The Family Album Down The Hall

I think that Melinda is finally ready to declare our hallway renovation complete! Five weeks ago it was quite the deary cave, but has been transformed by my better half's artistic vision. We've posted about the project here and also here, and are currently on step 16 of her defined 17 steps - only stepping out for a beer remains!


Just as a reminder, here was the starting point - a hallway with bad lighting, popcorn ceiling, partially falling off where a few drops from the swamp cooler on the roof leaked through, and your basic off-white color scheme. The second pic shows the lighting fixtures and with the popcorn ceiling removed (squirt bottle with water and wide putty knife).















And now for the unveiling! She chose white for ceiling (flat) and trim (semigloss) and "Pale Butter" (flat enamel) for the color scheme (an all-Valspar project). Of course, as the 16-step plan called out, there was LOTS of prep work, but the result is quite spectacular.


I think after the color change, the lighting change was most spectacular. After asking me what I was thinking for lighting (we agreed!) we went with wall-mounted track lighting, some directed upwards for indirect lighting off the white ceiling, and some directed downwards towards anticipated photos and artwork. It was really straightforward to replace the 2 fixtures with 2 track sets. We tried replacing the original 50 watt lights (200 per track!) with compact fluorescents, but didn't really care for the color cast, so went back to 35 watt halogens. Still more power used than the original dingy lights, but we love the results.













For artwork and photos, Melinda perused the local resale shops for interesting frames, all of which she painted flat black. Some were really interesting, some with open screening and some she used glass panes as the matting to allow the butter color of the wall to show through. The pictures she chose were of both of our families, as well as first wife Vicki and her family. There is also a pair of pics of us from back in the 70's of me in my studly days in short-shorts, and her on vacation in her sexy bikini. Woo, woo! Down at the end of the hall are some wedding mementos, including good wishes written in the matting by wedding attendees, and a decorated version of our invitation by former co-worker Wendy.

In all, I think the overall effect is just stunning, and it almost makes me impatient to get to the rest of the house!

An Evening With Comet Lulin

There is nothing like something exciting happening in the sky to bring out bad weather. In reality, the weather hasn't been bad, just cloudy, and not really solid overcast, but just enough to spoil any real chance of imaging the bright comet that currently graces our sky.

So blue sky finally broke through today, and even though it was a "school night" I had to go out and image. The comet is very nearly closest to the earth at about 40 million miles and also at opposition to the sun, so it is observable all night long. It is also moving very quickly - about 5 degrees per day, providing a good chance to do some sequences showing it's motion.

Melinda had to work tonight, but Ed, a friend visiting from Saskatchewan, joined me for the trip out near Kitt Peak. We arrived after dark, and I hurried to set up the 14" Celestron and Hyperstar for imaging. After that was finally going, I set up a second camera on a portable mount with telephoto lens. So here are the quick and dirty results - no stacking, no tricks other than some brightness and contrast adjustments. The first one is with the 200mm telephoto - 4 minutes exposure at F/3.2 on the Canon XSi. It shows a pretty wide field with the star Rho Leonis to the upper right, north is up. The closer view is with the 14" Celestron + Hyperstar = about 660mm focal length at F/1.9. It is a 1 minute exposure with the Canon 20Da camera. I've got a few frames to play with stacking to reduce noise, or make some short movie sequences, but I've only got a minute before going off to sleep, so this is what you get.

Recent reports describe the comet as a Q-tip, but Ed thought it looked like a lit match, and I might have to agree with him. Lulin was visible to the unaided eye, but wasn't blindingly so. The view through the 9X63 binoculars closely resembled the telephoto view, though color was hard for me to detect. Over the course of a couple hours, I thought I could definitely see it getting closer to Rho, so naked eye detection of motion was easy too. By the way, there are some spectacular images at Spaceweather.com. Get out and see it first hand if you get a chance - I'll likely be doing the same!

Steward Observatory Public Evening

Tonight, Melinda and I attended a talk as part of Steward Observatory's Public Evening Series. The series started in 1922, shortly after Steward Observatory was established at the University of Arizona by it's first director A.E. Douglas. I've attended occasional lectures for many years, where observing through a 21" diameter telescope usually follows the talk.

Tonight was Dr. Rachel Bean, a cosmologist from Cornell University speaking on "The Dark Side of the Universe". She was a most entertaining speaker - her first slide demonstrated the difference between a cosmologist (an astronomer who studies the evolution and space-time relations of the universe) and a cosmetologist (an expert in the use of cosmetics). She went on to explain about how modern theories seem to indicate the existence of what has come to be called dark matter and dark energy to explain how the outer reaches of the observable universe appear to be accelerating.

I've read and understood some of these concepts before, but one of the more interesting gems I brought home from the talk was a supposed quote from Albert Einstein, probably the most famous cosmologist - "The joy of looking and comprehension is nature's greatest joy".

Interestingly, that has informally been a personal mantra of mine - observe nature, and explain what you see with what you know. If you can't explain what you see, seek the wisdom of others through reading or seeing guidance. And it seems the reward is in the understanding. Anyway, it keeps me going - I hope it works for you too!

Oh, and by the way - tonight's speaker turned us on to the enclosed photo of Einstein - the website hetemeel.com has him writing whatever you direct!

Generating Some Work!

Haven't posted in an age! But I'm glad that at least Melinda's colonoscopy post finally moved off the front page of the blog - I was getting grief from her for taking advantage of her fuzzy mental state when she approved posting those pictures!

I've also not posted about work in nearly a month - a lot has happened! My friend and workmate Pat retired 3 weeks ago now and as a result, I'm back up to full time helping direct the backplate diamond generating on LSST. I've posted previously about the project - gave some background back in early December , as well as posted updates on January 7th, the 15th,and the 22nd. Since the last post, we've been preparing for diamond machining and are now well along on that task.


Like metals, glass can also be machined, but instead of hardened tools, diamond coated tools are used to cut away the glass, a process called diamond generating. So on a large scale, with the huge mirror substrates we are producing, we use large machines and tools designed to shape them.


The photo at left shows our workhorse, the Large Optical Generator, with the LSST mirror mounted to work on the flat rear surface. It is a "busy" photograph, with lots of features to point out, but of course, the large circular white thing is the 8.4 meter diameter mirror. The bulk of the machine is mostly hidden, but the red object is the spindle and 15 horsepower motor that turns the diamond wheels. The black accordion covers protect the horizontal and vertical slides and drives - 5 meters of horizontal motion and 1.5 meters of vertical with resolution of nearly a thousandth of a mm. The yellow fence-looking object is actually a safety rail to keep us from falling the long distance to the floor while we are working on the potentially slippery mirror surface.


The last thing I want to point out is the ventilation system - the coolant used to keep the diamond tooling cool is particularly dangerous when in a mist form. Since it can contain minute glass particles that can be inhaled deep into your lungs, it is instead contained around the cutting tools and exhausted to the roof where it is drawn through filters, allowing us to work without respirators in a shirtsleeve environment. Because of the ventilation system, the cutting point of the the diamond wheels cannot be monitored very closely visually. The operators depend a lot on how it sounds, and watch the computer outputs of the machine, including the spindle motor current, to judge how well the process is going. Mostly all you can see is the back of the mirror flooded with coolant - mostly water with a few percent of a cutting fluid specially designed for diamond machining operations.



The first order of business is to center and level the substrate as accurately as possible from the cast surface, then generate the backplate round, so that if the mirror needs removal, we will now have a machined surface to center accurately. This picture shows a diamond tool with diamond pellets around the periphery, with lots of coolant making that initial first diamond contact. You can see how a dangerous mist can form with the rapidly rotating wheel. I pulled back part of the ventilation system to take the picture, normally it would be fully enclosed.





After machining a big honking bevel on the outside diameter, to prevent a fragile sharp edge that might fracture or chip off, it was time to start the back surface machining. For this we use a "cup" wheel with diamond pellets along the bottom edge. In a view down the ventilation system, this is the tool we use the most for removing bulk amounts of glass on the large mirror surfaces. Diamonds only work well when they stay cool (removing glass up to 10 cubic inches per minute will make your diamond red hot very quickly without cooling), so we use about a liter of coolant per second from a tank where it is recirculated. Coolant is fed directly to the pellets, through the wheel and also under the wheel in a fan pattern in order to flood the contact point. To the right of the wheel is a white safety roller - connected to an Linear Variable Differential Transformer (LVDT), the height of the roller, thus the glass surface can be monitored by the computer monitoring the machine.

This next view shows the backplate now edged and partially generated with the back surface cleaned off. In a couple weeks after the machining is complete, we will also grind and polish the back surface, making for a stronger surface, as well as allowing visual inspection of the mirror interior. Come visit again and check out the latest activities!


Today I brought my macro lens in to work - I've been in conversation with our tooling manufacturer and wanted to know how a product was working, so shown here are closeups of our diamond tools. Likely not like the diamonds you were expecting that you see in jewelry, these are industrial diamonds that come in different sizes and concentrations, depending on the application. Currently we are still in the bulk removal stage, so we want to maximize removal. For that we use large diamonds that can remove that 10 cubic inches per minute that I mentioned. Unfortunately, the price you pay for that is the subsurface damage that large diamonds leave in the surface that must be removed in subsequent smoothing operations. So you follow up the coarse diamonds with finer diamonds that leave correspondingly less damage. Shown here are the pellets from our coarse and fine diamond cup wheel. Especially in the one with large diamonds (40/60 mesh, or up to about a half millimeter in size), you can see voids where dull diamonds have fallen out, exposing fresh, sharper cutting edges. The metal bond material erodes away slowly - you can see what look like small specks of diamonds, but are actually the tips of larger ones still buried in the bond matrix. While the large diamonds are mostly colorless, in the fine diamond pellet shown (80/100 mesh) you can see the yellow-green tint of some of the diamonds - click to enlarge. The pellets are about 8mm wide from top to bottom, and on the fine pellet, the top portion has not fully worn-in to full contact.


While I've been working with this stuff for over 20 years, there is still more to learn and apply to modern materials and products that manufacturers are now supplying. I suspect that the diamond tooling business is just about the largest it has ever been - not only from glass work and jewelry applications, but you see it every day in concrete and asphalt sawing and coring too.

Valentine's Day 2009

We hope everyone, reading this, had a happy Valentine's day!

We had a fun, adventuresome, day! Our friends, Mike and Elvira Spooner, from Phoenix/Arizona City called on Friday, asking if we had plans for lunch on Saturday. They planned to be in Tucson on Saturday and asked if we could get together. We hadn't seen Mike and Elvira since last summer, so we welcomed the opportunity to visit with them! Our lives are oddly similar in many aspects. Mike is "an old (our age) optics buddy" of Dean's. His first wife died of cancer around the same time that Dean's first wife, Vicki, also died of cancer. What a bond for two men to have. Mike met and married Elvira, a wonderful Peruvian lady, who works for the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix....Dean and I met, and so we're two (relatively) newlywed couples! Mike and Elvira married before Dean and I, by about a year or so. We last spent time with them at the Grand Canyon Star Party, in June of '08.


Mike and Elvira arrived about 11:30am on Saturday. We thought they probably had other plans in Tucson, but when asked they said, "We came to see you!" Elvira had never played in snow before, as she grew up in Peru and has lived in So. California and Phoenix ever since. We suggested the top of Mt. Lemmon for lunch, as they had 18" of snow over the past week! We had previously eaten at the Iron Door (at Ski Valley) on our trip there New Year's Day. This time we decided to eat in Summerhaven, the little town at the top of the mountain. The Mt. Lemmon Cafe was busy, but we found a parking spot, and enjoyed lunch there - though Elvira was huddling by the heater the entire time! She was wearing warm clothes, but not used to the cold weather. She tossed a few snowballs, as did I (aiming for Dean, hitting Mike)! It was fun to see the people sledding on the mountain, kids playing in the snow, and some crazy guy shoveling snow into the back of his pickup truck. Mike had lived in Tucson on occasion, but had never been up to Mt. Lemmon, and I think he enjoyed the trip even more than Elvira! We stopped at the beautiful vistas on the way up and back, viewing waterfalls of melted snow at 7 Cataracts; views of Mt. Graham and Kitt Peak in the distance, and even seeing Dos Cabezos (near New Mexico) off in the far distance. It was a picture perfect day! At one of the overlooks there is easy access to the desert from the parking area. There are some spectacular Saguaro, as well as Ocotillo and Prickly Pear very near by. I love looking at the Saguaro, they are so bizarre looking and massive; and even the Prickly Pear were in a Valentine's Day frame of mind!













Returning to Tucson, we caught the last weekend of the Gem and Mineral Show. This is the largest one in the world, and no February is complete without at least taking a walk through part of it! We hit one of the hotels that has a nice variety of gems, fossils, meteorites, and minerals. Elvira bought a pendant, we did lots of looking. It was a full day! We returned home about 5pm, in time to feed kitties. Mike and Elvira had an hour's drive back to Arizona City ahead of them yet.





Saturday evening brought a long awaited movie at The Loft. We had been planning this evening for a few months! Moulin Rouge (2001 - Nicole Kidman/Ewan McGregor)! I put this movie as one of my all time favorites, but had never seen it on the big screen. I had happened upon it on cable several years ago, and have watched it countless times since. There was a good crowd there to see it, including our friend Nancy and her friend Paul! Nancy had never seen the movie, and it was fun to hear her reaction to it. People sang along with the songs (including me), though there was no can-can dancing in the front of the theater. If you have never seen the movie, I really recommend it! It's romantic, funny, sad, and exciting - all at the same time! Definitely a winner! The perfect cap to a fun Valentine's Day!

More Shorts!

Tonight featured a return to the Loft Theater , where the Academy-nominated animated shorts were shown. Last year, they showed both live-action and animated shorts on one night and it turned into a 4.5 hour marathon. This year, it would have been just over 2 hours total, but they scheduled it over 2 nights before the nominations were announced, so tonight's animated shorts, instead of featuring the 35 minutes of nominated animations, also showed another 4 or 5 that were deemed exemplary, rounding out the program to about 100 minutes.

Those of you who think "cartoons" are limited to funny stories would likely be disappointed. While there were some slapstick (including "Presto" which was shown with Wall-E last summer) there were also some poignant stories, love stories, and a preachy environmental animation as well. My favorite was "La Maison en petits cubes" (The House of Small Cubes) which, despite the French name was a Japanese submission. An old man fights the rising ocean levels, building room upon room as the sea drives him upwards with time. Dropping his favorite pipe, he rents a scuba outfit to retrieve it, each descent to the next level bringing with it a flood of memories of family and past love. The hand drawn animation and music were a perfect match for the nostalgic mood of the 12 minute animated short.

My second choice, but the crowd favorite was "Oktapodi" a computer-drawn animation very much in the style of Pixar Studios, this one created by a group of third-year French film students. The 2.5 minute film (shortest of tonight's features) showed the adventures of a pair of octopus lovers after one of them is hijacked from their blissful life in an aquarium to be turned into food(shades of Finding Nemo!). Given that it started out as a student project makes it even more amazing and a lot of fun.

The worse part of the shorts collection the last two nights was that Melinda was working and missed out on all of it! With only a single night showing of each collection, you are out of luck if you have a conflict. I feel fortunate to see them - the New York Times says they're only being shown in a couple dozen theaters. This is the 4th year The Loft has shown the short film collections, and with the crowds they drew, will likely continue the tradition.

The best part is that this coming Wednesday, (Melinda isn't working that night) The Loft is showing a program of French live-action short films, which will include my favorite from last night, "Manon Sur le Bitumen (Manon on the Asphalt)". Twist my arm!

Oscar Shorts!

We are exceedingly lucky in Tucson to have The Loft, an "art house movie theater" where you cannot see the latest Spiderman sequel, and, in fact, many of the movies are in a language that isn't even English! Tonight, case in point, some friends and I attended a screening of the 2008 Oscar-Nominated Live-Action Short Films (as opposed to animated).

It was an eye-opening experience - normally the"short" films (limited to 40 minutes or less) are the poor white trash of the movie world - there really isn't a venue to see them, alone or as a group. I've seen some on the Independent Film Channel (IFC) on cable, and I understand some film festivals show collections, but you really have to go out of your way to enjoy them. The 2008 collection includes shorts from Switzerland, Germany, France, Denmark and Ireland - the US didn't make the cut this year. My favorites were "New Boy", about an African refugee's first day of school in an Irish classroom (shown at left), and "Manon on the Asphalt" (Manon sur le bitume - the french entry) about how a woman's life affects the people around her.

The format of these "filmettes" force the makers to tell a story, develop characters and form an emotional response quickly. How involved can you get in New Boy's 11 minutes, or Manon's 15? A lot, it turns out. I was nearly sobbing at the end of the latter, and my friends had a similar response, though the consensus was that the odds-on favorite to win was likely the German entry "Toyland" (Spielzeugland) with it's Nazi/Holocaust theme (13 minutes!).

So how do you ever get to see these? It says they are available in iTunes, though when I just checked, only the 2007 and earlier were available. I've also seen previous collections for sale on Amazon and I suspect those DVDs would be available on Netflix or other sources - you should definitely look for them! The Oscar-Nominated Animated Short Films are being shown tomorrow night - check for a report afterwards!