The Power of Pixels!

Unfortunately, the parade of posts from our 3-day stay in Mexico comes to an end.  Amazingly, counting the prompt to observe Venus featuring the pic from Puerto Peñasco on 27 December, I squeezed 9 what I think are all pretty good posts from the 1200+ images taken on that trip!  So currently I'm on empty - who knows what will come along for the next post...

I've been having fun the last few months since being turned on to the Microsoft ICE program.  The software (free download!) does an amazing job stitching together random image assemblages to make a mosaic or panorama.  Gigapixel panoramas are quite popular, with several software companies vying for customers.  I paid 99 euros for AutoPano Pro a few years back, but couldn't get a new copy with my old key when my hard disk crashed recently, so I moved to the ICE program, which does what I want for the most part. Of course, the advantage of taking multi-image panoramas is that you retain the native resolution of the lens used for the individual images, but build up a wide-field of view by combining them.  More pixels are good!

While down at Margie's beach below her house, I took a 16-frame panorama with the 70-200 Canon zoom, set to 200mm.  I didn't use a tripod like I should have, but did use a monopod to help steady the telephoto and help in aiming.  All frames were oriented vertically to maximize the vertical extent, and I provided a reasonable 25% overlap between frames for the software to stitch them together.  Very quickly the ICE software slapped them together into the panorama shown at left.  Well, I should clarify - the program made a panorama that was 25,000 pixels wide (108 million pixels!)...  Unfortunately, Blogger limits pictures to 1600 pixels wide, so the image displayed when you click the thumbnail is only about a 20th of the original...

Slightly better is if I limit the downsizing a little and put them side by side as shown here.  You get a better feel at a little larger size.  It is so fun to scroll around the image at full camera resolution.  It is the whole reason to shoot these panoramas with a telephoto lens - keep the resolution of long focal lengths, but build them up for a full wide-field image.  The right image shown just about the only defect in Microsoft ICE's assembly - through no fault of their own, since the waves moved between exposures, there is no way to have a perfect panorama.  There are 2 seams in the image if you load the full-size image.

About the best way to get a feel of what it is like to stroll through the image is to look at a couple full-resolution images.  These pictures are full-size crops from the above panorama, and you can get an idea of what is capable looking at the full image.  Again, realize all these images are from the same 16-frame panorama...  Fun stuff!  I just wish there was a way to better enable you to see the full-size images.  I guess I would need a real web site for that, plus the image would be about 12MB in size too...  Any suggestions, let me know!

Last Evening View of Venus?

Five days from inferior conjunction of Venus, when it passes between us and the sun, and I almost forgot to go out to look for it tonight.  Fortunately, 20 minutes after sunset, it was visible just over the tree line from our cul-de-sac, and I got a brief glimpse of it.  Even with the 70-200 zoom with 1.4X converter, the crescent was easily visible in this cropped view.  You might have to click to load the full-size view to see it better.  For this shot the XSi was used for 1/250 second at F/6.3. I'm thinking it might be visible, but not for much longer!  In another 10 days or so it should be visible in the morning sky where it will stay through most of the year, not to return to the evening until about Thanksgiving!

The Harvest Continues!

The harvest of blog posts from over 1200 pictures of our Christmas trip to Puerto Peñasco continues!  Watching the world go by from Margie's rooftop astronomy deck, was always a favorite activity of mine.  While Puerto Peñasco has a population of a little under 60,000, the lighting in use is old-school from a few decades ago, so a lot is unshielded.  This leads to a considerable glow to the northwest towards town, likely amplified by a little humidity from the sea and dust off the desert. The east was pretty dark - only low-level residential lighting with a little glow from seaside development and if you try really hard, Caborca can be detected 80 miles to the southeast.

Generally our schedule was ruled by the sun - we awoke early with the sun and headed for bed usually within hours of sunset.  The girls did a great job with all our meals at home, but they always wanted to eat dinner just as it was getting interesting right after dark!  Christmas was the time of year that Orion dominates the eastern horizon as the stars dissolve out of the sky, and for 2 of our 3 nights I missed it too...  But finally I was able to grab some frames for the mosaics shown here - a 4-frame shot at left, and 3-frame shot at right.  I was concerned the program (Microsoft ICE) would have difficulty joining the earth and sea since there was a gap in time between frames, but there didn't seem to be any issues at all.  The subframes are only 30 seconds of exposure and there was some vignetting that showed in the assemblages that I corrected in Photoshop to some effect, but otherwise these are good representations of what could be seen by eye.  In the left image, bright Jupiter can be seen rising with Gemini, while Orion dominates the center.  In the right image, I wanted to show the pair of clusters in Taurus above Orion, the V-shaped Hyades and the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades above that.  Click for full-size views, realizing the 1600-pixel-wide limits of the blog.

It is always interesting how homeowners take advantage of local materials.  In the Midwest everyone has grass in their front yard.  In Tucson where you would need to pay for water to grow grass, most yards have a layer of pea gravel.  In Puerto Peñasco, Margie has a layer of white turret shells to serve in the space between the parked cars and where the patio begins.  Very eye-catching!  She claims the locals sell large burlap bags of them for a few dollars...  Shown at left is a closeup, and at right one I ran across in the wild down at the beach.

Finally, an innocent napkin holder caught my eye one morning.  From the outside covered dining table, she had a couple of her gold plate spoons keeping the napkins from blowing away.  I caught my reflection in them and attempted a variety of "selfies" catching my reflection.  I liked the structure and tone a lot, and then, while manipulating the image yesterday noticed the "twofer" aspect - the twin images of me serve as an accidental stereo image too!  Cross your eyes slightly to merge the two images of the right-hand image and you will see a coarse 3D image of me taking the picture, camera closer to the reflection that my head and roof beyond.  I like it!

Las Conchas - the Cupola Collection...

Yet another post from our Christmas visit to buddy Margie's house in Puerto Peñasco.  Never having been to the Mediterranean, her little development in Las Conchas (the shells), is what I expect it to look there - pretty nice whitewashed houses against the perfect blues of sea and sky.  And they have one thing you never see elsewhere in Arizona - cupolas!  A large percentage of them have these little domed peaks to the roof, that let in outside ambient light, and acts as a vent to let out hot air.  Their exteriors run the gamut from unadorned tile or plaster to tile and mosaics.  Margie's astronomy lookout on the roof is a perfect spot to look over the village, and presented here are some random shots from that vantage with the William Optics 11cm, F/7 apo - effectively a 770mm focal length telephoto lens.

This exercise in architecture also pushed me to learn a few new techniques I'll use later...  Note the above image - with the long focal length of the telescope, the depth of focus is quite small, so if there is considerable distance between points of interest, one will be in focus, the other will be fuzzy.  Note the upper cupola is out of focus...  At left, I took 2 images, one focused on the front dome and a second on the rear, and used focus stacking techniques using Photoshop to combine the 2 images to keep both domes in focus.  It is a powerful tool that I can see myself using with my macro photography in the future using multiple exposures.   At right is another example, this time against a distant mountain peak - actually the Pinacate volcanic range, of which one crater can be seen to the right.  The Pinacates dominate the northwestern view on the drive to Puerto Peñasco, and are here nearly 40 miles distant.

Since this blog usually contains some nuggets of astronomical knowledge, this next example can also serve as an analogy to other principles.  From a fixed observation point, some cupolas appear bigger because they are closer.  Some appear bigger because they are physically bigger.  Sort of like star brightness - some are bright because they are close, some bright because they are intrinsically brighter.  In the case at left, Margie's neighbor's house has a spectacular tiling job on their cupola, and appears large because it is close - at the inner focus range of my scope, it turns out!  If this dome looks vaguely familiar - you have seen it before!  It served as the early morning roost for the ringed-bill gull a few posts back, re-shown at right...

The rest are pretty conventional, but vary from the simple red clay square version at left, to another nice mosaic of the cobalt blue tile at right. For some reason, I prefer the randomized pieces placed together better than the regular pieces of tile placed at regular locations, even though the latter is likely hard to do well without regular gaps, as the one at lower left in green tile...

That's all I've got!  Of course, Margie's flat astronomy deck isn't conducive to a cupola, but there were plenty of others to enjoy from a distance, and a good target for a small telescope!

Mexican Beach in 3D!

There are still a couple of Mexico posts in me fighting to get out.  You might recall that Puerto Peñasco is on the Sea of Cortez.  Margie's house is only about 125 meters from the beach, so is a short stroll, though a little work to fight your way down (or up) a pretty steep and very sandy access slope. I've written about the tides there - because of the "bathtub effect", small tidal changes down at the south side of the Sea near La Paz result in some of the highest tides in the world up at Puerto Peñasco.  At Christmas while we were there at last quarter moon, the tides were only about 1.5 meters, but during new and full moon it can be well over 6 meters (over 20 feet)!  Even at 1.5 meters it was a substantial change.  At left, the tide was near high when I made my first trip down to shore.  At right the next morning from near the same vantage point it was near low and the water was quite a bit further out if only 5 feet lower...  Both of these views are looking west towards town, the hill and lighthouse overlooking old town visible in the distance.

In Tucson, we've got lots of sand, but don't have many sea creatures!  It was fun to roam and explore the high-water mark to find shells and evidence of sea life.  In previous springtime trips, low tide was the interesting time for lil' sea animals, but this trip, at least with the minimal tides, little was seen of the live creatures we've spotted before.  But the photos here show that at least at the upper tide limits, there is more shell and what used to be shells than sand!  At left the nearly-setting sun added a warm cast to sand and shell.  At right, the next morning reveals that most every granule is an eroded piece of shells.


That morning, macro lens in hand, I worked on developing a new technique to simplify and improve my taking macro 3D pictures.  If the reaction from my readers is good, perhaps I'll write it up, but for now, enjoy the 3D beach pics below.  As always, these are cross-eyed views...  Cross your eyes slightly to look at the right picture with your left eye and vise versa.  You should see 3 pictures in your brain, the center one will be interpreted as showing depth.  If you are a newbie at this, you will likely find it easier to fuse the thumbnails, and if successful, you can try the full-size images for higher resolution.  Folks ask why I post them this way - well, with this technique you don't need any accessory viewers that are usually needed for parallel-eye viewing.  Try this and see! 

I didn't take note of the picture separation, but suspect they are likely taken from vantage points further apart than normal eye separation, making them "hyperstereo" images.  But they effectively amplify what little relief is visible on small objects on the beach, so I love the effect - I hope you do too!

Unfortunately, I don't know the identity of any of these shell types - I need my buddy Donna, who was with us and is a bit of a shell collector from her earlier Florida days, to help with these.  If I hear from her, I'll pass some IDs along!  I love the amplified depth of the hyperstereo effect on these almost microscopic shells...  The left one here is the same type as the left above, both eroded open, but still showing some interesting shapes, especially in 3D.

Ok, these are the last ones.  I'm showing literally every stereo pair I shot because I can't decide which ones I like best - I like them all.  Sorry if they give you headaches, but do let me know if the technique works for you and if you enjoy stuff like this - I sure do!

What A Difference A Day Makes!

Twenty four little hours...  And so the song goes...  I looked out this evening and the sky had changed dramatically since last night.  The moon, so tough to make out deep in twilight last night, is now much higher than Venus, which was the higher of the two last night and is quickly heading towards the sun, passing between us and our nearest star a week from Saturday.  So, of course, I had to document the new and revised evening view, first, the wide field view with a normal zoom lens (set to 65mm, .5 second, F/6.3) against my neighbor's palm tree and saguaros, then another showing the now-much-easier to see moon.  The "dark side" of the moon is lit up by earthshine, because when the moon is skinny, the Earth (from the moon's perspective) is full, and even a moderate exposure (1 second with Meade 80mm F/6) shows this light from Earth.  While to many the sky is unchanging, the last 24 hours proves this is definitely not so!

Chasing Skinny Crescents!

Earlier in the week, Sky and Telescope magazine told us of a New Year's Day observing challenge - from the western US, it was possible to spot a very young moon, well under 24 hours after new moon.  It favored us as this time of the year, the ecliptic (path the moon, sun and planets follow), is nearly vertical in the western sky, the moon is near perigee so it appears to move faster, and the timing was right since new moon was at 4:14am Mountain Standard time earlier in the day.  The difficult part was picking it out of the bright twilight shortly after sunset, so a mountain location for clearest skies were perhaps called for...  Hey, it was a holiday, and it was a beautiful New Year's Day, so why not go for a little drive and go for it!

In addition to the skinny crescent of the moon, Venus is nose-diving towards inferior conjunction in a few days (11 January), and would be less than 8 degrees from the moon.  Trying to image the small crescent like we did in Rocky Point last week would be tough because of its low elevation, so again, with the day off, I went after it as the planet transited high in the sky! According to the planet information in Heavens-Above, it would pass due south about 40 degrees high at 1330, so set up the William Optics 11cm APO to try to find it. Binoculars helped to sweep it up, but it was tougher than I thought, since it was only 15 degrees from the sun. I never saw it visually, but once in the scope it was easy. It was still bright enough that I had to use 1/2000 second exposure (a single exposure shown here), and it still might have been overexposed. That is why the sky looks pretty dark, but it is a good shot of the skinny crescent as it passes between us and the sun. The crescent was also easily seen in binoculars, but you only have another couple days to spot it!

About an hour before sunset, Melinda and I
jumped in the van with a couple scopes and cameras and headed to the Mount Lemmon Highway, to the Babad Do'ag (Bad Dog to its sacrilegious friends) lookout.  From this vantage point the sun would set just south of Kitt Peak National Observatory across the Tucson valley, and with any luck, the moon would also be near the silhouette of the Observatory!  I set up a sturdy tripod and  used a little Meade 80mm F/6 (480mm focal length) for some shooting, as well as the 70-200 zoom.  Melinda spotted Venus before sunset, but as the minutes ticked away, I was worried we wouldn't spot the little lunar crescent in the still-bright sky...  Finally, with minutes left before I figured we might as well pack up, I spotted it in 10X44 binoculars!  It was just to the right of Kitt Peak, and barely as high as the top of the mountain!  After I pointed it out to her, Melinda swept it up too and I spent the next few minutes shooting a little mosaic with the Meade, and also catching it with the zoom with Venus in the frame (1/4 second, F/6.3 @90mm focal length, ISO 200).  It was tough to spot, I don't think there was a chance to see it naked eye, but the little elevation we got off the first 3 miles of the Mount Lemmon Highway likely helped.  Looking at it in Photoshop, it was even tough to see in the wide frame without zooming in, so I inserted a magnified, enhanced sub frame to show it better.  It is much easier to see in the 4-frame Meade mosaic with longer exposure (1 second, F/6, ISO 200) and slightly darker sky.  It is visible way on the right edge of the frame, so make sure it is on your screen if you load the full-size image...

In the end, looking at the time stamp, corrected to proper time, we spotted the moon at 1806 local time when the moon was 13h52m old (after new).  Likely a new record for me, though I'm not sure I've ever gone out looking for young moons before.  It was fun - any excuse to get under a clear sky!