A Great Alignment and Spectacular Sunset!

Last evening was our first opportunity this year

to observe the sunset alignment of Kitt Peak National Observatory.  About 4 or 5 days before and after the Winter Solstice, it can be observed from a broad pullout on the outside of a curve just below milepost 9.  There is an unimpeded view of the Observatory to the SSW, and though sometimes the cars passing on the road are pesky, it is a safe place to observe the alignment.  It seems a tradition leading up to the holiday season to observe or shoot it and it would seem strange not to chase it - any excuse to get out and observe!  While it can be quite cold here in December above 5,000 feet elevation, yesterday we set a high temperature record of 83F in Tucson, so it was comfortable in long sleeves even without a jacket...

I always have fun trying new imaging options every year, and there was no exception this year.  Our friend Roger, a telescope maker of some renown, built a 5.75" F/8 diameter triplet apochromat a few years back, and I talked him into joining us, and running Melinda's T1i on it.  The 1170mm focal length was perfect for the sun's diameter on the APS sensor.  I quickly adapted his mounting plate to a massive tripod I've had for decades, and the combination was quite robust.  The pictures were taken shortly after we arrived with the sun still a good 10 degrees off the horizon.  Yes, we had some thin clouds, but perfectly clear skies usually make for boring sunsets!

We had a few friends joining us this year from the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association (TAAA).  Alan Strauss,director of the Mount Lemmon Sky Center, joined us with some small scopes, one for white light and another for H-alpha viewing.  In the image at left, Alan is standing at right talking to Roger, behind his blue telescope, with Melinda sitting in the back of the van.  Jim Miller and his wife Elaine also joined us, setting up his 10" telescope - the picture at right shows him focusing for the sunset.

Jim O'Connor and wife Susan also came along, Jim attempting to take video of the event with laptop and Imaging Source camera (shown at left image).  We all arrived in plenty of time to get our equipment setup, and had a chance to socialize a bit before the sun hit the horizon.  We even had a couple of normally speeding cars stop and ask what was going on...  The picture at right shows the wide-angle view with the spare camera once the button was pushed and pics came crashing in...

Our observing setup is shown in a little more detail at left.  Roger's APO is the blue scope at left.  It has an older Thousand Oakes glass solar filter - a type 2 filter designed for imaging with short exposures.  Not entirely safe for visual observing (a little too bright), but perfect for shooting a dimmed sun on the horizon!  You can also see the kludged saddle plate mount atop my binocular mount to hold the telescope...  We also observed the sunset visually with a C5 telescope with Mylar filter and roof prism diagonal to give a correctly oriented view.  Through trial and error, I found I could shoot a full-size jpeg every 2 seconds with Melinda's T1i without problems, so that is how I shot it.  While the images were quite sharp when we set up, the seeing got quite mediocre a little before sunset.  I'm thinking it was the inversion layer that was very near the level of Kitt Peak, Roger thought it was cooling air falling down the slopes of the mountain we were on.  Effects of the seeing can be readily seen in the time-lapse below...

As soon as the sun entered the field of view, I
checked the exposure to make sure it wouldn't be overexposed, then started the exposure-every-2-second sequence.  Running manually, each was about a 2000th of a second.  As soon as the sun set below the mountain, I switched it to aperture priority automatic, and even through the solar filter, an adequate exposure was about a 16th of a second.  The image at left shows the sun perfectly centered on the Observatory outline.  Yes, the clouds made the pictures a little more interesting, and fortunately, there was a clear zone at the level of the telescope domes above Kitt Peak.  The sun always seems to move a surprising amount from left to right as it sets (because we're in the northern hemisphere).  It also seems to happen so quickly through a telescope, but takes about 2 minutes, telescope or not!  The last piece of sun set between the 4-meter telescope at right and the Steward Observatory scopes to the sun's left, the last bit bifurcated by the flat-topped dome of the 90".

Of course, we get some spectacular sunsets in
Arizona - something about the clarity of the air and the normally clear skies of the drier, more desolate desert to the west.  And did we have a spectacular sunset.  While normally the show is over once the sun sets, it just got more and more spectacular for the next 10 minutes!  While some of the first color shows up in the wide shot above while the sun was still above the horizon, a few minutes later with the sun illuminating the underside of the clouds, they just glowed...  I took a couple different styles of images - at left is an HDR (High Dynamic Range) which combines 3 exposures of different lengths to preserve details in both shadows and highlights of the image.  I wanted to preserve the purple illumination of the front side of the mountains, as well as the bright colors in the clouds.  At right is a 4-frame mosaic with my zoom's maximum 200mm focal length to preserve details of our view to the west from Thimble Peak at right to the south past Kitt Peak.  Of course, I'm limited to the 1600 pixel wide frame here, but it is a good representation of the spectacular sky.  I'm sure you might think that I've photoshopped in the colors, but check out Alan Strauss' post of the sunset and you will see that I'm not pulling your leg!

So finally, the 173 images collected, of both the sun setting and a minute of twilight skies afterwards, were assembled into a movie using Windows Moviemaker, then uploaded to Youtube.  It makes a very nice 30 second sunset time lapse, showing not only the motion of the sun, but also the slight motion of the clouds past the mountaintop.  You should be able to play the movie right here in the blog post, or you can hit the youtube icon at the bottom of the viewer to go to that site for viewing.  Enjoy!

Lovely Lovejoy - First Look!

While the potential "Comet of the Century", C/2012 S1 ISON got pulverized as it passed over the Sun's surface on Thanksgiving and has disappeared, there has been another with greater staying power - C/2013 R1 Lovejoy.  Discovered by Terry Lovejoy in Australia just 3 months ago, it is currently barely visible to the naked eye from a dark site ( I mean that - barely imagined from a really dark sky!).  While I've spotted it from the back yard in binoculars knowing exactly where to look, nothing beats the view of these things from a dark sky, but as it is a pre-dawn object, I've not gone for any early-morning drives...

But with the nearly-full Moon upon us, this morning was the last chance to have a dark sky for an hour after moon set and before twilight starts, so pulled the trigger and drove up Mount Lemmon north of Tucson to San Pedro Vista with a clear, dark sky in the northeast.  Leaving the house at 1am reminded me of the "olden days" when as a pup of 43 years of age, I would head up the mountain about every third or fourth morning to shoot Hale-Bopp in the morning sky with a Schmidt Camera back in the spring of '97, and believe me, I felt it in my bones these 17 years later!  Arriving well before moonset, I set up 2 mounts and 3 cameras running 80mm to 480mm focal length.  Here are some quick-and-dirty results.

Interestingly, it was also the peak of the Geminid meteor shower, and the skies really were ablaze with meteors.  I was sticking to the task at hand, so never set up a camera with a wide-angle lens, but believe me, would have been like shooting fish in a barrel!  While not even looking away from the quadrant of the sky where the comet was located, I'd see 2 or three over 5 or 10 seconds!  I'm thinking it was easily a couple hundred per hour over the entire sky...  The dark sky really helps with that.  Interestingly, 2 of my early shots with the wide-field 80mm caught Geminids on consecutive frames, so stacked them here.  Comet Lovejoy is sporting a very nice tail (also visible in binoculars) just south of the Keystone of Hercules.  The grand globular star cluster M13 is visible on the left side as well, and made a nice contrast to the comet.  I'm thinking the comet was just brighter than the cluster, but not by a great amount...  Since the comet is so low, the fast lens (Canon 80mm @F/3.5) also caught some airglow (the greenish tints), and possibly some very thin cirrus.  North is at the upper left corner...

One of the other rigs I set up was the little Meade 80mm F/6 triplet APO lens (480mm focal length).  Shown here is a stacked set of nine 150second exposures. Taken with a Canon XSi (my normal go-to camera), north is approximately up in this exposure, whose field of view is small enough that it doesn't even show Xi Hercules at the left of the comet in the wide-field above...  The comet is moving pretty quickly, and I stacked the picture on the overexposed head of the comet, so the multiple-star trails demonstrate how far it moved in the nearly 3 minutes between exposures.  The colors are real - the greenish glow in the coma is from dissociated carbon molecules from the nucleus, and the bluish glow of the ion tail is from the fluorescence of water vapor and carbon monoxide driven back by the solar wind.

The hour of darkness between moonset and start of twilight passed all too quickly, and I packed up all the gear and drove back down the mountain to Tucson, arriving home just after sunrise.  It made for a long night, and sleeping till 1pm, but it was worth it to see this stand-in for Comet ISON do such an admirable job as substitute.  And this fellow isn't going anywhere soon - it will stay at the limit of naked-eye brightness for another month in the morning sky, and even into the Spring and the Grand Canyon Star Party, a dedicated hunter with a C-14 might be able to show it to tourists as a barely-visible speck.  In the meantime, I'll look at these exposures more carefully and see if I can get out something a little more interesting...

Melinda's Chemo Graduation!

Chemo cycle 6 is in the books!  Initially, way back in August, the oncologist had said 4 or 6 cycles, and she eventually settled on 6 cycles.  Each cycle consists of 3 consecutive days of chemo, with 18 days off, so a 3 week cycle.  Day one was always the hardest, as it included lab work, consultation with the oncologist, then an infusion of both Cisplatin and Etoposide.  We've had some day ones where we were in at 8:30am and didn't get out till after 6pm - a long day at the Cancer Center!  On days 2 and 3 Melinda only got the Etoposide, no docs or labs, so were usually in and out in 2 or 3 hours...  Anyway, today was the 3rd day of cycle 6, so Melinda has officially graduated!  We've never covered the details though, so yesterday brought the camera along to document the process, if not just for us, perhaps for someone else going through treatments for small-cell lung cancer.  At left we were waiting for Melinda to get called into the infusion center.  In the waiting area they have a big-screen TV showing a loop tape or CD of scenes of Hawaii - nice, relaxing calming video to ease the nerves...

Inexplicably, they either seemed to be packed to the gills with patients, sometimes we were the only ones waiting - we never figured it out the difference...  Yesterday we waited all of 5 minutes or so before getting called in.  Check-in consisted of vitals - weight, blood pressure, temperature...  Here nurse Kathy charts info while Melinda checks Facebook correspondence before getting started.  Nearly all the rooms have windows facing either mountains in the distance, or trees out in the atrium.  It is nice to have views of outside and natural light.  Most of the rooms have chairs for 4 patients and escorts.  There are also a few private rooms with beds for those with medical complications.

Melinda had a port installed after cycle1.  It makes the chemo infusion a lot easier for both the nurses and patients after all the vein pokes as an inpatient at UMC.  It is just under the skin under her right clavicle, so easy to access.  Melinda starts the morning of a chemo with a numbing cream applied a half hour or so before her appointment.  The Tegaderm covering that protects the area after application is shown at left.  After peeling it off, the nurse scrubs the area with a little scrubbing sponge and antiseptic to sterilize the area where the port is located...   As shown at right, I got put to work just after this picture was taken to pull her necklace aside to clear the area...

After the area dried, it was time for the poke!  A port is accessed by a Huber needle, something just under an inch long.  The patient is usually instructed to look the other way, and while the nurse feels for the boundaries of the port, the patient inhales and holds for a moment while the needle is pushed in (shown at left).  Thanks to the numbing cream, it is usually painless, or at least, it certainly helps!  As soon as the port is accessed, saline is injected to make sure there is a good connection and there is a good blood return from the port line.  The needle and line are taped down with gauze over it for the infusion in case it is accidentally pulled during the process.  After the chemo, the needle and line can be left in for an infusion the next day - they can put tape over it to keep the area clean.  However, you are not supposed to shower with the needle/line installed.  Melinda did both - sometimes kept it in overnight to save a poke the next day, and also had it removed daily so she could shower before the next infusion.

After all that, the rest is easy - relax for as long as the infusion goes on.  First came a small bag of Zofran and Dexamethasone to help with nausea, followed by a 30 minute wait.  The Cisplatin on day one was a 2-hour infusion, and the Etoposide  on days 1, 2 and 3 were for an hour.  With a 4 hour or more infusion, Melinda would sometimes sleep - a reaction from the oral drugs Atavan, another anti-nausea and anti-anxiety, and Emend, again for nausea.  We would usually do the NYT crossword puzzle.  Some days I'd go out and fetch lunch, some days go downstairs to the little café where they had reasonable cheeseburgers for $2.50!  Most days you would see Joe or another volunteer come by with the snack cart (at right).  If nothing else, they want their patients to be happy and snacking and drinking, with either goodies off the cart, or a variety of juices or cookies out of the cantina.  As shown at left, the patients are also spoiled by bundling up with warmed blankets too.  It isn't that the rooms were so cold, but the chemo fluids weren't warmed certainly, so most took advantage of the offer!

Today was day 3 of Cycle 6, so Graduation Day!  For the occasion we had a nice view of the Catalina Mountains, and one of our favorite nurses Molly.  We didn't know they made a big deal of finishing chemo - figuring we'd have a private party, but were surprised when a half dozen nurses gathered round, clapping and showering Melinda with bubbles!  She was more than a little overwhelmed, as shown at left...  They also presented her with a graduation certificate and a little ceramic heart - it was almost sad walking out of the place today, knowing we'd not be going back to the second floor, hopefully for a long time, other to take them up on stopping by to say hello!

So no more chemo in the foreseen future!  After the New Year, she'll get another PET scan, and a brain MRI, then get a referral to a radiation oncologist, likely to follow up with some radiation treatments.  In the reading she has done, evidently follow-up with radiation has an improved outcome, so her attitude continues to be "whatever it takes!"  So the end isn't in sight yet, but the final steps are becoming clearer...  We'll post more then and let you know what is decided then.  In the meantime, at left is a "Selfie" that Melinda took today on her chemo graduation.  Congratulations!

Our New Family!

While we grieve the loss of Melinda's sister Susan, it has initiated some unexpected benefits.  Actually, it goes back a little further to Melinda's lung cancer diagnosis - one of the surprises we got were some notes of support from Susan's estranged children, Kathy and Rick.  I won't get into the family dynamics, but after disappearing from her life for 14 years, she has told me more than a few times that the best thing about getting her cancer diagnosis is the reconnection to her niece and nephew.  They spent a lot of time together when the kids were growing up, so it was difficult for her when they separated.  The picture at left was taken in October at their first meeting this century, and the reunion culminated when we went to Rick's house this trip to meet the rest of the family!

Kathy is unattached, but Rick is married with two lovely girls.  At left, Rick's wife Susan poses with their oldest daughter Lily.  Not far away is their baby girl Emmy (9 months!), who is visibly frustrated because she can only crawl backwards!  You can tell she'll be a ball of fire when she figures out how to go where she wants!

They are dog people (we have cats...), so we were constantly under attack by loving puppies.  At left is Kathy's dog Jethro spending quality time with Melinda holding her new (to her) great niece Emmy.  At right is Aunt Maj (Melinda's sister) getting up close and personal to Rick and Susan's great dane Sadie.  Sadie is starting to get some hip issues, and having mobility problems, but she is a beautiful, if slow-moving giant of a dog.

It was a great evening and went a little late for a school night with conversation and getting to know our great-nieces.  We had some leftover birthday cake (from the last post) to share, and I got to enjoy some Lou Malnati's pizza for the first time (a Chicago classic, and one of my new favorites!).  It was great to have a renewed addition to our family and finally connect faces to people I've only heard about!  We are looking forward to spending much more time with our family!

Yes, I'm Older Than Dirt!

On our side trip towards Iowa to see my side of the family this trip, there were enough attendees for the gathering to justify moving the event to a church basement!  I smelled a surprise birthday party, but Melinda told a lil' white lie that "no birthday cake was involved" to her knowledge.  Well, whenever you complete another decade (yes, I'm turnin' 6-0 in another week or two) people make a fuss.  There was cake, not only to celebrate my birthday, but also that of my Aunt Velma who remains ageless - around for as long as I remember and always part of our family.  She had celebrated her birthday on Thanksgiving Day with her kids...  So while not a surprise, we had a great celebration with a huge batch of lasagna thanks to my sister Linda (who claims the recipe was from a former girlfriend of mine!), and a plethora of sides to make the Ketelsen family proud!

My goal for the night was to get a decent picture of great-niece Claire.  Being the big, scary uncle you only see a few times a year makes it tough to put the subject at ease, and I got lots of her peaking from around her mom, or picking her nose, or otherwise not having a camera-ready attitude (unlike her dad growing up who was always ready for a photo!).  What finally worked was this shot as they were about to leave where one of her aunts attacked me with a stuffed puma, with me adding suitable crying sound effects to get the needed reaction.  Hey, whatever works!  Not bad shots of Jeff and Sandy either!

Seasonal Transition

We've been enjoying some balmy weather in the Midwest.  Normally in the space between Thanksgiving and Christmas you can get some good accumulations of snow, but instead, we've had foggy, misty skies with temps mostly in the 40s, reaching an unseasonable upper 50s yesterday (all temps in Fahrenheit!).  Since we're not likely to see those temps again until March in Illinois, even though it was raining yesterday, it was a good day to grab an umbrella and the macro lens to shoot some more closeups like I did our last visit, and another a few days later.  First up is the only one well above ground level of a twig on a juniper tree a few feet from the house.  I've never paid much attention to their form, and it is interesting enough by itself, but the drop of water collecting before it drops was cool too.  This is the only of these shots where the on-camera flash was used to help illuminate it on a dreary day.  The 100mm Canon macro lens was used for all, shooting from 50cm or so from a tripod...

I'm still really impressed by the image quality of the 100mm F/2.8 Canon macro.  I rarely use it wide open as the depth of field is quite shallow.  I normally shoot at F/8 to F/12 for reasonable depth of field - any smaller on aperture and diffraction starts degrading the sharpness.  The image at left shows a single blade of grass with a line of rain droplets gathered along it.  This image is cropped considerably from the full frame, but is still degraded in image downsizing for display here.  At right the center of the frame is shown at the full camera resolution.  Clicking on it and taking a close look and you can start to make out cell structure, or at least fine details in the blade of grass - pretty cool!

Out in our yard is evidence of some of the storms that pass through and bring down branches from the variety of trees here.  Mostly they are branches that are already dead, and this one had a growth of interesting lichens and fungus on it.  It seems like a wet year with all the variations of mushrooms and fungus I've spotted on the downed trees in the woods...

While it wasn't raining hard while I was out shooting, it was a slow, steady drizzle.  I had spotted this fuzzy-leaved plant and figured it would look interesting in close-up.  I believe it is a Great Mullein (Verbascum Thapsus), though missing the flower stalk of a mature plant.  Sure enough, the mat of fibers in the leaf surface seemed soaked with drops of rain, some of them acting as magnifying lenses to enlarge the appearance of the fibers.

Before going in to dry off myself and the camera, I shot a couple more frames of leaf litter where individual raindrops could be seen acting as little magnifiers.  It appears that the balmy weather ended, as a cold front passed through last night and we woke to temps in the 20 and even at the warmest today, wind chills were in the teens.  As we leave tomorrow highs are to stay in the 20s and won't look to get above freezing for the foreseeable future.  We're looking for warmer temps in AZ where they are below normal in temps too, barely reaching the 50s.  What the heck, we'll take whatever we get handed, what else can you do!?

New Mirror Unveil!

In what seems like forever ago, but was only 3 months, the Mirror Lab cast a new mirror for the GMT project.  I blogged both on the final preps for the GMT3 casting, and about the casting itself.  The reason it seems so long ago is that it was when Melinda was first diagnosed with her lung cancer and with the treatments, travel, and work, it seems like ages!

The casting crew opened the oven last Tuesday just before Thanksgiving, and have been unpacking it since then.  Today (3 December), they are planning a big unveil for partners and VIPs, and since I've been out of town since the holiday, don't have current pictures, and have had to hold these until after the event.  Above is a 5-frame panorama assembled by the Microsoft ICE program.  Jim and Phil are unloading the white insulation that sealed against the vertical walls of the oven.  Visible are the inconel bands that hold the tub walls together against the force of the molten glass as the oven spins.  The bands are terminated with the air cylinders that allow for the band's expansion and contraction as the casting cools from 1200C to room temperature.  Note there are more bands on the bottom since there is more force when you add the weight of the liquid glass at the bottom of the mold...  At right, John helps Jim load up the insulation for disposal.  Note that there are lots of dangers in handling not only the insulation, but most of the other refractory materials, so all the casting crew routinely wear respirators and gloves in handling them.

The casting appeared to my eye to be about as perfect as they come.  A casual inspection didn't reveal any surface flaws one normally sees - bubbles, seeds, bubble veils that normally occur in any casting.  This one looked great!  Another 5-frame panorama is shown at left - the one thing you can see is that there is a fine scattering of black dust that happens during the casting after the glass solidifies at about 800C.  I've been told it is microscopic particles of the heater elements that flake off during the process.  You can see near the center where someone wiped it off at one spot.  It literally is a surface feature and will wipe off easily.  You will note also that there is no center hole on this casting, identifying it as one of the off-axis mirrors of GMT.  The next mirror to be cast, GMT4 will be the one mirror with a center hole, nearly 1.5 meters in diameter.  At some point in the fabrication process, we will be coring a 5cm (2") diameter hole in the center for drainage of generator and grinding/polishing fluids.  At right, our self-appointed Mirror Lab documentarian, Ray Bertram is documenting the mirror unpacking process too.

And, of course, I felt the urge to take a few stereo shots.  The band termination posts are a natural focal point for the depth of the stereo pair, both perhaps better show how the bands wrap around the tub walls.  These are both cross-eyed stereo - cross your eyes slightly so that you view the left picture with your right eye, and vice-versa.  There will be a center image that your brain interprets having depth...  It is usually easier to practice on the small images here before clicking for the full-size views.  Serious stereographers usually mount a pair of cameras that take images simultaneously, but I do it by lean left, snap, lean right, snap again, any motion between frames results in something weird in the stereo view.  Since Ray is included in the right pair, he moved slightly in the half second or so between frames, so there is a blur in the stereo pair there...

I'm sure that the efficient casting crew has removed the bands and hard refractories by now and only the naked mirror remains for the unveiling today.  I believe the schedule calls for attaching the lifting spider to it, allowing the RTV attachment to cure the couple weeks over the holiday shutdown.  Then in January or February, it will be lifted off the oven hearth and mold cleanout will start.  The finished mirror will likely be available late Spring or early Summer for us to start fabrication, though we'll likely not be ready for it yet - if only we could polish them as fast as they cast them!