Eclipse!

Some of you heard we had a lunar eclipse Sunday night (20 Jan, 2019)... Of course it was hyped by the Internet to be the Super-Blood-Wolf Moon, as if just calling it a lunar eclipse wouldn't be as exciting! Well, you will get no embellishments here... Total lunar eclipses are always fun to look at, and lead once upon a time to my second published image - in the Des Moines Register no less, way back in 1975!

So I'm back in Arizona again, usually the bastion of clear blue skies, but in the week here the sun has only made rare appearances, and the forecast for eclipse evening was depressing to say the least! At least the high temperature that day was 79! It was perfectly clear at "Ketelsen East" should I have observed it from there, but the temperature at eclipse time was -5F! Blue sky and thin clouds thickened as sunset approached in Arizona, but always willing to take a chance, drove out to a dark-sky site that the Tucson astro club used to use a couple decades ago - Empire Ranch, about 40 miles SE of Tucson. I wasn't much interested in the partial phases, but sky looked to be mostly clear with only about half of the moon showing.


I set up my Polarie tracking mount - a simple tracker for camera-only use - no tracked telescopes for this eclipse. I did set up my big binoculars for a visual look occasionally. With the moon still partially lit by the sun, a 44-degree halo was apparent and I took a few shots of that before totality started. Totality finally came and while impressive visually, the slightest magnification showed the effects of thin clouds. The photo at left shows the view with a normal lens - the overexposed pink spot is the eclipsed moon, and M44, the Beehive Cluster is to its left and constellation Gemini above in a 30 second exposure. The thin clouds made the stars misty - showing the color differences more clearly. The two bright stars above the moon - Pollux, the lower, is cooler and more yellow than Castor, the upper one...


I tried a couple lens combinations, but again, the clouds made getting anything worthwhile difficult, so decided to stick with wide-angle lenses, finally choosing my relatively new-to-me Sigma 15mm fisheye lens, taking a 30 second exposure every 40 seconds... The exposure was perfect for showing the Winter Milky Way when the clouds parted enough to show it! And all the grand constellations - Orion, Gemini, rising Leo to the far left were visible, as well as the brightest star Sirius (other than the sun) to lower center, and the Hyades and Pleiades star clusters in Taurus at upper right are evident. The yellow light glow are reflected from the cities of Sierra Vista to the lower left, and Nogales, AZ to lower right. I ended up with about 40 frames, extending from about 15 minutes before the end of totality to about 15 minutes afterwards, so decided to put them in a little time lapse using Moviemaker, after minimal processing of each frame. The 7 second loop was repeated 3 times, and the result was then uploaded to Youtube for you to look at here:





If you want any more than that wide-field view, please refer to the last eclipse visible from here, back in September of 2015! Like I said, you don't need to hype it any more than what it really is - a lunar eclipse! The next one fully visible across the country isn't until March of 2025 (some partly visible before then), so a good long wait for the next one to be high in the sky!

A New View of LBT!

It is never my intention to go a month between blog posts - it just seems to work out to that lately - I have no excuse! Case in point is this post about the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) - the photos were taken nearly 2 months ago! I was initially looking for permission from their director to ok the release of the images, but after so long, I guess I'll be looking for forgiveness rather than permission if they complain!


I feel sort of possessive of the LBT telescope as I supervised the polishing operations on the primary mirrors. Entering "LBT" in the upper left search window will return a number of posts, including some on the ARGOS instrument - my current favorite. ARGOS, of course, stands for "Advanced Rayleigh guided Ground layer adaptive Optics System" - an instrument mounted on the telescope that uses lasers to focus 10km above the telescope, those artificial "stars" are used to analyse and correct the atmospheric turbulence along the path. It really is exciting stuff, as it can improve seeing over a relatively large (up to 4 arc-minutes) field by a factor of 2 or 3.  While a factor of 2 or 3 doesn't sound that groundbreaking, note that the INTENSITY or brightness of a focused star goes up a factor of 4 or 9, by improving the sharpness that factor of 2 or 3.  Improving your star detection ability by a factor of up to 9 really is a big deal! This post really isn't about the instrument, merely observations of the lasers involved. For more information of the system and results, even from this run, go to the Max Planck Institute site - the sponsor of the instrument.

There was an ARGOS run in early March. With fresh snow on the mountain, I didn't even consider an observing site on Mount Graham, instead, went to the town of Safford, some parts of town enjoying a direct view of the telescope. I had obtained telephone permission to observe from the Discovery Park campus, but their view was a bit too obscured, so moved about a mile eastward for the good view shown above right at about sunset. You can see in the photo if you go west or north, the rise to the right of LBT starts blocking it. From my vantage point, LBT was 12 miles away - the closest I've been for an ARGOS run! The image at left shows my setup - from 2 sturdy tripods I was running a 500mm lens on the Canon 6D (full 35mm format) for a wide angle shot of the telescope, and the TEC140 (1,000mm with Canon XSi APS format) for the narrow field-of-view.

Looking very carefully at the above image, the laser projecting upwards from near the peak of Mount Graham can barely be seen. It was much more obvious through the optical aid of the telescopes and telephotos! At left is the view through the 500mm. Coupled with the larger format of the 6D, it gives a very nice wide field of view.

Through the TEC140, as with the photo at the top of the post, lots of details can be seen, including antennae in the sunset shot above! I took a series of photos with both setups, typically 30 second exposures under the nearly full moon was sufficient to get a good histogram. In the wide shot above, a wisp of clouds can be seen hugging the mountain. There was a layer of smoke that I suspect was from a controlled burn from the Tucson water treatment plant. The "Sweetwater Wetlands" had a burn of vegetation to control mosquitos, and can be seen as an enhancement in the laser scatter just over the telescope in some of the shots.

I chose to use only the narrow field in making the time-lapse of the evening, since the details were so stunning. In addition, I was able to start taking images before the dome opened, another advantage of knowing the phone number of the telescope operator and getting briefed on the observer's plans. So shown here are about 270 frames taken over a 3 hour period covering the dome opening, setup and following the first object of the evening. While it looks like the telescope is tracking across the sky much more slowly than the stars in the field, realize we are looking just over the horizon with a considerable focal length while the telescope is looking much higher in the sky.




Note that at no time was the green beam of the ARGOS laser visible to the naked eye. Even in my decent pair of 9X63 binoculars was it barely seen. Of course, as seen above, it photographs well! Finally as I was driving home with the telescope on its second object, I could barely detect a "green star" from inside the enclosure directly by eye, but that was all that was visible in my nearly 4 hours there! I've heard rumors that locals are upset at the lasers, but as you need optical aid to detect them, it hardly seems obtrusive! At the same time, with the gains in observing efficiency they are seeing it is proving its worth.

Before leaving, I took a few frames of the Discovery Park campus a mile to the west from my location. It is a cool place with interesting displays of both historical interest from the region, and the ground-breaking science going on at LBT and the optics from the Mirror Lab, including a cool 20" Tinsley telescope in the dome. Shown here is a 2-frame mosaic illuminated by ambient moonlight, and some security lights on the grounds that give it a nice glow...

More Buds N' Bugs!

Even as our monsoon season winds down, we've still got some flowering cacti. I've still got a couple buds from the Cereus repandus on the east side of the house that will go off in a couple days, and the Fall barrel cacti are blooming. We've got a pair of fishhook barrel cacti in front of the house - while they look very similar, even down to the orange flowers, one of them blooms in April, the other in August.

I've had a small potted barrel in the back yard, and just this year started blooming with the most beautiful deep red flowers. I believe the generic name is Ferocactus wislizeni. At left are the buds about a week short of blooming - well protected by the dangerous-looking spines of the cacti. At right are the open blooms this weekend - here a close-up taken with the macro lens - a 7 frame focus stack. Each of the 7 frames were focused at a slightly different position to extend the depth of sharpness through the area of interest. Here you can see most everything is sharp - even the pollen scattered about the flower petals... This is nearly at the full camera resolution - about the best I can do without adding extension tubes for additional magnification...

3D - Parallel View

3D - "Cross-eyed" View

Of course a pair of lovely blooms is worthy of a 3D stereo pair. Unfortunately, the use of anaglyph glasses transforms the flower into a gaudy bluish-purple flower and I'm not even going to show it here. So I'll have to resort to the old-school method of viewing the stereo images like I used to present! Here you don't need any equipment at all, but it helps to be able to have nimble eyes! At left is the "parallel view" pair. Look across the room, then down to the image to look at the left image with your left eye, and right image with your right. Your brain will put them together to make a 3D image!

Similarly, the right image is a "cross-eyed" view. Clicking the image you will notice that this is a larger size. In the parallel view, you typically can't "uncross" your eyes to view images larger than your eye separation, but if you cross your eyes, to look at the right image with left eye, and left image with your right, you can get more resolution as you don't have the same limitations! You can practice with the thumbnails here before clicking to load the full-size images - good luck! At least they are in natural color!

And now for the fun stuff! On Saturday, I set up the camera after taking the above shots for a time-lapse. Since I was lazy and didn't set up till after lunch, it shows the flowers closing, though you see the evidence of bees swimming through the forest of anthers in the flower! At an image every 2 minutes, you don't see a lot of pollinator action, more the evidence of them being there as the flower parts move around. Five and a half hours of flower action played back here at 10 frames per second... Check it out!

Before The Big Blow!

We happened to see the weather report this evening at 5:30 - there was rain on the other side of the Rincons, and some on the other side of the Catalinas, moving away from us. It had been clear all day and looked to be a clear evening. But just before sunset, there appeared to be some active clouds, so I got out a camera and took some images for a time0lapse clip - here every 6 seconds, and played back at 10/second.  Except for the first cloud taken with a 300mm, all the rest were taken with the Canon 70-200 at various focal lengths. Here is the clip:





Like I said, they appeared REALLY active, and those dark clouds moving in at the end also brought some lightning and distant thunder too! Before the possible storm came in, I thought of trying to shoot the evening planets to the west - what, you didn't know about them? Well, Jupiter is low in the west, but Venus is coming up behind the sun (well past superior conjunction), and Mercury is visible too for a day or two before it dives down to pass in front of the sun (inferior conjunction). I hadn't seen the later two for a while, so walked down the block to avoid some power lines.

Sure enough, they were pretty easily visible. Venus is hard to miss, and Jupiter was about to get eaten by the front of clouds moving in, and finally Mercury was spotted just before the 3 planets were reduced to 2 planets visible. Shown at left is the image I got - click it to load the full-size. For a cheat-sheet, you can click the right hand image with labels to better locate them. Taken with the 70-200 at 70mm with the XSi (APS sensor) with 1 second exposure at F/6.3.

After walking the block back home, I swapped out for the kit lens and went back out to try to shoot the incoming storm. Wow, what a show! Before the rain hit, I shot a number of 15-second exposures from the cul-de-sac towards the Catalinas where lightning looked more numerous. Truth be told, this is a combo of 3 consecutive frames - exciting stuff, but needed to run for cover when the big drops started landing. It dumped a good half inch, so was glad to document the storm coming in. You can't always do astronomy, especially during the monsoon season, but you gotta always try to have fun whatever you do!

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!

The Saguaro!

While we're still enjoying ourselves in Illinois, loving the green of a late Spring, I've still got some catching up to do on "posts to be written"! Most overdue is one on the saguaro cactus, recently flowering in our neighbor Susan's yard...


First, for those non-Tucsonans out there, is pronunciation of saguaro. It is a native American word, so is pronounced differently than spelled. Try this - "sah-wah-roh", that should get you pretty close. Some alternate spellings even help out by using the sahuaro spelling, including some local businesses. But most everyone knows what you are talking about - the iconic cacti that is likely a close second to the Grand canyon in symbolizing the State of Arizona. While the plant is a hardy survivor of the harsh Arizona Summers, it is very sensitive to low temperatures and excessive rainfall. As a result, it is not found outside the borders of the state except perhaps Sonora, Mexico. So yes, all those old-timey western movies that were supposed to have taken place in Texas showing saguaros were all filmed in Arizona, as they will not survive outside the state!





It has been over a month already (time flies!) that I posted this year's first pictures of Susan's saguaro. I wrote an iconic post about it 2 years ago, but have more to add this time around... Note that mostly saguaro blossoms (the Arizona State Flower!) bloom at the top of the main trunk and arms, so usually they are located 20 to 50 feet off the ground (note another pair of Susan's plants at upper left). But fortunately, one of Susan's saguaros suffered some frost damage a few years back, one of the arms drooping to head level, this year making the flowers easily accessible. I already posted some anaglyph images of the new buds in the first post above. The lower branch started blooming in early May, the buds popping open just after sunset and lasting into the morning of the next day. Of course, I was there to document it - these anaglyph (3D) images taken on 9 May - the same morning as the Mercury transit across the sun! Of course, you need the red-blue glasses to view them, red filter on the left...

I also took a number of focus-stacked images as with the close-up macro work, it is difficult to get good depth of focus. Here, several or many images are combined with slightly different focal positions and combined in Photoshop to extend the depth of focus much deeper than normally possible. At left is a 9-frame stack that shows the entire flower. In another setup, an ultra-closeup of the saguaro blossom was framed and 13 images combined for maximum depth of field. In that one, I cropped it down to the full camera resolution to retain full sharpness of the flower. Shown at right, you can see the flower anthers loaded down with pollen grains...


Finally, I took some images for making time-lapse sequences of the flowers opening at night. I was fooled several times, checking the buds at sunset and swearing that none of them were going to open that evening, only to check an hour later and finding them well on their way to open! Finally I set up on some of the buds that were likely candidates and had my fingers crossed they would bloom and I got a couple over several nights that way. I'm also looking out for pollinators, but only found small insects on these flowers. I've heard stories of bats pollinating these at night, but never captured any...





This is likely the last of the saguaro posts of the season as by the time we return to Tucson, I'd not expect much activity. But there will certainly be other topics on which to post!

New and Improved!

A week ago I had posted a short time-lapse of my Mammillaria longimamma blooming.  It is an unusual looking cactus with striking flowers, and as I learned, its blossoms last longer than usual cacti and their day-long flowers. After posting the day-long sequence, I started another the next day, then again on the third! The second day the second bud opened, as shown at left. On day three I was looking for something a little more unusual to add, so stopped as they were opening to zoom in on the center of the first flower. Watching the time-lapse later, the vibrations of the flower petals and the interior flower parts seem to be natural and not caused by insects or wind. Since the images were taken every 3 minutes (20/hour), buffeting from outside sources would be herky-jerky, so the gentle swaying seems natural.  Note that all this activity takes place in an 8cm square plastic pot!

Finally, on day 4 I kept an eye on it, but the now-aged buds refused to open, and a snapshot appears at the end of the sequence below. Good thing too, as it was Mercury transit day, and both cameras were busy, and didn't have another to spare!

So without further ado, here is the now-78 second clip.  Feel free to go full screen and hi-def if you have the bandwidth.  Enjoy!

A Day In The Life...

On the way out the door this morning, I saw that one of my cactus buds were likely going to bloom today. You might recognize it from the center image of these three bought at the cactus show a couple weeks ago. A Mammillaria longimamma, I had also posted an anaglyph 3d image of the first flower a week or 10 days ago.  This morning, it looked about ready to pop, as shown at right... So what could I do but set up the camera and intervalometer to record it for a possible time lapse? I set it up for an exposure every 3 minutes, so got 20 frames per hour for what turned out to be exactly 10 hours! I had set the aperture to F/9 to keep most of the flower sharp, and guessed what it would look like so the bloom would be centered. I also used a ball cap fastened to the tripod to keep the sun off the camera for the duration. Mostly, it looks like I lucked out!

When I got home from work late in the afternoon, the flower had nearly finished closing, even though the sun was still shining on it. I was expecting it to stay open as long as the sun shone, but that wasn't correct. I let the sequence go on a little more, then after tonight's astronomy club meeting, loaded the images to inspect them. It was a lovely flower, waving perhaps in the strong breeze today,shown at left as open as it attained. And taking only a frame every 3 minutes, only caught one pollinator - a bee shown at right. This image is shown at full resolution to record all the details the macro captured. I may shoot it again tomorrow, as the last flower lasted a good couple days, and a comparison to the first day's bloom might be of interest.


And as promised, I loaded the 200 frames into Moviemaker and made the 20 second time lapse, displaying the images at 10 frames per second.  I ended up running the sequence twice to round it out to 40 seconds long.




There were some interesting things visible in the clip - the flower waving as it opened might be partially due to wind, but seems like it would be more "vibration" than the waving observed.  Also the small fingers and next bud to bloom also move around and wave some during the 10 hour period.  Fun stuff - glad it was able to run unattended - isn't technology wonderful?!

Just One More, And Then Another...

Tonight's title comes from a song.  Our movie buddy Larry makes a mix tape every holiday and we were lucky enough to get one last year. One country-tinged song, called "Just One More" by Tim O'Brien and Darrell Scott has the words: One more drink of wine/ And if you're still on my mind/ One drink, just one more, and then another". So it goes for my sunset sojourns - a week ago I said I was done with them for the season, but the more I thought of it, the more I wanted to go up again and chase the alignment further down the hill. Perhaps I should have done what the song suggests - stay home and drink, but after a two day trip to Mexico for Christmas, I again headed up the Mount Lemmon Highway in search of celestial alignments.



Using the Heavens-Above website to calculate the Sun's declination, it was obvious I would miss the alignment at my usual setup point (from my experience the week before), so it was time to bias my position to realign the sun and Observatory profile. TAAA member Jim O'Connor stayed on the turn, biased as far south as he could set up, and I went south a bit and up a hill a couple hundred yards to "Thimble Peak Vista". There, among the hordes of folks going down the road after playing in the snow atop the mountain, I set up the scope for imaging the sunset. Note from the left image that observing any further south isn't allowed as the side of the hill about 1km away would block the view... So this night was perhaps the REAL last chance for an alignment.


With the sun barely in the field of the telescope, I quickly checked focus and exposure, then started the sequence using an intervalometer, taking frames every 2 seconds. Once started, there was really nothing for me to do other than watch, so took a couple frames with Melinda's camera and 300mm lens (without filter) at left. I knew the sun would be overexposed, but wanted to catch the other mountains that aren't visible through the solar filter. This shot is F/10 and 1/2500 second. It turns out that the alignment was perfect! Shown at right is about the most-centered frame. All together, 142 frames were included in the sequence from start to finish, so I went through them all, cropped each down to the center 60% of the frame and fine-tuned levels slightly. No color or sharpening was done, otherwise straight shots through the Baader solar filter, TEC 140 scope and 1/80th second exposures at ISO 200.

Putting all the frames together, I made another GIF, but the artifacts similar to the last version bothered me, so I uploaded it to Youtube after making a clip in Moviemaker.  In this video I also added a couple frames where I ID the profile of the main scopes at Kitt Peak.  Here it is with 2 loops through the frames - full screen and HD if you can:



Unfortunately, while I had a perfect set of data, Jim O'Connor had some software issues and didn't catch an alignment on the usual curve.  Looking at some frames that his wife Susan took, I'm thinking they could have caught it there too.

And of course, in the theme of "Just one more, and then another", I decided that perfect wasn't good enough! I felt bad about chickening out about trying 1 frame/second for the intervalometer, so wanted to push that, and also wondered if I could catch one more alignment from the Thimble Peak Vista. The quick answers are yes and no.  Yes, if I didn't overload the camera by trying to write raw files, it seemed to write jpegs just fine at 1/second. But unfortunately, while the data streamed in quickly at 1/second for over 4 minutes, the alignment couldn't be seen a full week after Solstice. Examining the image at left, you can see the sun is north enough that it doesn't ever cover all the scopes at once, though it does over a period of several seconds. So in my book, the alignment season's limits are +/- 1 week. I'll likely write up a compendium of all this information for future alignment chasers - so look for that if you are interested...

Another Learning Adventure!

On Thursday after a long day in the Arizona Cancer Center keeping Melinda company for her latest round of chemo, I was ready for a drive just to get out of town. The IV drugs they administer help her with the immediate side effects of the chemo for a few days, so knew she would be ok at home. They make her a little sleepy, so likely she would relax at home, surrounded by cats.

For my adventure, there was a bright moon, so no astronomical imaging of the usual sort, but I'd been keeping my eye on ARGOS from a distance. ARGOS is an instrument on the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) and stands for Advanced Rayleigh guided Ground layer adaptive Optics System. In short, a laser makes an array of guide stars around the field of view and instrumentation partially corrects the distortion caused by turbulence in the atmosphere over an extended field of view. Most large telescope's artificial guide star systems work over a field of view of a few arc-seconds, but ARGOS corrects a field of 4 arc-minutes, a huge improvement. I've blogged about it before - the 18 watt lasers can be seen for many miles, and with post-storm clearing, I was hoping to get another chance to take more images. The image at left shows an shot from 22 miles away that I was hoping to improve on. This image, taken on 8 November, 2013 resulted in a blog post, but the images taken with a 200mm lens at left and the William Optics scope showed some color shifts, and even though I had intended to do a time-lapse, I never attempted it with all the work involved.

So I made the 90 minute drive, arriving just at dark, looking for a site a little closer than that I used before. I quickly found a nice quiet deserted site a little off the paved road. Unfortunately, my first exposure showed that the only cloud in the sky was found hugging the profile of Mount Graham, my target! Shown at left through the 200mm lens, it was pretty close - stars were above the mountain, but residual moisture from the storm left a defiant cloud cap. Staff on the mountain had found the season's first snow the previous day, and I know from my experiences on Kitt Peak that even the humidity that sticks around after the clouds dissipate would likely keep the scope closed. Fortunately, this trip I had the phone number for the console room of the telescope, so could use my cell phone to find out directly what was going on! And the operator Thursday was Geno - who I've worked with occasionally a couple decades ago when he worked at a metrology place here in town. Geno confirmed they were, indeed, in a cloud cap and were unlikely to open anytime soon, because of humidity as above... Oh well, it was such a pleasant evening too!

Well, since I was there, I got out one camera anyway and took a few frames. My first shots of the night provided a learning moment for me! I saw Ursa Minor with Polaris nicely placed so thought I'd take a short exposure of it. After carefully focusing on distant farm lights, I pointed it up to Polaris and took a 30 second exposure. My eureka moment was seeing not pinpoint stars, but little wormy trails. While I had carefully turned off the autofocus feature of the lens so it wouldn't go hunting for focus in the dark, I had NOT turned off the image stabilization (IS). For longish exposures (30 seconds here), the corrective optics get lost and drift, resulting in trailing star images. I corrected the issue and re-exposed, shown at left. The inset is from the exposure with IS turned on and you can see the effect. Also in my sky, the Big Dipper asterism was hugging the horizon, so I took a 2-frame panorama to capture it and Mount Graham. The lights are from local farms and the nearby community of Fort Grant. The Dipper is at left and the cloud-capped Mount Graham is at right. There is an artifact from the vignetting of the two images that result in a darkening in the center...

With the bright moon and little chance of LBT and ARGOS making an appearance anytime soon, I decided to head back to Tucson for an early evening of it. I got back pretty much right at 9pm. The next morning, I got an e-mail from one of the engineers that said that was about the time they were able to open the telescope... Which was ok, because with that late start, taking a couple hours of images would have resulted in a return time well after Midnight. Will try it on another time...

But when searching for the topmost image on my last ARGOS imaging session, I returned to the files taken nearly 2 years ago. I've spent the last day or two going thru them and making the time-lapse I had hoped to. On that trip, Melinda and I recorded about 2 hours of images through my 70-200 zoom set to 200, and also on the William Optics scope, with 770mm of focal length. The former had 1 minute exposures at F/3.5 and the scope needed 2 minute exposures working at F/7. I do not know the details of the program that night, but they apparently were set up on the same part of sky for those hours. Also visible are a number of planes, cars going to and from the mountain, and of course, the LBT can be seen rotating to keep the object in the field. It apparently was tracking something just north of the zenith as the dome was turned north, not south towards us. Since I've got a new telescope with more focal length (the TEC 140), I'm ready to try it again when I get a chance. Enjoy the time-lapse - watch it full screen in HD if you can...

Rainout at the KPNO Fall Star-B-Que...

Last night was our Fall, 2015 Star-B-Que at the Kitt Peak picnic area, held for about 20 years now. Last night's reminded me of the very first one - Kitt Peak had been very paranoid about anyone outside astronomers being on the mountain after the death of Marc Aaronson in 1987. It was nearly a decade later that we convinced them that the picnic area with its open-air pavilion, flush bathrooms and 6500 foot elevation was the perfect place for a "Star-B-Que", a cookout and star party, and it has happened ever since. That very first one, where we were permitted only 25 attendees, filled up with those wanting to join in, and even though the weather was questionable, 23 still showed! I recall it rained so hard that we had a hard time keeping the charcoal grill going! But it was a memorable time, as is nearly every trip up that mountain.

Again, the weather was questionable, but there were lots of blue skies and sun on the 60 mile drive to the SW of Tucson. As organizer, I had to arrive a little early, head to the visitor center and collect the keys to the picnic area and staff area where the gas grill is now locked up. Arriving a little after 3pm, I found the night time programs had been cancelled for the weather, but as I'm fond of saying, at least we'll have a cookout!

Upon driving up, I grabbed a camera to take some more time-lapse of the VLBA dish. It was just a week ago that it was moving multiple times per minute to a new object, and it seemed to be sticking to that schedule. I took a short sequence with a frame every 20 seconds and show it as a GIF here at left.

We had a few attendees dribble in, so the grill was pulled out and set up adjacent to the restrooms. We also had some auspicious visitors! Mike Spooner, telescope maker extraordinaire and his wife Elvira attended after I contacted them a few weeks earlier. Mike has joined the ranks of the recently retired, and had brought one of his gems down with which to observe. Also, Demetry Papadopoulos, a doctor, had flown in from where he lives in Charleston, SC for some desert observing. Ironically, it was clear back home, and the Peach Star Gaze in Georgia, where he usually goes to observe this weekend, also had clear skies! Besides Jim and Elaine Miller and Paul Lorenz, TAAA stalwarts, that was about the extent of our crew.  With Melinda and me, we could all fit at one picnic table!

But as I said above, even if the skies don't cooperate, there is usually something of interest going on, and storms can be spectacular from elevation where you can see them for 100 miles! While we didn't have any raindrops early, the view off the west side of the mountain was at times breathtaking. At left is shown a view of vertical rain shafts to the distant west, alternated with some slanted crepuscular rays where the sun shown through breaks in the clouds.  You can see that the distant west looked to be clear, and if it looks familiar, I've mentioned them before in identifying the Pinacate volcano field. The flat-topped range are the Mesquite Mountains, about 40 miles west of Kitt Peak, and the peak to the left is Mount Cubabi, just into Mexico south of Sonoita/Lukeville border area. As time passed, the storms grew a little nearer, with associated lightning too as shown at right. While I was using a timer at the moment this was taken, I actually pushed the button manually, as these strokes sometime last long enough to react to. I would have been lucky indeed to catch one taking an image every 15 seconds with intervalometer!

Locally, the rain picked up and I was out protecting the cameras I had going with my trusty umbrella! Behind a bush I saw a glow and thought the sun was sitting on the horizon already... Walking a couple meters, it was the sun reflecting off sheet flooding out in the desert! The sun, still hidden behind clouds, eventually dropped into the clear gap and gave a spectacular encore setting behind some storms and providing some amazing colors. I shouted out to the attendees, hunkered down in the pavilion to come see and all were amazed. Unfortunately in my haste to catch it, the camera was slightly out of focus, so didn't make a time-lapse, but did catch 3 representative frames as the sun moved through the gap. The top one shows the sun reflecting off the flooded desert I mentioned, then the sun eventually coming into view and momentarily being partially hidden by clouds.

As the sequence neared its end with sunset, the rain intensified and everyone ran for the cars.  I stayed to the bitter end, holding the umbrella against the downpour.  Between the lightening and rain, everyone was long gone before I packed up, and I had to return the key to the mountaintop before leaving.  It has been a long time since driving in rain that heavy, but at least the near-constant lightning helped light the way!  At 7:45, it was about the earliest we've ever gotten back from a star party - even got to catch the last inning of the Cubs playoff game!  The storm followed us, arriving in Tucson about 30 minutes later, but lacked the intensity of the Kitt Peak version.

But as I've said before, a trip to the mountain is always entertaining, and this one was no exception!

Seeing the Unseen!

I was up on Kitt Peak last evening, helping out with their beginning astro-photography class. It was a very nice group - one fellow who lives 25 miles from our house in St Charles, IL, a couple from Florida and even a couple from Tucson! All were fans of astronomy and getting into trying to image the sky. My little presentation was about some of the time lapse that I do. Of course, you can click on the "time-lapse" keyword on the right side of the page, or go to this link, which does the same thing!   My motivation for most of my time lapses is sort of seeing the unseen by demonstrating the motion of the sky or objects, instead of static images.

Last night, the second night of the workshop, we got them going exposing on they sky with their own equipment on tracking platforms or piggyback on the TEC 140 piggyback on the 16" scope at the Roll Off Roof. As first time astro-photographers, we ran into the usual issues - not having adaptors for all cameras, or not having the intervalometers or cable releases to take long exposures, but we got past them mostly. Most were truly enthused about their first images, and all seemed inspired to push forward into this new aspect of their hobby.

While we were away for dinner, I had set up my tripod-mounted XSi with a 300mm lens shooting at the VLBA telescope about a mile down the road near the picnic area. The 80 foot dish is part of a 10-telescope array scattered around the hemisphere. I was hoping to demonstrate how time-lapse techniques show things you had no idea were going on. Take an image of the dish and yea, looks interesting, but take a second and third and you realize that it is changing its pointing between EVERY frame taken at 30 second intervals! Of course, I knew nothing of the observing program - the telescope is run remotely from the VLA headquarters near Socorro, NM. I do know that IR and radio wavelength observations used to take data by offsetting off the object to measure the background signal. This is what appears to be happening here. You can see offsets both N-S and E-W in the time-lapse.

Anyway, I took the VLBA sequence and also one of the sun setting in a clear gap in the west, to demonstrate how easy it is to use Microsoft's Moviemaker program to make the time-lapse. But the constant motion of the radio telescope was more interesting in my book. However, the sunset was interesting too in that it set directly behind the Pinicate Mountains, visible as the more distant peaks here. They have been featured many times on the blog as we drive past them on the way to Puerto Penasco on the Sea of Cortez. At left is a pre-sunset image of where the sun eventually set. The flat-topped mountains are the Mesquite range, nearly due west of Kitt Peak. The more distant mountains are the volcanic Pinacates, just over 100 miles distant. At right is the same horizon with the sun entering the image...

Finally, here is the time-lapse I constructed during the workshop, here with an intro shot and uploaded to Youtube. The radio telescope is a flurry of activity, moving between nearly every frame taken at 30 second intervals.  Go to full screen and HD if you have a high speed internet connection!




We fought a few thin clouds through the evening, but fun was had by all as they say, and hopefully we all learned a few things.

ECLIPSE!

If you get your news off of the Interwebs (you poor thing!), you certainly would have known about the "Supermoon Eclipse" or "Super Blood Moon", or "Blood Moon Spells Doom", or some combination of the above. While I learned that the last "Supermoon Eclipse" was in 1982, back those days we NEVER called a moon at perigee a Supermoon. In those "olden" days, we also NEVER called a total lunar eclipse a "Blood Moon". I do not know how these terms get into the vernacular, and I hate it, so you will note that outside this paragraph, these terms will NEVER be used again here!

From the western part of the country, where we live (Tucson, AZ), the full moon rose right at sunset, of course, just as it was moving into the shadow of the earth. Since we just passed the autumnal equinox a few days ago, the eclipsed moon would pretty much rise due east. We were invited to a 5-year-old's birthday party late in the afternoon, and I suspected we'd be arriving home right about the start of the eclipse, so I at least thought about what I wanted to do. I actually went out the evening before scouting some locations, looking for a foreground that might say "Tucson". I went wandering around downtown, and found this scene looking east down Congress Street, but it didn't yell "Tucson" enough for me, even with a rising eclipsed moon down the street...

So I gave up on a scenic background, especially with the party taking up a chunk of the afternoon. We just went home afterwards for Melinda to rest after spending time at a Hispanic birthday with Techno band and hyperactive children (actually, I could use some quiet time too!). We got home about 15 minutes before sunset and I started setting up the equatorial mount in the back yard to set up the TEC 140 refractor. Right about sunset, I took an amble around the neighborhood with telephoto zoom to look for the rising moon. In the alley behind our house I ran into the neighbors, who were holding a small party with chairs facing west. I pointed out the moon would be rising behind them, but they were celebrating the sunset first... They joined me in the trek towards the rising moon, soon spotted rising due east as expected, shown at left. We have lots of suspended power and cable lines, so walked a hundred yards to clear some of them, as shown at right. These shots taken with the 70-200 zoom off a monopod, 200mm at left, 140mm at right.

It soon got dark enough that the short exposures to properly record the moon way underexposed the background, so I departed to set up the scope. Plus there was lots of good stuff on TV! There was the Cubs game against the Pirates (CUBS WIN!), there was the CSI finale, and a little later there was the Silent Sunday features on TCM. Fortunately, working in the yard, I could keep track of the game while stepping out frequently to monitor the eclipse. My first mistake was assuming the eclipsed moon would clear the tree from where I had first set up the mount. Wrong! Moving an assembled AP 1200 needed more strength than I had, so needed to disassemble and set up against my western fence. It amazing how fast the thing goes together with an eclipse progressing over your shoulder! The shot at left was taken with the zoom lens again off a tripod for 6 seconds at F4.5, showing the total phase of the moon against the stars of Pisces. The TEC 140 works at F/7, so is just about 1 meter focal length, just about perfect for an eclipsed moon, even at perigee! My first guess at an exposure was 20 seconds, shown at right - a little overexposed, but shows more stars than in the shorter, properly exposed images.

I finally settled on 8 second exposures at ISO 200 that didn't saturate any of the channels. With the scope set to lunar rate to track the moon, I used an intervalometer to take an image every 60 seconds. It finally started routine exposures at 7:42, just a couple minutes before mid-totality when the moon was deepest into the earth's shadow. The image at left shows mid-eclipse at 7:47. I let it go pretty much automatically, occasionally adjusting the north-south position of the moon, as lunar tracking only handles the east-west motion. After the deepest part of the eclipse, the moon slowly got brighter at lower left until it eventually left the full shadow of the earth. The image at right was at 3rd contact, just as the edge of the earth's shadow hit the edge of the moon.

The partial phases don't interest me much, so I took down the gear after 3rd contact and put things away. After work today I finally started messing with all the frames, about 43 all told. The limitation turned out to be the visibility of a single star to center on during the sequence, taking out the declination adjustments, and visible throughout. Using Nebulosity 2 software, I centered on the same star, so that in a time-lapse, shown below, the stars appear fixed and the moon moving through the field, as it should be. Since the earth's shadow moves slowly (about 1 degree per day), the moon's motion of about a half degree per hour dominates and zips through in a couple hours at most. Here is the result, uploaded to Youtube. Be sure to go full screen and HD for best visibility of stars and details...




All in all, a pretty good eclipse! The last few we've had had issues, clouds, or shooting from Mexico w/out a tracking mount. They are about to get a lot rarer - after 3 of them every 6 months, the next total lunar eclipse for North America won't be till January, 2019! Seems like a long time off...