Out And About!

Life has been so hectic lately, I'm way late posting a lot of interesting stuff. Case in point is the adventure I had on Kitt Peak nearly 2 weeks ago. Now I've not been up there is likely over 6 months, and have been long off the payroll with the Nightly Observing Program, since I couldn't commit to working there with Melinda's ongoing condition. So while I love spending time at the place, I just couldn't continue being so far from Tucson.

So I was surprised and pleased to get a call from the supervisor up there on Friday 2 weeks ago, asking if it was possible to help teach an astrophoto workshop on the weekend. These happen about twice a year, teaching the basics of webcam and DSLR imaging with some nice equipment. I usually lead a section on time-lapse imaging applied to astronomy, and my presentation always seems to generate interest. Well, it turned out that we happened to have our friend Donna staying over Saturday evening, so with her taking care of Melinda's needs, I was free to head to the Mountain!

I arrived before 4pm and walked around kind of looking for the group I'd be with. It's always nice to walk around the mountaintop - a magical place, really. But I didn't run into anyone, and since I didn't have keys anymore, I headed to dinner, where everyone met up. After eating we headed up to the "Roll Off Roof" observatory and its classroom for the workshop. My presentation was pretty early - again, pretty well-received - finishing with some of the flowering time-lapses I've been working on lately. My talk finished before sunset, where a break is always taken to observe - this time with the combined group from the Nightly Observing Program. The thin scattered clouds portended a great sunset, and sure enough it was! The sun set into a clear sky and lit the clouds up providing the standard spectacular sunset...

Taking shots of a sunset is always a challenge. The shot needs a foreground, but is sometimes difficult to work in from a viewpoint facing west. The shot of the WIYN telescope above right shows some nice colors even though it was a good 80 degrees from the setting sun. My favorite of this bunch is above left incorporating the couple. I used the head of the boyfriend to block the actual brilliant sun, and used the phone screen to partially show what was going on. It required a small amount of "Photoshop magic" to slightly lighten the screen brightness. At left is my second favorite taken a little later with the crowd just as they were about to leave. Including a few people always helps you "witness" the event with you... Finally, a minute or two later, the crowd gone, I took the most boring version - an HDR image combining 3 exposures of different lengths to record more of the dynamic range. While successfully recording the colors, it is a pretty drab composition...

The crew had the workshop in hand and with my presentation finished, I decided to head back to town. Had it been clear, I might have stayed to image some, but the clouds took their time departing, so headed down the hill about a kilometer to a lookout on the north side of the mountain. I decided to set up my TEC 140 scope to image the lights of Tucson, just coming up from the twilight. Seeing was atrocious, but took some of the city lights. Just for grins, I also pointed it towards Phoenix too. A few years back, I thought I had detected the broadcast antenna array atop South Mountain on the edge of Phoenix. Sure enough, there it was, showing reasonable detail from what Google Maps later revealed was 98 miles distance! Metropolitan Phoenix is just beyond that hill, and I can't imagine the glow from the area if those mountains didn't help block it! I backed off the 1000mm focal length of the TEC scope to my 300mm to shoot some frames of Tucson (note all these images taken with my older APS sensor Canon XSi). Shown at right is a 3-frame panorama taken with 20 second exposures with the 300 at F/6.3, assembled in Photoshop. It shows the main metropolitan area of Tucson from Valencia and the Casino of the Sun at right, to Tucson Estates on the west side of the Tucson Mountains to the foothills up to the Catalinas. All fun stuff, but not particularly interesting with the 1600 pixel limit of the blog. Someday I'll figure out how to show full size images!

I took a lot of images on that pullout, including some time-lapse sequences and more, but I need to think about what I'm going to do with it... Perhaps it will show up here some day, but in all, a fun evening on Kitt Peak...