More Star-B-Que 2013!

The Fall Star-B-Que of the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association was held up at Kitt Peak this last Saturday.  I already blogged about the lizard-in-a-strait-jacket yesterday, so time for more mundane stuff, like the latest pictures...

I also recently told about my IR-converted camera's vacation to New York State, and I wanted to bring it along to the mountain to shoot the contrasts between the titanium-painted domes, vegetation and clear sky.  With the Fall sunset seeming to come early, I didn't have a lot of time to play given my responsibilities as Star-B-Que organizer, so only got the above images.  The one at left is a straight shot of the 4-meter and Steward 2.3 meter framed by a pair of oak trees at the picnic area.

The shot at right is a 5-frame mosaic of shots showing the wide expanse from the VLBA radio dish, located at the picnic area, across the profile of the Observatory.  This picture brings up a topic I've been wanting to discuss for a couple weeks - mosaic software!  I was happy for the last year or so with Autopano Pro in assembling mosaics, but a recent disk crash required a reload, and I couldn't find the version I bought (key protected), and I was loathe to pay another $100 for the new version.  Photoshop has a "Photo merge" feature, but it often has difficulty in assembling anything but the most simple panoramas...

A friend recently turned me on to "Microsoft ICE", which I understand means Image Composition Editor.  The website has an impressive demonstration where a 200 frame mosaic was assembled by the program in seconds, retaining the full resolution of the original frames, or zooming out to see the "big picture"!  The great thing, besides the incredible job it does, is that it is a free download!  The other great thing is that I've yet to be able to stump it - I've fed it star-field pictures and somehow it assembles them perfectly and seamlessly!  You will see the results of my latest effort below...

After the excitement of saving the lizard earlier in the afternoon, a variety of scopes were set up down the clearing of the picnic area.  My Celestron 14" might have been the largest, buddy Roger brought along a 5.5" F/8 refractor that was nice for scanning along the Milky Way.  We had a lot of attendees that couldn't stay late for one reason or another, and just came to socialize and look thru the scopes for a bit at some great skies before the 75 minute drive back to Tucson.  The picture at left is taken with a Nikon 8mm F/2.8 for a 2 minute exposure once it got fully dark.  The glow of the Milky Way bisects the picture vertically, and astronomers with red lights illuminate the foreground.  The outline of the C-14 can be seen in the right foreground.  The brightest star at the upper edge is Vega, below and left of Vega is Altair.  This is a tracked image using the Vixen Polarie.

As advertised, here is the Milky Way mosaic.  It is a 9-frame assemblage, each shot was a stack of two-2 minute exposures taken with a Nikon 80mm lens at F/4.  At left is a single frame, cropped from the one that shows the hydrogen clouds M8 (below) and M20(above and right).  Since the camera was mounted on a ball head on the tracker, I wasn't sure of the overlap or framing, but was hoping that it was sufficient to do the mosaic without any holes!  Once all 18 of the frames were stacked into the 9 individual shots, they were dumped into the ICE program and it was done in seconds!  It was cropped slightly to smooth out the edges, and had levels adjusted some, but is otherwise shown in all its glory at right.  Of course, as I've lamented before, the blog limits pictures to 1600 pixels wide, so you can't go exploring through the Milky Way like I can on the 6,000 pixel wide original...  The Teapot asterism dominates the lower left corner, with the dark clouds and Nebulae scattered along the plane of the galaxy emphasized with the 20Da camera.  The black bits are where the frame edges stopped, and I'm mystified how ICE assembles it without any apparent errors.  Anyone who has been tempted to try mosaics but has baulked at the price ought to give it a try!

One Lucky Lizard!

Yesterday was the Fall version of the Kitt Peak
Star-B-Que - a chance for the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association (TAAA) to get together and picnic in the late afternoon, followed by some observing with our own telescopes in some great skies. The Kitt Peak National Observatory allows us to schedule their picnic area for the event - a great location about 1.5 miles below the mountaintop at about 6300 feet elevation. Over the years we've spotted a variety of local wildlife, and someone spotted this lizard pictured at left, shown at full camera resolution. And while it is normally difficult to catch these guys, this one was easy - somehow he tried to crawl through a short chunk of garden hose and got caught - the right shows the full frame while he wears his self-styled "straight jacket"

It seems like it would be difficult for wildlife to get caught in something like this, but perhaps it is not.  From the edges, it appears that it has been nibbled on, but is difficult to say.  Common knowledge says that cats' whiskers prevent them from sticking their head into anything they can get stuck in until a mean kid pulls or cuts them and they will get stuck.  Regardless, lizards don't have whiskers, so he might have been doomed had we not come along.  I'm thinking that after a couple weeks he might have gotten skinny enough to be able to crawl through, and we've certainly seen lizards around our house that the cats have brought in that might very well have spent weeks or months under dressers.  But this one was definitely stuck, and it was our mission to free him (assume he was male from his bright coloration)!  Someone had a Swiss Army Knife, and you would think that would have been the perfect tool for the purpose, but such was not the case!  The piece of hose had spent considerable time in the sun and was quite hard and brittle, seemingly impervious to our assault.  neither a knife blade or the scissors were up to the job...  Before he reached for the saw blade, I asked him to let me look in the toolbox of my van.

Fortunately I had a variety of tools, including a long needle-nose pliers that I sent up the length of the hose section just to create a small gap between lizard and hose.  I then had a side-cutter for cutting wire that I nibbled up the length of hose, setting him free at last.  Unfortunately as I was wielding tools, I've got no pictures of that operation.  But I was able to grab a couple shots of one very happy (and lucky) lizard before he ran off in the underbrush.  Glad to be of service!

Back From Summer Vacation!

I got a package in the mail the other day - my IR-modified camera got back from its summer vacation back East!  My friend Ken Spencer, who was a real photographer in a former life and writes "A Picture Each Day" blog expressed an interest in old-timey IR imaging that we all used to do back in the day.  Well I offered to send him the camera for a few months during the summer season when the "Wood Effect" makes IR imaging so dramatic.

I think he had lots of fun with it - it really does

open up a new window to looking at things.  But as Fall arrived, he sent it back (with a new camera battery!) and I took it out the other day to remind myself what it is can do. 

The next day I took it in to work at UA and at lunchtime took a short drive over to Reid Park to eat my lunch.  Of course, the IR shots excel with clear skies and lots of vegetation, and though the monsoons were still hanging around, the clouds sometimes add a little drama.  There are open ponds at the park too, and besides showing the vegetation as bright white and the skies dark, water is also a strong absorber, though it offers some reflections of bright trees...  I think the shot at left is my favorite, and when returning to UA, I ambled over to the just-finished addition to Arizona Stadium.  This time the addition wasn't for the Mirror Lab, which is under the east stands, but rather for the football team.  They added an artificial-surface field for "Bear Down" field, to be used for intermural sports.  While made to look like green grass, you can tell immediately from the IR shot is isn't nearly as bright as real vegetation, like the trees in the background are...  Real grass would be just about as bright as the painted lines in IR!

A day or two later I went up to Finger Rock
Canyon when friends were hiking the trail.  While waiting for them to come out, I took a few shots.  Besides the cacti showing lots of green, being the end of the rainy season the ocotillo were all in leaf.  During the dry Spring, they mostly look like unadorned thorny sticks in the ground, but rain brings out their fine leaf structure.  In this shot I've also got mountain slopes with saguaros, partly clear skies and one of the houses built on the national forest boundary line high up the slopes.  Another effect of IR imaging is in haze penetration - you can see and image at great distances without any haze blurring.  I made a small panorama of the downtown Tucson area with a telephoto lens shown at right.  Coverage is from "A" Mountain at right past our "skyscrapers".  Note the light-colored vegetation, as you would expect, but also the visibility of the distant Sierrita Mountains, a good 30+ miles away are quite clearly defined.  The white spot at lower left is a golf course fairway, and the nearby ridge shows individual plants as they appear in IR.

It was great to again image with this converted camera (the IR-blocking filter that all cameras have, was replaced with an IR-passing filter).  Certainly it isn't something you use every day, but is fun to break out now and again!

Night of the Moonflowers!

Last Sunday, Melinda's last night off before her next round of chemo, we took a little evening road trip while she was feeling good.  For some time I'd wanted to take pictures of the evening blooming of Datura Wrightii, known by a variety of other names such as Locoweed, Jimsonweed, Moonflower, and others...  I'd been intrigued by the blog posts by "Ranger Kathryn" regarding watching them open in the evenings, her link listed down on the right side of our own blog. 

We headed out to Kitt Peak, where I've seen the plants before.  About a mile below the mountaintop observatory, we found a couple healthy plants conveniently next to a pullout.  Since it was still a little before sunset, the buds were all still closed, so I set up a couple cameras and timers to watch a couple of good-looking candidates.  For each I used the on-camera flash, since it would soon be dark, and set the timers to take a picture every 20 seconds - one for a side view, one looking down the tubular flower bud.  The photo at left shows one of the cameras well after dark, the bright moon illuminating the distant domes, the flash illuminating the datura.

We didn't have long to wait, pretty much as soon
as the cameras started, the buds started unwrapping and they sprang open about a half hour after sunset.  Ranger Kathryn in her posts above noted the rush of insect pollinators, but since we are now clear of monsoons, sort of late in the blooming season, we didn't see a big rush like she did...  But it was quite striking how quickly they went from closed to open.  The pictures shown here show the change, but it is the time lapse constructed of all the nearly 600 images that is most interesting!  We had the slightest bit of breeze, accounting for the movement you see in the time-lapse, but Ranger Kathryn notes that even in still air that vibrations seem to originate inside the plant...


Here is the time-lapse, with a little intro and epilogue:

And yes, the time-lapse sort of spoils the surprise
- we did have some pollinating visitors show up in two of the frames - 2 different species of hawkmoths, genus Manduca. I believe the one displaying only their rear end out of the trumpet-shaped flower (at right) is Manduca Rustica, the other at left is as yet unidentified, as it doesn't show as clear markings, though the long proboscis is revealed in the flash image. Both of these images are at full camera resolution to show maximum detail...

While up at the Observatory a month before, a few days before the Perseid meteor shower, I was getting buzzed by big moths like this a good part of the night.  A couple nights later, with Melinda present, I detected only a couple, so their population must be quite variable, but they sure get your attention when they are flying around your face!  Next year we'll have to go a little earlier in the season and see if we get more pollinators...

Melinda Update - Into Round Two!

Here we are, about 4 weeks after her lung cancer diagnosis and today she finished the last day of the second round of chemo!  This time, she took all 3 day's worth of chemo as an outpatient at the Cancer Center, which conveniently is only about a mile from our house.  As I said a week ago at our last update, she was really feeling well.  Now that the second round has been loaded into her, we're expecting a few days of nausea and tiredness headed our way.  Fortunately they also give her nausea medicine in an IV before the chemo, and other than a touch of queasiness this morning it has controlled it well.

The good news is that her new port worked great!  No bruises up and down her arm trying to find veins for the chemo to go in.  While they would have allowed her to get all 3 day's worth of chemo with a single port stick, she wouldn't have been able to shower, so they removed it after the first day when she went home, then left it in between days 2 and 3.  Unfortunately they did have to stick her for a blood test - an INR measures the clotting factor of the blood and the Heparin flush to assure her port was open would have affected the results.

The bad news is that she started shedding even her short hair last Friday in the shower, so went to the local hair cutting place for a buzz cut.  So she is looking significantly different, and mostly wears bandannas or scarves, even around the house.  I'm hoping for a photo-shoot with one of the calmer cats draped over her scalp - the good thing about that is she would have a choice of head cover of blond (Lucy, Hannah or Pixel or YellowCat), auburn (Annie), brunette (Hootie or HootieII), or calico (Mia)!

Two-fers on the Interweb!

Today was a good day!  Well, good for being at work, anyway!  I love my job, working on some of the most interesting telescope projects in the world!  We use a net work and the Internet often, both for communications between coworkers, searching for items to buy, and believe it or not, when watching big mirrors go roundy-round for hours, it helps to pay attention to go interwebbing for a bit now and again.  What I really like is finding a site that scratches two itches at once - you know, discovering something that interests two of your interests at once.  I found a couple of those today that I'll share with you...

First up is an amazing website/blog by Brandon Stanton, who writes "Humans of New York".  Now I've blogged about him before - he is a street photographer of some renown in NYC, posting typically a half dozen portraits a day of people and snippets of their lives.  It is an engrossing site, and it is easy to spend a lot more time than you intend to, looking at his images and learning a little about the subjects.  One of today's images is shown at left - a shot as part of a commemoration of "Fashion Week" in New York City.  As a stereo nut, what I love about it is not the item or colors or pattern, but the "accidental" 3D image caused by the pair of reflections from the glasses!  When you "parallel view" the two images, you get a very nice 3D image of the woman holding the purse!  As opposed to my normal "cross-eyed" method of viewing stereo pairs, on this one, you look "through" the image - the goal is to look at the right image w/your right eye and left image w/left eye.  Try it, you will be amazed!  And don't forget to go to go to Brandon's site for more portraits.  Near the top of the page is a link to his trip to Iran earlier in the year - just amazing stuff!  Photo by Brendon Stanton.

The other discovery I made today was an essay on the New York Times online "Opinionator" page of comments.  I was looking for the latest Dick Cavett column - he writes about once per month about show business, his TV show from the  '70s (I was a big fan - an Iowa farm boy watching big city showbiz!), and stories from his amazing life. Nothing new from him on this visit, but up at the top of the posts was a very nice essay by former astronomer Pippa Goldschmidt.  Now how often do you see astronomers having their say on the NYT - almost never!  Her essay conveyed a lot of what I expect many professional astronomers feel - a closeness to the stars by deciphering their hard-won secrets even though these days they are working from well-lit warm offices to do their observing that might as well be in their living room, not on a mountain observatory...  Her essay leads her to a not-too-distant prison that used to house opponents to the then-just ended Pinochet regime in Chile where she did a lot of her observing.  She concludes as an astronomer that it was easier to discover what makes a distant quasar tick than understand people and why they treat others the way they do.  It is interesting reading, and as you would expect from the Times readership, the comments are generally enlightened and interesting as well - make sure you check those out underneath the essay.   I might have to track down Pippa's book that has just come out.  Artwork at left by Brendan Monroe for the New York Times.

So you see, it was nice to make a couple discoveries that covered several interests at once!   The fun is in the searching AND discovering!

Hurricane Season!

The latest Melinda update!  Nearing the end of her first chemo cycle, she feels pretty good and almost normal!  The good things are that she is feeling well, has good energy, and her taste buds are almost back to normal too.  The bad things are that a nagging cough has returned and her hair continues to drop.  The cough thing plus a low-grade fever concerned the physician assistant enough to prescribe a round of antibiotics.  The hair triggered another haircut, this time with an electric clippers to a uniform half inch.  By the way - don't ask her how long it is like I just did, or she'll pull out another pinch of it for you to measure!  Interestingly, now that it is ultra-short, her hair has picked up a life of its own and displays a couple cowlicks, the one in back looking like a full-fledged hurricane, the others more diffuse like tropical depressions that may form one in the future.  While she doesn't permit portraits at the moment, she does allow showing her cowlick, shown here.

Today we went to the University Medical Center for a port placement.  A port is a subcutaneous connection that allows a direct connection into a vein without a temporary IV connection every time.  Once installed, they can stay in place for months or years as needed for treatment and blood tests without vein sticks.  The procedure was supposed to take about an hour and we arrived before 0800 for filling out forms and blood tests.  A late start because of a surgical backlog and what ended up being about a 2 hour procedure, we didn't get released until after 1300.   But we're glad to have it - it will greatly simplify chemo and tests without all the bruises she suffered from the first round of treatment.  It is bandaged now, but will only appear as a bump under the skin that can be connected with a special needle.

Her chemo cycle starts anew the first of next week, with 3 days of infusion as an outpatient at the local cancer center.  The hurricane analogy above seems apt somehow...  We've been through a cycle now, and know a little about what to expect.  While there will be some stormy times ahead we feel a lot better about something we've only heard about before.  Knowing that for each cycle there is a good part of it where we can function semi-normally is a great comfort and something to look forward to each time.  Keep fingers crossed and prayers coming our way - a few months more of this and we'll get an evaluation to see where all this is going.  Stay tuned!