It's A 3-D World!

We are on the road again - this time to the Midwest to see our house there, as well as friends and family.  I usually bring my camera along as one of my carry-ons, but mostly don't take any photos from the plane.  Since it is considered an "electronic device" it has to be off during take off and landing, and that is mostly the interesting times with city lights or the hometown under you.

As normal, Melinda was just coming off night shift, so was pretty tired, and I took the window seat so in case anything appeared outside, I'd not be reaching over her.  Against the curved outer wall, there is even less room it seems, and way back in coach, I can barely reach down to grab the camera between my feet anyway.

But some nice shots appeared - the clear Arizona sky gave way to some scattered clouds in New Mexico, and I photographed some with their stark shadows below.  Now if any of you who have read the blog knows, I'm a 3-D fan, and there is nothing easier than shooting stereo from a plane.  Take a shot, take another shot a couple seconds later.  Meanwhile, with the plane going 500+ mph, you get a nice stereo baseline for fooling your brain into making a stereo image when they are viewed later.  These images are presented for cross-eyed viewing - cross your eyes slightly so that you view the right picture with your left eye and left picture with your right.  Your brain will combine them into a central image that shows depth!  Once you can do it with the thumbnail here, you can click on it to see it in full resolution, though you will have to cross your eyes a little more...  Hopefully these will be headache-inducing free!  The picture at left here looked like one of the spaceships from Star Trek, with its interesting shape projected over some irrigated fields...

I didn't follow our precise path, but as we headed what I assume was NE across New Mexico, we picked up some very interesting parallel cloud bands.  They were so evenly spaced that I couldn't imagine they would be random, but rather caused by some phenomenon.  I've seen parallel airglow patterns caused by gravity waves, and from that reference, they are also known as cloud streets.  I was also taken by the blackness of the sky at 37,000 feet!  Since I'm pretty tall, it is difficult to look very high in the sky through the low windows, but it showed up well in the image.  The cloud bands persisted for a good distance, perhaps 20 minutes or more, so extended over hundreds of miles on the ground.  They are still at least partly visible in this shot of an airport (sorry, don't know which one).

Deeper towards the Midwest, just before they broke up, we picked up a higher level deck of thin clouds as well that showed up well in the 3-D view.  Stereo views tend to be more interesting with more than one or two planes to attract attention, and while I didn't know if the thin layer would show up, it does just fine.

It clouded up for a while, but cleared as we neared Chicago.  Since they don't consult us on their flight path, it is always interesting to see if you can recognize anything before landing.  Lucky for us, we easily picked out the Fermilab accelerator with its dual rings, shown at left.  Nearly 4 miles in circumference, it was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world until Cern's Large Hadron Collider came on line a couple years back.  The closer, small circle is the main injector ring, and the larger circle is the Tevatron accelerator where protons and anti-protons, accelerated to nearly the speed of light rotate in opposite directions and collide to reveal details of subatomic particles.  This is located in Batavia, just a couple towns south of where we live in St Charles!  As we neared "Ketelsen East" we passed a few more landmarks, including the ballpark where the Kane County Cougars (the Chicago Cubs class "A" affiliate) play.  Another 5 or 6 miles and we would have flown over our house, but we turned east just as we reached highway 64, so never got the chance to see it from the air...

Fortunately for us, we're getting the moist, green
springtime we never get in Tucson!  We've already been within spitting distance of 100F there, but here in Illinois, it snowed just 10 days ago!  But now it is warming and the flowering trees are in full glory.  And of course, 3-D doesn't end when you get off the plane - by moving slightly between frames, you can still take advantage of  the stereo effect.  New growth always looks cool in 3-D, I think because it looks almost too perfect.  I'm not even sure what plants these are - located a few feet from each other adjacent to our house.  I'm sure we'll bore you with more flower and tree pictures over our stay here the next few days -- but it is exciting to us!

Mirror Lab Activities...

Going to work at the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab every day, sometimes it seems progress is slow, but at the same time there is always something going on!  While doing the same thing every day would soon get boring, fortunately tasks change with time and it rarely gets old.

Case in point is what the casting lab is up to. 

They can produce mirror substrates a lot faster than we can polish them, and they are preparing to cast another mirror late in the Summer, likely in August.  As a result, mold production is in full swing.  They've recently replaced the old CNC mill they wore out with 15 years of machining, and after getting used to the new machine, have been hard at work.  It is an entertaining 8 minutes or so to watch the machine turn a raw block of alumina silicate into a mold core, complete with tool changes.  It even cuts off the core with the right height and angle.  It takes something in excess of 1600 cores to make an 8.4 meter mirror - fortunately because of symmetry. that many individual programs are not needed to machine each of the cores!  At left, one of the non-hexagonal cores are being machined - the cloud of particles are headed for the dust collector towards the left.  At right, John removes the finished core and prepares to load a new blank.

There is, of course, quality control - many of the cores are

checked coming out of the CNC to make sure tolerances are met in the machining process.  At left here, Phil is using "smurf glue", so named because of its blue color, to help fill small voids at the base of the cores.  In the casting process, higher hydrostatic pressure at the bottom of the mold can inject molten glass into these voids which might cause issues in the glass blank after the mold is removed.  The smurf glue seems to seal the bottom edge well enough to solve the issues we had on one mirror blank.  At right, some of the raw blanks await machining in the mill.

After machining and sealing, the cores await installation.  Since

the non-hex cores are hardest to machine and last to get installed around the outside, there are a few hundred cores on a large number of storage shelves.  The picture at left shows some of the more normal hex cores, queued up for placement in the mold.  We were told at our Monday organizational meeting that over 25% of the cores have been installed after about a month of effort.  Since much of that effort was in the outer cores, they are actually over half done with core machining.  As of this morning, the picture at right showed the present mold progress - actually a panorama of 3 frames.  Fast progress is being made, but much work remains for the August firing date.  After finishing the mold, there is a pre-fire, complete mold inspection, and 20 tons of glass inspection and loading.  Last I heard they were on schedule!

Well, Two Out Of Three Isn't Bad!

Yesterday was the Spring Star-B-Que at Kitt Peak National Observatory.  Twice a year now, for almost 20 years we've gotten permission to hold a cookout and star party for the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association (TAAA).  It is always a lot of fun, socializing over a pot-luck picnic, and the skies can't be beat for observing afterwards.  The mountain employees association also supplies their gas grill for our use, and with the pavilion and flush toilets, the site lacks nothing! 

This year we had an extra attraction, after schedules

prevented us us from realizing it the last couple tries - a tour of the Wisconsin, Indiana, Yale, NOAO telescope (WIYN).  The public rarely gets the chance to see this modern 3.5 meter telescope, and the new technology contrasts nicely with the nearly 2 generation old Mayall 4-meter Telescope across the mountaintop.  Since one of my part-time tasks at the Observatory is giving occasional VIP tours of WIYN, I was able to offer an afternoon tour of the building to early arrivals to the Star-B-Que.  Amateur astronomers are a difficult audience, and I was unprepared for some of their questions regarding basic hardware of drive mechanisms, encoders and instrumentation.   Fortunately, I was able to answer questions about where it was polished (my 3rd 3.5 meter telescope at the Mirror Lab in the early '90s!).  Fortunately I had brought along an appropriate lens for a group shot at the telescope, but I couldn't decide on horizontal or vertical format, so you get both here!

As we finished the WIYN tour, the mountaintop

was about to close - time for normal visitors to depart the Observatory.  But after a stop in the Visitor Center for souvenirs, our group headed down to the picnic area to set up our own scopes and have our picnic!  The grill had been delivered as promised, and fortunately, I had a key where it was locked in the mechanical room off the bathrooms.  After setting that up in the pavilion, I wandered off to set up my scope, as did others.  I was planning to use the Celestron 14" on the AP1200 for visual observing early on, and perhaps some imaging later in the evening.  I had a couple friends that are recently heavy into astro-imaging, so wanted to provide a tutorial in use of the Hyperstar there.  Once the scope was set up time for dinner!  We had a great pot luck!  We brought brownies for dessert and as normal, there was a wide assortment of items to feast on!  I've never been a fan on organizing too much on what people should bring, and that proved to work fine here.  My friend Byron's chicken salad was a favorite, and everyone had a great time socializing over the picnic tables or over the grill.  Folks wandered off to the scopes after eating - got some good white-light views of sunspots, and in the picture at left, Wayne is looking through my C-14, trying to read the manufacturer of the AC unit at the 4-Meter Telescope - he was unconvinced on my insistence it was a "Carrier" brand, while Jim and Pat trade storied in the background.  At right, Irene (at left) was giving Marilyn some pointers on her new Sky Commander encoder system she had recently installed on her 16" telescope.

There was a really nice assortment of telescopes

assembled.  At left is shown what nearly became the "valley of the Schmidts", though a vintage 8" Cave Newtonian showed up, and a couple refractors can be spotted too.  Melinda is chatting with Byron, one of our new buddies who is getting into astrophotography.  The sacred mountain Baboquivari watches over us, about 15 miles distant and about 800 feet higher than Kitt Peak.  Shortly it was time for sunset, and while the sky had been crystal clear, suddenly some clouds popped up.  It made for a spectacular sunset, though, and attracted a pretty good crowd at the couple overlooks with views to the west.  These sunset views are HDR shots - 3 exposures are taken in quick succession with varying shutter speeds to try to preserve the high dynamic range of the scene.  These are mostly successfull - catching the views from the solar disk (setting into the smoke of the California fires) to the muted colors up in the clouds.

As the sunset waned, the wind, that had been

brisk to begin with, became even stronger, and more clouds moved in.  Through gaps (sometimes called Sucker Holes!) we spotted Jupiter and 3 of its moons.  Interestingly, over a 3 minute period about 7:35, Jupiter's moon Io moved out of eclipse and became visible where it had not been just moments before!  That was about the only astronomical observation, though as clouds became thicker...  While many gathered around the scopes and chatted, it soon became obvious that trying to observe in the wind through the cloud gaps was going to be a losing proposition, so cars started wandering out by 8.  Melinda and I (with Irene as a rider) hung out for a bit longer, but were packed up and ready to go about 10, with only one die-hard from the Phoenix area left, swearing to take his chances.  At least we had a great tour and picnic, but observing will have to wait for 28 September - the next edition of the Star-B-Que...

The Cast of Characters!

A week ago I posted the time-lapse of the Omega Centauri globular cluster rising past the 2.1 Meter Telescope of Kitt Peak National Observatory.  I was amazed how well the cluster, as well as a pair of galaxies showed up so well with 15 second exposures, which are what each of the frames was exposed!  While Omega is visible to the naked eye (and spectacular even in binoculars), Centaurus A is strictly barely visible in binocs, and NGC 4945 was unknown to me till glimpsed in an early version of these clips.  The labelled frame from the time-lapse is shown here to jog your memory...

 

The other night (29 April) I went out to photograph the individual cast of characters with my Celestron 14" (C-14).  My friend Marilyn came along for company, since Melinda had to work that night.  We were out near Kitt Peak to leave the sky glow behind us.  Because these objects are very low near the horizon, no light pollution could be tolerated.  The trip was also a test of the new (for me) AP1200 mounting, which I've used for visual use a number of times, but have yet to use for photography.  The C-14 was used with a Hyperstar - a lens system that allows the telescope to be used at prime focus - in this case, a 660mm lens at F/1.9 to keep exposures very short.  I also used a 1.4X tel-extender so I was actually shooting at 925mm focal length, F.2.6.  After finally getting everything aligned, installed and collimated, I started exposing, starting first with Omega Centauri.  While doing so, I also had installed my 70-200 zoom to shoot a wide-field tracked image of the trio using Melinda's camera.  That exposure is shown here with north up.  It is a total of 3 shots, total of 9 minutes exposure.  All 3 non-stellar objects are neatly shown, but it still surprises me they were visible in 15 second exposures!  Granted, that was with a wide, fast (F/1.8) lens...

 

Omega Centauri is beautiful pretty no matter how you observe it.  I was thinking this shot was pretty good, with 630 seconds total exposure, but as I was stacking the 10 exposures, the new Astronomy Picture of the Day featuring Omega came up.  It was shot from South America with the cluster nearly overhead, not 10 degrees off the horizon like it appears here.  So of course, the linked image is even more spectacular, but I still enjoy the one I took with my own setup.  The cluster is about 16,000 light years away from us, much nearer than the galaxies seen in the above wide views.  The description from APOD says there are 10 million stars in the cluster - simply amazing!

 

Next object I imaged was NGC 4945, as it was culminating very near the meridian.  Since it only reaches 9 degrees off the horizon maximum, every little bit helps.  This galaxy is actually pretty close to us as galaxies go, only about 12 million light years away.  At 9th magnitude it is barely seen in binoculars, but would be a lot more observed in the Northern Hemisphere if it rose higher in the sky!  This stack has 9 minutes total exposure.  The Wiki link above describes that this galaxy is in a nearby cluster along with Centaurus A, explaining why they are pretty close in the sky.  It is also quite large, the length is nearly 2/3 the diameter of the moon!  It would be nice to be able to go deeper with more exposure, but likely isn't worth it as low as it is...  The small elliptical at the left edge is NGC 4976, about 3X further away than 4945.

 

Finally it was time for Centaurus A, a most unusual-looking galaxy.  Also known as NGC 5128, its other designation identifies it as a radio source.  It is the 5th brightest galaxy in the sky, just below naked-eye visibility, and looks strange because of its spherical overall shape, but with a dark obscuring lane.  This image is only 5 frames with 6.5 minutes total exposure.

 Overall, it was a fun night and the Ap1200 worked flawlessly.  All the above exposures were taken WITHOUT guiding to assure accurate tracking!  I just let the mount track on the objects, and even with a little breeze, round images almost always resulted.  The only exception were the 2 frames from Centaurus A that I had to discard, otherwise, I included all images exposed!  I got back home right about 1am - a long night, but invigorating since I got to observe with my own equipment, looking at objects on my own list - as opposed to the public observing I've been doing lately.  I figured that this was just about the first time I've been out imaging with my own equipment in over 2 years!  Perhaps some more this weekend!

Peak-O-The-Season!

The saying goes "April showers bring May flowers", but that is not the case in the desert Southwest!  Yes, it did sprinkle while we were gone to the Carolinas - rained all of .12" total on the 8th and 9th of April, otherwise has been 20 February since we had nearly .5"...  Of course, we're entering the dry period of the year - we're unlikely to get much of anything till the monsoonal flow stars up in early July.

But thankfully we don't depend on the rain to

provide springtime blooms.  While Winter rains can provide a good wildflower display in February and March, April and May are peak cactus flower season, and driving around town on Saturday just about knocked me for a loop with the displays of prickly pear and cholla cacti, which seem totally independent of rainfall.  The basic colors of prickly pear are yellow flowers, though you see tints tending towards peach too.  The varieties of purple plants with bright yellow flowers as shown here are just stunning!  I was able to catch a honeybee doing its thing on these blossoms too...

Down the block, wandering with my camera, I

found a huge prickly pear with the peach-colored flowers and amazingly, 21 buds on one pad of the plant!  usually you get a couple flower buds along the rim of a pad, but this might have been the most I've ever seen!  I wish I knew more about the different varieties - there seem to be dozens if not hundreds of prickly pear.  Note the flower buds at right - very different from at left.

The buds shown here are more in line with what is usually seen - some number of them along the rim of the pad.  Any given day one or more might bloom, but likely not all at once.  Flowers will last a day, but with all the buds the cactus will likely be in bloom for a couple weeks...

 

I mentioned cholla cacti above - there is a magnificent plant down the block that is a good 6 feet high with the most spectacular crimson flowers.  We don't have a lot of cholla in the neighborhood, but they have quite a range in flower coloration from green (!), oranges, reds and yellows. 

 

And perhaps most spectacular of all, Jack - our

neighbor down the block, has a trico cereus that is currently in bloom. I've actually blogged about it before - it is a spectacular plant, especially with the bloom set from 2 years ago (go to the link!).  Well, as I was doing my little neighborhood walk, I could tell one of the buds was about to pop open that night, so I took a picture of it, then at one hour intervals as it opened.  Shown here, from upper left it is shown over the 3 hour period.  The bottom two used flash for illumination, so forgive that... Then at right is one from early this morning before it closed.  We have a cereus night bloomer that opens later in the Summer with white flowers, but this Springtime flower is such a stunner...  Seems amazing that something so spectacular comes out of such an innocuous plant, and lasts for only a day!

Carolina Reptile Walk

While we were visiting Betty in Columbia, South Carolina, one of our destinations is the Three Rivers Greenway, a nice walkway/bike path along the Saluda and Congaree Rivers, flowing down the west side of Columbia.  While we have similar paths in Tucson, Columbia's has an actual river, with water flowing in it!  Tucson's system of washes are typically dry about 330 days of the year...

Our last visit was no exception, and it is always

fun to see the wildlife you can spot between the edge of land and water.  I assume it is pretty dependent on water level and time of the year, but this trip in early April seemed heavy on the reptile family!  It seemed every rock sticking out of the water had turtles on it and every branch extending into the water had frogs (yes, I know - amphibians, not reptiles)...  I haven't identified either of these, but both look pretty common.  This shot of the frog at right is my only picture that starts to show a pattern of white pigment under its chin.  Whether real or a temporary malady, I'm not sure.  A search didn't turn up anything...

A few yards down the path and I spotted a pretty good-sized snake, certainly 5 feet if not a little more. From the pattern, I believe it is a brown water snake, a non-venomous snake often found in low-hanging tree branches.  This fellow was basking in the sun and didn't pay me any mind, in fact, I didn't see it move at all, but it was gone when we passed by again 40 minutes later.  It certainly didn't have the triangular head of the pit vipers, so definitely wasn't a water moccasin.  It seemed pretty dull-colored and I thought perhaps it was looking to molt, but I'm thinking now that the brown water snake is normally dull in contrast...

 

 

 

Out in the river we saw a number of egrets and

great blue herons, but didn't see them fishing much or eating anything, so were wondering what they were doing...  Then we spotted huge schools of good-sized minnows in pools near the bank.  If this is any indication of the richness of river life, the birds might very well have been resting after a feeding session.

And lizards - we got lizards!  At lease different ones than we see in Arizona... Now that it is getting warm in the Southwest, the lizards we see move at seemingly the speed of light! The ones we spotted along the trail in Columbia at least were social enough that we got to take a few photos anyway... First up is the five-lined skink, one of the most common lizards in the Eastern US.  But they were cool to us as we don't have them in Arizona!  One of their most unusual features is a blue tail, easily detached when threatened to distract predators.  The blue tail may fade with age, though remains stronger in females.   I've got a thing for lizard fingernails, so love the little nails in the picture at right!

 

 

Also seen on the way back to the car was a Carolina anole -

easily seen with its bright green color.  The above link indicates it has some color-change capability, like a chameleon, and its behavior is distinctly different than the skink above - it stayed motionless for some time, evidently believing it was blending into the background, making picture-taking much easier.  The two pictures here are from the same frame, the right image shown at full-resolution to show the finest details.

So we had a great time visiting the river walking path with Betty.  Even in the urban area, we saw a nice variety of the creatures living there - common for South Carolina, but new for us!

A Windy, Starry Night!

While we've had an abundance of clear skies in the Tucson area, up atop Kitt Peak, we've lost a lot of nights recently to high winds.  While most telescopes are protected by domes, as it nears 40mph, domes and telescopes are at risk from wind damage and rules dictate the observatory closes down. 

The last couple Spring observing seasons I've worked part time on the mountain, I've been working on a time lapse of the great globular cluster Omega Centauri rising over the 2.1 meter telescope.  After a couple tries I'd all but given up on the project, but last month I obtained a new tracking platform, made by Vixen.  One of the tracking options is half-speed, which splits the image blur between the stars and ground objects.  The setup is shown at left - the platform and camera is mounted on a standard tripod and it tracks along the horizon.  So while helping out on an astro-photo workshop a couple weeks ago (a very windy night), I tried out the combination with an 85mm, fast Nikon lens.  It worked great, but I aimed incorrectly so planned to go up a couple nights later.  Finally on tax day, after the Nightly Observing Program had been cancelled for wind, I decided to brave the elements and 5-day-old moon to try again.

The result is shown here.  Fortunately with the practice session a couple days earlier I knew when and where the cluster would rise.  The wind, gusting to 45mph made critical focus difficult by buffeting me around while trying to manually twist the lens grip, then I spent too much time getting the framing perfect - ball mounts are tough to aim in the dark with a camera body short on flat or straight edges to use a bubble level on...  So I didn't quite get the cluster rising over the trees.  The bright moon and F/1.8 lens speed made 15 second exposures possible (taken every 20 seconds), which was about perfect to minimize movement between frames.  As a bonus, besides the cluster, which clears our southern horizon by only about 10 degrees, the bright galaxy Centaurus A (NGC 5128) is visible a few degrees above it.  In addition, in my previous attempts at capturing Omega, I've noticed another sizable galaxy to the west, NGC 4945.  I've never seen it in a telescope, only on these pictures, but it is big and bright enough to try it next time I'm out.  The objects are pointed out in the annotated picture here...

 

Oh yes, and the time lapse is shown here - uploaded to YouTube for your convenience.  Full screen and HD quality always helps if you have the bandwidth.  Enjoy!