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday morning!  The 6 minute clip, linked here, is a story about amateur astronomy in Tucson.  It starts with the Venus transit on June 5th.  We then give the radio crew a tour of the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab under Arizona Stadium where I work, and it ends up at the Sky Bar, where telescopes entertain the sometimes-tipsy patrons at a 4th Avenue tavern. 

I had been alerted to the upcoming piece last week - they called me 5 days before doing some fact-checking to make sure their script was accurate.  I set out an e-note to our Tucson astronomy group letting them know it was going to be on.  Unfortunately, we were on the road, in small-town Iowa attending my 40th high school reunion, but with Melinda's computer, we found the show streaming on-line and got to hear it "live". 

If you go to the above link, Melinda also makes an uncredited appearance as "UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1"!  So do check it out if you have speakers attached to your computer, otherwise you will have to be satisfied with reading the transcript at the same link.  I generally live on the NPR stations in southern Arizona and northern Illinois full time, and it is great that they archive most programming for all to access.  Meanwhile, you can get a taste of astronomy in Tucson where we're perhaps a little more sensitive to the machinery of the universe which controls the whirring of the orbs over our heads.  Keep Looking Up!

Squeamish Might Want To Skip This Post!

We haven't been posting much about our lil' bundles of joy.  Mostly they have been healthy, though more recently we've had some health issues.  Pixel cycles between kidney failure and semi-normal and is currently somewhere in between.  He needs to eat more, but his appetite isn't there when he feels bad.  After a week or so of pushing subcutaneous fluids, he eats better, but needs more.  He may be "vacationing" with us in the Midwest this Summer so we can pay more attention to him!  Scruffy, who "vacationed" with us last summer, has always been a medical disaster...  He is FIV+, has glaucoma - blind as a result, hypertension and likely more, but after scaring us last summer, has been doing extremely well except for his right eye.  After taking glaucoma meds every day, his eyeball fluid pressure was not being controlled well, and the eye swelled to the point that he couldn't completely close his eyelid himself.  Even with giving him ointment several times a day, his cornea developed ulceration and  vascularization. 

So, reluctantly, after the recommendation by the opthamologist, we considered surgery.  The polite word is enucleation - removal of the eyeball...  He has been blind for years, and without surgery the glaucoma meds would need to be continued with likely side effects that might affect his general health, in addition to the pain he was likely suffering.  Keeping his non-seeing eye was mostly for our benefit, not his.  So today he went in for his hour-long surgery, and came through it just fine.  Well, let me qualify fine - I can see the cone-thingy as being a problem for a blind cat.  While he normally gets around fine without his vision, the cone extension has been a problem the last few hours.  While it keeps him from clawing at his stitches, using the litterbox, eating, walking through the obstacle course of the house and jumping to his spot on the sofa is much more difficult.  He has mostly been resting comfortably this evening, and the angry look he shows here I think is from being wakened for his portrait.  After his recovery in a week or so he should be doing better, less pain, fewer drugs.  Meanwhile we'll continue to monitor his left eye for issues.  Melinda has already picked out his Halloween costume - pirate w/eye patch, of course, with a paper mache parrot riding piggyback!

Cameras at the Canyon - What Fun!

One of the big surprises I found out on the first night at the Grand Canyon Star Party was that Canon Cameras was running a "Photography in the Parks" program.  They were offering free photography workshops rimside.  The best part - you could use your own equipment, or even better - leave a credit card and driver's license and you could use theirs!  They had state-of-the-art cameras and lenses available, including an 800mm F/5.6 lens on static display that I would have hated to cart to the rim at 10 pounds w/out camera body or tripod...  Melinda and I signed up for the 12:30 workshop on our second day.  She chose to keep her own camera, but borrow a nicer zoom - I stepped up to a brand new 5D Mark III that I've had my eye on since it was released a couple months ago, with a very nice 70-200 F/2.8 zoom.  That pair would have run me about $5K had I dropped it into the Canyon, but I survived to tell the tale!

Now of course, had we been thinking, the noon workshop is about the worst time to go out to photograph the Canyon.  The sun is overhead, no shadows, just lots of featureless brilliant light.  Our instructor, Kyle, a professional specializing in outdoor imaging - mostly surfers and rock climbers, did a good job with our intermediate/advanced group - making us move away from our normal "program" mode of shooting and visualizing the exposures needed to properly image the scene. 

In the 90 minutes of workshop, I couldn't well put much experience under my belt with the new 5D III, but I really liked it!  It had some clunky features like the 3 or 4 fingers you need to simply zoom in on an image on the screen, but it has some features I really liked, including an in-camera HDR mode - taking 3 images in quick sucession(at 6 frames/second) and combining them into a nicely exposed image displaying a much greater range than a single frame could.  The image of Melinda at left here is a good example.  Since she is in shade and the Canyon in bright sunlight, a conventional exposure would have required a lot of work to display properly.  This image is straight out of the camera's HDR mode.  It has a number of interesting features for astronomy, including an ISO range topping out at 25,600 (expandable to 102,400!), and a full 35mm format sensor of 24X36mm (twice the area of my XSi).  If only they offered the astronomy version of the 5DIII with the slightly red -shifted cutoff filter and the articulated screen - it would have been on my wish list!  But it was still a thrill to hold new cameras and lenses in your hands, and using them at will.  I also got to play with the Canon 8-15 zoom that I wasn't too impressed with (a little fuzzy wide open, where I'd be using it for astro-imaging).  I would have liked to try the 15mm F/2.8 zoom, but they didn't have one...

I did get to hang out with Kyle, our instructor a couple times - or rather, I pestered him a few times!  He was interested in astronomy imaging and was intrigued with the time lapse images I was taking while the star party was going on.  I jokingly offered that if he brought over that 800mm telephoto, we'd hook it up piggyback on my C-14.  He bit, then I had to back off, and asked about a 300mm or 400mm.  He indicated that Canon had a new 400mm F/2.8 lens, and would bring it back the next night. 

After the crowd thinned a bit after 10pm, he showed up right on schedule and I removed the C-14, replacing it with the huge telephoto.  I could tell he knew a lot more about the 5DIII than I did the way he was whipping through menus, but after a couple test exposures, we decided that we would use the lens wide open at F/2.8, and expose for 1 minute at an ISO of 3,200.  That put the histogram right where we wanted it at about 30% or 40% of the way to the right.  I was telling him about taking multiple frames and stacking them to improve the signal-to-noise, but frankly, the images looked pretty darn good right off the back of the camera.  Looking at the frames in the computer, even at ISO 3200 there is very little hot pixel activity to correct, so these frames have no dark corrections.  The G-11 had to work hard to properly track, even at the short focal length of 400mm, but I know there was some gear backlash and the wind was quite blustery that night, so there is some elongation at the full resolution.  And of course, we were impatient, and at most took only 3-4 exposures to stack...

The first frame up was the region around Antares - a nice combination of globular clusters, bright nebulosity lit up by the brilliant red giant, and dark clouds silhouetted against the glowing Milky Way.  I had shot it with the 70-200 zoom a month ago and the 30 minutes of exposure is wider and perhaps deeper than this 4 minutes of total exposure, but this combo performed well.  The one issue with shooting fast lenses is evident here, particularly when you want to stretch the contrast to the max to bring out details - fast lenses result in vignetting - light falls off in the corners with fast lenses.  If we had lots of time, I would have stopped it down to F/3.5 or 4 and doubled the exposures to improve overall sharpness and reduce the light fall-off in the corners.

We worked our way east to some dark nebulae in Ophiuchus.  There the glow of the Milky Way shows off the clouds of obscuring matter when they block the more distant star clouds.  Dead center is Barnard 72, the Snake Nebula, so named for its sinuous outline.  Other dark clouds are similarly named, but the field is just a little too small to show the other major structures of the Pipe nebula just off the bottom and the Prancing Horse, parts of which can be seen at left here.  This is 3 minutes of total exposure, again with the 400mm at F/2.8 and an ISO of 3,200.

Now for some bright nebulae, next we moved a little more east to the great star formation areas of Messier 8 and 20.  These are flourescing clouds of mostly hydrogen gas.   As I mentioned above, the infrared-bocking filters of modern digital cameras block much of the red light of these clouds.  This entire area would likely glow red at low levels from the h-alpha emission.  M8, the Lagoon Nebula is at bottom center, M20 the Triffid Nebula is top center, and the star cluster to its upper left is M21.  As above, 3 exposures of 60 seconds each were combined.

Lastly, we went for something different, the supernova remnant of the Veil nebula in Cygnus.  A few decades ago this was considered a very faint object, now revealed even in average-sized telescopes with narrow band filters that darken the sky while transmitting the specific wavelengths of the nebula.  It is still tough to get good exposures with standard camera techniques, but here the 3 minutes of exposure do a pretty good job at recording the filaments from the supernova that went off about 8,000 years ago.  It has now expanded into arcs about 3 degrees across.

In short, the camera and lens combination shows a lot of promise for astronomy applications.  The images of the 400mm, even wide open looked very good, though as mentioned, vignetting is moderate.  I used the program Nebulosity to stack the raw frames.  Kyle mentioned that the .raw files of the 5DIII are of a new format and even Photoshop CS5 couldn't open them.  Fortunately, in recovering from a disk issue a few months ago, the current version of Nebulosity handled them just fine.  I stacked and manipulated them slightly in that program, then wrote Tiffs for final stretching in Photoshop.  I suspect the new Photoshop CS6 would not only handle the .raws just fine, but also correct for most of the 400mm F/2.8 vignetting, but that is currently beyond my capabilities!

Overall, the free Canon workshops were a great perk of being there for the Grand Canyon Star Party this year.  Since this is the 6th annual, we've just had bad timing in previous years.  They are early in their treck around the parks this summer - if you see them, be sure to take advantage of their offerings, or go to the link in the first paragraph and track them down!