Ho Hum, Another Sunset...

As you know, we get our share of spectacular sunsets in Arizona. It has something to do with the clarity of the air, and for the western horizon to be clear to enable the setting sun to shine through and illuminate clouds at the observer's location. This one was from last Wednesday, the very evening I went out and photographed the second set of images of Mars and Neptune. Once the clear strip at sunset came over, I headed west of town to shoot the night time targets.

But that sunset! It was a sunset for the ages! If you aren't ready they can pass in an instant, so not much time to prepare if you aren't ready. This time I had collected my camera in preparation of going out to observe, but didn't have the right lens on when I grabbed it and went out to the cul-de-sac in front of the house. I had my 100mm macro, a reasonable telephoto - difficult to shoot a needed wide-angle view.

Well it was spectacular, so as a compromise, rather than run inside to change lenses, I did a mosaic - Took about 5 photos, then moved up a field and took 5 more, then later assembled them in Photoshop to appear as a single image. It worked well, as you can see here. Sometimes the software gets lost and can't combine them, or distort them wildly, but it really did look pretty much just like shown here. Enjoy!


At left is one of the individual frames from a slightly earlier sequence than went closer to the horizon...

Another Post-Thanksgiving Outing

It was such a perfect Thanksgiving weekend - Temps in the low 70s and a perfect blue sky. On Saturday was the final football game of the year - archrival Arizona State was in town for the big game. If AZ wins, they qualify for a bowl game, lose and they are done till next Fall. Can't get much more dramatic!

I took the opportunity to do a little road trip to "A" Mountain, otherwise known as Sentinel Peak, located about a mile to the SW of Tucson's downtown area. It has a paved road to the peak, a few hundred feet above the desert floor and the view extends from south to north - an expansive view that is popular all day long!

I chose to set up my TEC 140 refractor and take some photos of my favorite landmarks, and with Arizona Stadium a mere 3 miles away, used it as a target to evaluate a 2X converter (doubled the focal length, thus the scale of images). At left is a photo taken with a 50mm "normal" lens with my fave targets labeled.

I've used this telescope to image AZ Stadium before. Seeing effects (atmospheric turbulence caused by mixing of different temperatures of air) usually limit the sharpness at 3 miles distance. But still, the scope is ALMOST sharp enough to recognize people from 3 miles! Shown here are the full frames of the Canon 6D of the stadium view. Clearly seen is that in the view with the 2X converter at right, the image is larger and field of view is narrower. The real question is whether use of the converter provides any advantage, or can you just enlarge the straight image in Photoshop...

Of course, the real limitation on this blog is that images are limited to 1600 pixels wide, while the camera has almost 5500 pixels across the image! So just showing you the full image above you are losing a huge amount of resolution because each pixel there shows an average of almost 16 pixels in the original image (4 across and 4 high).

So here is the answer. Shown here at left are full resolution crops from single images from each configuration. The fields of interest are the same - the 2X converter version below is on the left side without the converter so you can compare directly (taken a few minutes apart, 2X later). It looks fuzzier, but again, because the scale is doubled, is resolution any worse? I think the answer is no - the bowl games played are about equally legible, as are details in people and clothing being worn. I think both are limited by the atmospheric turbulence - the effect can be seen in the horizontal white line in each - wiggles seen in it is caused by turbulent air mixing at these large magnifications... Oh, and by the way, I went to some length to minimize vibration - used a 2-second delay after pushing the camera button, and also locked up the view mirror to minimizw "mirror slap". So it is a wash for distant objects to use the converter or not. Perhaps closer objects less limited by "seeing" might work better with the 2X converter...

I then moved to a few of my other favorite targets. At left is the old Pima County Courthouse, with its distinctive tile domed roof. It is interesting that it is seemingly surrounded by newer boring architecture...

Also photographed, but not detectable by eye mid-afternoon was the "window" of Window Rock. A good 16 miles away from my "A" Mountain observing location, it is visible by eye from Midtown when conditions are right - preferably evening or morning twilight. Here the scope makes shooting it simple!




I also did a 10-frame mosaic past AZ Stadium up through the NE side of town. Combined together in Photoshop it shows the stadium, Catalina High School just above and left of the stadium (in truth about 3 miles past it!), Tucson Medical Center upper left of stadium, then the Mount Lemmon Highway which leads up the mountain in the far distance on the NE side of town. Right about where the road disappears, "Bad Dog" overlook can be seen - another favorite lookout of mine! Of course, here the mosaic is only the 1600 pixel limit wide - was more fun in the original nearly 15,000 pixels wide with the full camera resolution...

And one more shot are some of the homes creeping up the foothills of the Catalinas. I think these are about 12 miles away and you can see how they get permission to build right next to the National Forest boundary considerably up the slope of the foothills. Good thing they don't get much snow and ice here - can you imagine climbing those hills in slick weather?!

After an hour taking in a shooting the view, I headed home. It was an exciting game - the home Wildcats hanging on to a thin lead, then at the end the "Scum Devils" overtook and won the game by a single point! Next year!

A New View!

Long time readers know I'm justifiably proud of some of the Mirror Lab accomplishments, including the twin mirrors of the Large Binocular Telescope, each 8.4 meters (about 27.5 feet) in diameter. In particular, I've been on a quest of sorts of imaging the telescope while it does interesting things. It seems to have culminated last Spring when I caught the ARGOS laser propagating into the sky from a distance of 12 miles. From the town of Safford, through a small telescope, I almost had a front-row view of the instrument, visible at left, which is used to project a constellation of artificial stars in the field of view of the telescope to partially correct atmospheric turbulence. Several hundred similar frames were combined to make a short video seen here.


Well, without permission from the powers that be to get any closer (made more difficult by the recent severe fire this last spring that approached within 50 meters!), my most recent query was - from how far away can you see it?! From a post a few years back, I knew that LBT was line-of-sight from Kitt Peak National Observatory, very close to 120 miles away! The image at left is from that post and demonstrates that if you can see KPNO from LBT (flat-topped mountain in center), you can see LBT from KPNO!




So last night after work (working evenings this week at the Mirror Lab), I found my way driving westward - this after confirming with the LBT telescope operator that indeed ARGOS was operating properly. Being that it was dark-of-the-moon, I parked on the last pullout before turning towards the Observatory so that my lights would have no effect on operations there. It was an interesting night - totally clear, but obviously above an inversion layer. I watched the thermometer climb as the van ascended. It was 60F at the base of the mountain, 70F on top! The wind seemed a little blustery, alternately blowing out of the south or the north - weird! But fortunately, I was very comfortable in shorts and a long-sleeved t-shirt.

I had several optics to try - the first was easiest to set up - the 500mm F/4 "big bertha" telephoto. I had it up, pointed and focused on the lights of Tucson in a few minutes. It took me a couple shots to find where the LBT would appear - I'd never seen it from Kitt Peak, as it is quite small. But I knew it would be left of the red-lit radio transmission towers atop Mount Lemmon, so used that as my guide. About my 3rd shot - there it was! The green laser standing out from the occasional star and headlight visible on the Mount Lemmon Highway. At left is shown a 6-frame panorama of part of Tucson. with the green spot of the 18 watt ARGOS laser visible. At right is a single frame at a little larger scale better showing the laser beam.


I then broke out the big gun - the TEC 140 - a 5.5" diameter telescope with 1,000mm of focal length. Again, because of the large magnification, it took a couple practice frames to get it pointed properly. Note that at NO TIME was the ARGOS laser visible to the naked eye or even visible in the camera viewfinder. It was only the power of a 20 to 30 second exposure that revealed it was there. I had started an exposure sequence for a possible time-lapse, and interestingly, the inversion layer is visible just under LBT. In a couple minutes of exposure, it slowly dropped and became a little brighter in the less-affected air. Also visible in the exposure is the south slope of the mountain, brightly illuminated by the lights from Ft Grant prison at its base.


Most of my outings, I usually finish with a practice shot or mini-project that can be completed while putting away gear. This night, approaching 1:30 in the morning, I mounted the 16mm fisheye on the Canon 6D and took a couple frames of the sky from Andromeda to the rising Winter Milky Way. What is most interesting, besides the reddish airglow that looks like clouds to the west (right), is the oval glow just below center. This is called the Gegenshein, or counter-glow - a spot defined by being opposite to the sun in the sky. An optical effect allows sunlight to reflect from meteoritic dust back to us. This may be my best photo of it, and from only 2 stacked exposures shown here. Each of the 2 exposures were 2.5 minutes with the fisheye working at F/4.

Always great fun to be under a clear dark sky, and while chasing an ARGOS viewing might be only an excuse, it doesn't take much to get me out looking up!

Déjà vu All Over Again!

As my regular readers surmise, on travelling back and forth to "Ketelsen East" in Illinois, I enjoy looking out the window.  Looking at my fellow passengers, it seems I am nearly alone pressing nose to window watching the country pass by.  It seems most can't be bothered even having the shade open - how can you rather read a book than see the world zip by at 3/4 the speed of sound?!

I've also made comments that I suspect the pilots enter the destination or waypoints into the flight computer and it follows the same path. Every time. Not that I'm complaining, but it is fun to see the same landmarks swing by. This last flight I recognized a reservoir in NE Kansas, and my seatmate asked where I thought we were. I told him I thought we were near Topeka, and wouldn't you know the pilot came on and confirmed it 15 seconds later! He also said something about flying over El Paso, normally a ways out of our way. I got a little excited, but then I think he confused it with the normal Albuquerque waypoint! As shown here at left and at right, from Chicago O'Hare to Tucson, AZ, we ALWAYS pass just south of Albuquerque before turning south towards Tucson. That is it just east of the Sandia Mountains in the center of the left photo taken on 15 November. The most recent trip, on 31 January, you can see a little snow in the mountains. What is more interesting is that at the very top of the photo, you can see the snow-capped Rockies well up into Colorado!


The plane turns slightly more southwards and we pass down parallel to the Rio Grande River - yes, the very one that runs down and eventually becomes the border between Texas and the United States. About 6 minutes after making the turn, we always seem to pass over this remarkable mesa that I've yet to find on Google Maps, though I know pretty closely where it is located. The landform and subtle coloration is exquisite! And you can also see from the near-identical images that we are almost flying over the exact same spot! It is a big sky up there and I would think it would be tough to occupy the same spot without help!



A few minutes later and outside the right windows, we seem to always pass over the VLA - a huge radio telescope that uses 27 dishes, each about 82 feet diameter. As shown on the left photo, both these recent trips, we've passed over the very end dish of the east arm of the array. Each arm is 13 miles long - the best way to think of the radio telescope is as if the 82 foot dishes are tiny parts of a huge dish 25 miles across! The left photo was taken on the most recent return trip. The dishes are mounted near railroad tracks, so they can be moved to adjust the telescope's resolution and sensitivity, which happens on a regular basis. At right you can compare the center of the array 11 weeks apart. In the lower, more recent image, they are reconfiguring the array for the "D" close-pack configuration which has lower angular resolution, but the highest sensitivity.



Somewhere down in southwestern New Mexico, we adjust our course more to the west to pass over the big copper mine in Clifton/Morenci, and a few minutes later, Mount Graham and the Large Binocular Telescope(LBT). I always look for LBT as a waypoint, and also because we made the mirrors for it at the Mirror Lab where I work. Sitting atop the mountain very near the peak, it is easily visible. Once seen, the Sub-Millimeter Telescope is spotted adjacent to it, and the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope is there too. You can also see here that in the 11 weeks between my return trips, Graham also picked up quite a snowpack, as seen at right.

From there we follow Interstate 10 into Tucson, usually circling over the north side of town before landing towards the southeast into the south-side airport.

Normally the photos I take include image pairs taken a few seconds apart for making 3D images, and there is no lack of them on these trips too. But I know that many of you don't have the glasses, so am slowing down my production of anaglyph images. I'm looking for an inexpensive source of them so I can offer them to you in exchange for a self-addressed-stamped envelope, but still looking for a suitably cheap source! In the meantime, open your window shades and enjoy the view out the plane!

The Window View!

I know, has been a full week since blogging. Seems that since returning to Tucson, time seems harder to come by! The flight back was if anything, uneventful. Niece Kathy provided an early morning ride to the airport on her way to work. The morning was overcast with some fog, that seemed to thicken as we neared O'Hare, yet, the display monitors inside assured the flight was on time. Security was a snap and got thru in seconds, if not a minute or two, so was sitting gate-side a full 2 hours early! Finally boarding the plane, it was only about a third full! Evidently the fog kept connecting flights from coming in, so most everyone missed their connection! Fortunately the plane was already positioned - we could take off, but evidently flights were not coming in!

The first pictures show the situation - as we turned, I could get a glimpse down the runway, the fog and the queue of planes behind us. As we started our takeoff run, a quick shot of the terminal showed the thicker fog obscuring even the top of the control tower!

But almost moments later we broke through - it was a very low layer causing the problems. And right away I caught an amazing sight - the shadow of the plane surrounded by a glory! These are caused by water droplets reflecting light from the sun back to the observer. The circular glory is centered on my shadow, so you can see I was sitting behind the wing on the down-sun side! I took photos at about 15 to 20 second intervals, and made a sequence of our ascension out of the fog.  As the plane climbed, our shadow, of course, gets smaller as the projection screen (top of fog/clouds) gets further away. What is interesting is that over the 3 minutes of elapsed time, the diameter of the glory stays the same or grows! I went to some trouble to assure the scale was the same between exposures, so what does that tell us?


The diameter of the glory actually tells us the size of the water droplets! I actually did the calculations a couple years back. Since the diameter of the glory is inversely proportional to the water droplet size, as the glory grows, the droplets get smaller and smaller. Shortly after the sequence ends, we ran off the end of the low-hanging clouds, as shown at left, 7 minutes after the start of our takeoff run. The growing glory indicates a falling droplet diameter size to the edge of the fog layer. Makes sense that the edge of the fog extent has a smaller droplet diameter... Data seems to bear that out, anyway!


With the rapid clearing so close to
O'Hare, I was quickly able to orient myself, spotting towns and cities just west of where our house is in the Western Suburbs. I was able to quickly spot Decalb and the nuke plant southwest of Rockford(shown at left), the town of Dixon - just visited a few weeks before. We crossed the Mississippi River just below Clinton, Iowa - the town where I was born and spent much of my youth. The image at right shows the "Tri-City" area of Fulton, IL at right and Camanche, IA to the left of Clinton in the center. Looking at the full-size image I can show you dozens of landmarks from casinos, my Uncle John's farm and housing development adjacent to the golf course I used to walk to and search for lost golf balls, as well as lose a few too! Above the two bridges that cross the river into Clinton is Lock and Dam #13.  I worked most of my summers at my Grand-Dad's (now Uncle's) farm, so know the area reasonably well and is fun to look for the little details that would take hours to drive around to see.

I was able to follow our path out to Iowa City where I attended college before I lost track of what I was seeing. I suspect it might have been a record for me as we usually travel quite a bit further south - don't know a lot of landmarks around the southern part of the state!

Opposition Effect brightening!

Most every time I travelled it was with Melinda, so this was one of the few times I've flown alone. But looking out the window, I recognized a friend and spent a good part of the middle section of the drive documenting the "Opposition Effect". Shown at left, it is very similar to the Heiligenshein which I blogged about a couple posts ago - it is the bright spot near the shadow of your head on dewy grass. That effect needs water droplets, but looking at where the shadow of the plane should be, you see another bright spot. From our high altitude, the plane is much smaller than the subtended angle of the sun, so the shadow would be subtle at best. So what causes the bright spot? This sequence was made from exposures taken at about 1 second intervals, each going through the same enhancements I do for most of these images taken from planes - nothing extra-ordinary...

The effect is a combination of a couple things - first, like with the heiligenshein, shadows of the landscape disappear, so there is a component of brightening from that. In addition there is another contribution from some grains in soils and rocks that retro-reflect light back towards the sun. If you pay close attention (it can be sometimes be low contrast and difficult to spot) you can watch it pass over farms and towns and then something else happens - light retro-reflects back up towards the sun from vehicle reflectors and the glass micro-balls added to traffic signs to illuminate towards you from your vehicle lights at night. It is way cool to see these signs get absolutely brilliant as your shadow crosses them. At left is shown some random town, I'm thinking in SW Iowa, but not sure. I noted our "opposition effect" was going to cross it so got the camera ready. Not too much noted in the slightly darker exposure at left, but at right is the same frame with the brightness set just black - just showing the saturated pixels. It is neat seeing the red reflections likely returned from stop signs that face south towards us at regular block intervals.


I am still amazed at the nonchalance of folks flying along at 550 miles an hour 6 miles above the ground. I continue to have my nose glued to the window the entire time but this mostly empty flight demonstrated those with opposite feelings. The couple in front of me had the center and window seat and as soon as we took off, they moved AWAY from the window to aisle and middle, and no, they weren't watching a video or something where the light might have bothered them... Anyway, I don't understand not looking down at the spectacular 200 minute show right outside your window! Look at these pictures here, I believe taken in northern New Mexico - just spectacular landforms that I'm glad I didn't miss. I've got stereo pairs of most of these, but won't bore you with them now - will work on a 3D post later!



Most every flight you can catch the city of Albuquerque in New Mexico. If you draw a line from Chicago to Tucson, the line passes about 80 miles south of Albuquerque, but evidently air traffic is steered near it before turning more southward towards home. Here at left it is seen on the western slopes of the Sandia Mountains at right. The darkish channel from right to left center is the upper waters of the Rio Grande River which flows up there in NW New Mexico with its ultimate headwaters up in Colorado!

Lately it seems we also always pass over the VLA radio telescope west of Socorro. Not always easy to spot with 27 dishes spread over 40 miles of track. Shown at right is the eastern arm of the "Y" shaped array. Each of the 80 foot diameter dishes are mounted and moved around on tracks so can be repositioned at regular intervals. I think this fully spread-out setup is Configuration A which results in the highest resolution images from the telescope.


Two more spectacular images shown here. At left is a spot just north of VLA, which I've not been able to exactly locate on Google Maps, but is just a sublime landscape of erosion channels in a dry desert! The subtle colors plus the amazing landscape just blows me away! Similarly, the distinctive view at right came by the window 12 minutes later - I believe it is the Middle Gila River in SW New Mexico. Note the golden foliage in the trees along the river channel at bottom.




One of the things that always interests me on a plane trip is how far you can see from 30,000 feet elevation. Of course, even how far you can see from a mountaintop interests me too (easily entertained!). Fortunately, on this section of the flight through SW New Mexico we had a nice reference to look for. Barely visible from the time we left Albuquerque was a pimple on the horizon. At left is a well-stretched image of it taken about this time from the above pictures. I believe with all my heart that the bump shown just below the tip of the wing are the San Francisco Mountains north of Flagstaff Arizona. With my trusty ruler and Google Maps, it was a good 260 miles away, which I think is a record for knowing how far I can spot a landscape. Two years ago on a similar flight I saw 220 miles, so a good jump in the distance record here!


Before I knew it we had passed the big copper mine in Morenci and the LBT telescope atop Mount Graham, both a little too far away to pay justice to here on the blog. We did pass right over the relatively new windmill farm run by Tucson Electric Power, dedicated just over a year ago on the western slopes of the Winchester Mountains (east of the Rincons). I had spotted them from up on Mount Lemmon so was nice to get a near-vertical view upon them...

And minutes later we circled the north side of Tucson to line up to land. As we passed over the eastern slopes of the Tucson Mountains, I marveled at some of the houses perched atop the very top peaks, shown at right. Good thing they don't get much snow on those hills - would be hard to get up some of those driveways if it were icy!

So the trip was great, and the longest break I've had in memory was over. Back in Tucson and trying to get back to normal now. Hopefully I'll get blogging at more reasonable intervals - I promise!

A Spectral Two-Fer!

Here in Tucson, our Summer rainy season is winding down - right on schedule! You can usually start planning on astronomical observing opening up again in mid-September after the rain starts (and threatens most every day) around the Fourth of July. Our "monsoon" season provides a nice break during the hottest (and most humid) time of the year, so we don't have to worry about fighting discomfort of warm temps and bugs that seem to wait till then to "bug" you!

Yesterday the weather forecasters were saying there was a 50% chance of possibly severe storms, and the next week looked to be a drying trend as weather patterns changed. True to their word - clouds thickened and threatened after lunch. We found ourselves watching from the second floor of the Cancer Center, where Melinda was getting her occasional topping-off of fluid. With the desert dryness and depending how she feels, it is tough to drink enough, so the liter of fluids on about a weekly schedule is welcomed. While we used to enjoy the view of the mountains and the employee parking lot in years past, we now enjoy the mountains and the construction zone as the treatment center expands.

Yesterday, even the mountains disappeared as storms moved in from the southwest. It never rained more than sprinkles at the Cancer Center as they moved around us, but the conditions were fine for rainbow formation! The thing to note is how low the rainbow arc is in the sky. Of course, if you know how they are formed, you know that they appear at a constant angle of 138 degrees from the sun. Since it was about 2:30pm, the sun was still high in the sky and as a result, the bow peaked out at a low angle, just clearing the trees around the construction zone. With the sun higher in the sky, the bow would be even lower - I was on a winter bike ride when we ran into showers and the bow didn't clear the horizon! Of course, you can make your own "rainbow" with a garden hose at high noon and you can see the nearly full circle of the bow around the shadow of your head projected on grass. The close-up at right shows the acute angle it forms with the ground...

A few hours later, after we got home, another band of intense showers moved over us again and the process was repeated. This time, just 45 minutes before sunset the sun was much lower and correspondingly, the rainbow appeared much higher in the sky. At left is shown a panorama-mode image of the rainbow, taken with my IPhone 6S from our back yard. The shower was intense - about the hardest I've ever seen it rain for all of about 2 minutes! But as soon as it passed, the sun appeared, so I knew there was likely a bow... In the close-up at right, you can also spot a fainter secondary bow outside the main one. This second bow is caused by a second reflection inside a raindrop, instead of just the single reflection that causes the main bow. Note also that the colors are reversed - in the outer secondary bow, the red color appears on the inside - on the primary rainbow, red is on the outside! Rain and rainbows are rare enough in the desert that a simple comparison of the heights of the arc are difficult to come by, so it was neat to see this pair in the same afternoon.

And right at sunset about 6:30, some more dramatic lighting appeared - direct sunlight bathing the clouds in sunset-colored clouds while the gibbous moon and shadowed dark clouds also remained in the view. Nice contrast, nice colors, but tough to underexpose enough to not saturate the highlights. Will have to re-read the 6S manual again!

Last Weekend - Part 2!

In the last post, I showed some of the first results with the new-to-me 6D. While taking the wide shots of the transiting Milky Way, with the lower edge of the field near the horizon, I noticed the strong green cast of an airglow display. The last image of that set, shown at left, shows the airglow at its highest extent that I caught. While it has the greenish glow of aurora (558nm), airglow is completely different from the northern lights they can resemble. First, they can appear in any direction - due south in this exposure. Airglow (the green kind) is caused by the recombination of oxygen atoms that were photo-ionized during the daytime.




But when airglow is visible as green in the camera or faintly visible to the eye as a glowing white cloud (too faint to trigger eye's color sensors), chances are there is a good display in the near infrared as well. I've got an IR-modified camera that replaces the IR blocking filter with an IR-pass for some cool landscape effectsI've also posted some airglow images and time-lapse clips here before. Of course, being duly prepared for anything, I had packed the camera for the outing Sunday nite, so set up the modified Canon 20D with the Nikon 16mm fisheye on a tripod to shoot a clip. There was indeed a nice display that filled the field of the fisheye lens. In addition, the structure showed good motion, so was great for a time-lapse clip. Interestingly, while the green airglow showed very faintly to the eye, this IR stuff, that looks so much like bands of cirrus moving through the field, was totally undetectable! Oh, and just to show the subtle changes that shooting in the near-IR (NIR) shows, at right is a close-up of the Milky Way center.  While the Teapot asterism of Sagittarius and the end of Scorpius are readily visible, there are some bright stars that seem out-of-place. Eta SAG and G SCO seem brighter - as bright as any of the other stars in the constellations (compare to color image above!). Sure enough, checking their Wikipedia entries, both are spectral class K or M supergiants that would appear brighter in the red...

The IR airglow emissions, interestingly enough, are known as OH Meinel Airglow, named for the scientist, Aden Meinel, who identified the source of the infrared glow from OH emissions in the upper atmosphere. And if you don't know Aden Meinel, shame on you! A Lick Observatory astronomer when he was hired by the NSF to establish a National Observatory (eventually located on Kitt Peak), he served as its first director before moving across the street to serve as director of Steward Observatory, and then went on to found the Optical Sciences Center! He is really the reason the Tucson area is a major center of astronomy and optics, even now 50 years after his efforts! I blogged about one of his last appearances in Tucson 6 years ago (he passed in October, 2011)...

In his first paper (1950) where he presents his evidence the spectral lines were due to OH+, he talked about the "short exposures" of 4 hours at Yerkes Observatory, compared to the 32 hour exposures required (over several nights!) with older instrumentation at Lick Observatory! Of course, this was due to the extremely slow IR photographic plates of the day. Imagine what he would think of the 60-second exposures shown here! So about 80 minutes of monitoring are included in the clip here, after some minor stretching. The banding structures are known as "gravity waves" - not the newly found electromagnetic waves from merging black holes, but bands in the upper atmosphere caused by upper winds and the restoring force of gravity...

Here is the clip - enjoy!