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!

Airglow, Not Aurora!

Last night's post evidently stimulated some interest, but some were perhaps mislead from my title of the post, "Arizona Aurora?".  At the time I observed it, the northern location of the brightest sections, and the pinkish color seen in some images had me thinking it might have been aurora.  In addition, there were auroral displays seen as far south as Northern Utah on Saturday night, 16 June, the night AFTER my first observation.

So what I saw and the photos posted are airglow - the brightest airglow displays I've ever seen!.  While resembling the greenish color of aurora, and occupying nearly the same part of our atmosphere at about 90km altitude, they are different phenomenon.  Aurora are caused by energetic particles spiraling down the earth's magnetic field, while airglow is caused by excitation of atoms in the upper atmosphere by daytime solar UV radiation.

There is an excellent site on atmospheric optics called "Optics Picture of the Day".  They maintain a gallery on a wide range of optical effects, including the above topics, with very well-written explanations of what the images illustrate.  My favorite image of airglow from the site is from an all-sky image at local midnight from Nebraska a half-dozen years ago.  There are also examples of similar banded airglow to my image and an image from space showing airglow from above.  They also have several examples and explanations of gravity waves.  I highly recommend bookmarking the site and returning frequently to learn about many of the sights we can see in the sky, both day and night.

Arizona Aurora?

We are just back from a spectacular 5 day break from reality in Northern Arizona, mostly at the Grand Canyon for the annual star party there.  We've many previous posts regarding some of our time there on previous trips, so check here for a link to some of those exploits. 

On our way there last Friday (15 June), we stopped at the Bed and Breakfast of buddy Tom Taylor, proprietor of A Shooting Star Inn.  We'll write a separate post about our evening there, but what I'd like to cover tonight is a display of sky lights.  What looked like a thin layer of clouds moving in showed structure I've seen before from dark sky locations - airglow with gravity wave structures.  The main clue was the green color from oxygen emission. Shown here is a frame of several taken with a 16mm fisheye with a 1 minute duration, with only minor levels adjustments.  The bowl of the big dipper is coming into the upper left, Cassiopeia at lower right and Polaris, the North Star is upper right center.  It was a cool display, and like I said, the casual observers there thought they were thin clouds,  but the exposures show the green emission.

Then again just last night (19 June), on our last night of observing, showed a very similar glow and structure.  Again, the observers thought clouds were moving in, but again the exposures showed the telltale green emission.  I thought hard about it being aurora, but didn't see any characteristic rays, even though the display was very strongly centered due north.  Peaking right at about midnight as we were putting telescopes away from the night's public observing, after dropping Melinda and another observer off at the campground, I went back out to Yavapai Point and shot more frames from rim side for about a half hour.  I thought I could detect some pinkish or red color in some of the frames, but the structure and motion is consistent with airglow and gravity waves. 

I collected the 30 or so frames into a time-lapse and uploaded them into YouTube so you can see the structure and motion of the glow.  Interestingly, the structure was moving north on both nights, and the wind, which was very strong while taking the frames, was also towards the north.  In case the YouTube viewer doesn't load, go to this link to view on their website. Anyway, really cool stuff, but not aurora, which is pretty rare, even in Northern Arizona.  More posts about the events of the last week to come!