Out With The Old...

Along with the end-of-the-year "out with the old, in with the new" theme, the same goes with some technology that Melinda has been after me to replace. My old cell phone, which has served me very well, was approaching inclusion in the Smithsonian Institute. This particular phone , which was only 5 years old (replaced when the original got wet), was actually a model at least 10 years old from what was Vicki's first cell phone. And while it excelled at what I used it for (making phone calls), it was beginning to show it's age - like most of the numbers being worn off. It was getting difficult to make calls unless you had the number pattern memorized.




So for Christmas, I've entered the 21st century when Melinda got me a "smart phone" - smarter than me, anyway! It is a Droid X and does everything but scratch my back! Of course, it has a camera, a pretty good one, that also takes video (picture of Mia enclosed). It has GPS capability, as well as Internet connectability via Verizon, and about a gazillion other things I'm still learning about. It even makes phone calls! My favorite among the "apps" is of course Google Sky, which shows a view of the stars in pretty good detail where you have the phone pointed, acting like an interactive star chart. Of course, it works clear or cloudy, even showing the sun under your feet in the middle of the night!

Another of my favorites I've found these first few days is Pandora Radio. You set up virtual radio stations by entering a favorite artist or musical genre, voting thumbs up or down for music the app thinks you would like, thus refining the users tastes. By applying your likes and dislikes to the hundreds of thousands of songs available, it develops a music list just for you that would be unlike the list for another user, even starting from the same beginning artist. Melinda found an abundance of other applications, from turning the Droid into a precision bubble level, even a flashlight, with tunable light (astronomers like the red lights, you know!). Another can be used at the store to read bar codes, giving the list price, and I believe nutritional information as well for food items.

So I think it will be great, though there is a learning curve that will take some time getting used to... I've always been a touch typist, never having typed with my thumbs on a small screen, so I can't see sending many e-mails or blog posts from the new phone, but you never know! But with navigational info, google maps, Internet access and everything else, fitting in your pocket, it is a new age!

Snow! In Tucson!

Well, very near Tucson, anyway! Just up the hill a little bit towards Mount Lemmon, the mountain range has a winter frosting of white. While we suspected as much with the rain overnight the mountains were shrouded in clouds and fog through the morning. It wasn't until we came out of the movies this afternoon (we saw "The King's Speech" - an excellent flick, and my favorite going into Oscar Season!) that we saw a clear view of the hills and grabbed a couple frames from the top of Alvernon Avenue.

It is interesting that since I blogged about the rain on my birthday 2 weeks ago, it has rained for 3 straight Thursdays! I also noted in that post that the weather patterns suggest a dry winter for the desert southwest! Now note that the total rainfall for the month of December is only .46", but still, the rainy Thursday is something I could get used to, especially if we could always arrange to get nice sunny weekends. With the clearing storm, cold air is moving in - it is already at freezing here at 10pm, with low temps tonight expected in the low 20s (F). Interestingly, it is about the same highs and lows they are currently getting in Chicago today and tomorrow! Rare for us!

More Sunset Fun!

We certainly hope that all of our regular readers (all 5 or 6 of you!) have gone to Youtube and checked out the spectacular sunset alignment video we posted way back 10 days ago. Partly because of that success, we got to repeat the sunset trip several times, setting a record of 4 attempts this season!

Adam Block, who runs the SkyNights program on Mount Lemmon had a large group going up for the lunar eclipse on the 20th. Unfortunately, while we had some views of the sun while we set up the 5 telescopes (!), the sunset was totally socked in, and other than the view of Kitt Peak telescopes, the group of 25 people were skunked on the sunset observing. At least we tried! I think they had at least partial success on the lunar eclipse observing like we did in town...






Our next try was on Christmas eve the 24th. Friends Tom and Jenn came down from Phoenix to join in the fun with at least 3 other TAAA members. I was thinking that the only way we could improve on our sunset video from the 18th was to do it in the light of Hydrogen Alpha, using a special filtered view that normally shows dramatic activity in the light of a primary hydrogen reaction. When you see images of the sun showing large flame-like structures off it's edge (called prominences), it is likely an Halpha image. Tom is about the only person I know with such a setup, so we supplied Melinda's camera for another video, and he supplied the scope and mount for the partnership. He also shot some white-light shots with a telephoto and through his 10" telescope.

The attempt was partly successful for us. There was indeed a nice prominence that was visible that was just about the last part of the sun to set, but because we needed to use a diagonal in the filter train, the video is flipped left-to-right. Rather than show an inverted video, we show some individual frames here that we flipped in Photoshop. To show the prominence, the disk needs to be overexposed some, and it is hard to coax good views of the prominence so low to the horizon, but I think we did ok (barely visible at the top of the frame). Everyone in the group was successful, even though we were once again shooting through some thin clouds in the west. First timers Jim and Susan O'Connor even had one of their images picked as the solar astronomy picture of the say!

Tom and Jenn stayed the night at our house (we dined on crock pot chili that was waiting for our return from the sunset), setting up Tom's 10" to look for the storm on Saturn in the early morning hours. Unfortunately, the atmospheric seeing was so bad, we could barely tell that the planet had rings!

About the time they took off for Phoenix at noon the next day, another friend Laurie arrived (another Phoenix refugee). She was also interested in the sunset alignment, so we headed up once again. Unfortunately, we were shooting through thin clouds again, and while the video was fine, the blustery wind we had was really shaking the mount, almost inducing motion sickness watching the movie! With the clouds we had more spectacular colors, and we paused at another pullout on the way down to watch the city lights come up against the dimming twilight. Laurie had a great time documenting it all.

So for this December 2010 solstice sunset season, we were 3 successes for 4 attempts. The alignment seems perfect - that pullout at milepost 8.7 seems the perfect place to be when the sun reaches -23.40 degrees declination. It was interesting that none of the 3 "clear" sunsets were actually perfectly clear, but we had great views of each anyway. And even though we got that perfect video on the 18th, well likely do it again a few times next year!

Bella Luna

We've been planning for this night for a long time. The 2010 Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse. In fact, I intentionally scheduled myself off of work for this night. So, when the clouds started building, and the radar looking too vibrantly colored I was a little more than disappointed. We had hoped to join our TAAA friends at one of the club's dark sky sites (TIMPA), but decided that it just wasn't worth the drive over the mountains to get there with a cloudy sky. All the same, we continued to poke our heads out the back door to peek at the moon as the time drew near. Lo and behold! "Sucker holes"! "Sucker holes" are those breaks in the clouds where you can see 'some' stars, but you still have mostly cloud cover. If we were in Illinois we'd be thrilled to have a few of those to get a glimpse of the eclipse; being in Arizona we expect clear skies. Clouds were not in our plans! However, since we were seeing a bit of 'hope' I grabbed my camera while Dean went for the tripod. There's a distinct advantage when it comes to being married to someone who is SO good at what he does, I have to admit that up front. Dean set me up with a great tripod and a Meade 80mm, f6 (480mm focal length) lens/telescope for a lens to shoot through. Yes, some of the time I was shooting through clouds, but the results speak for themselves!

Holiday Sunset Alignment!

It is that time of year again - if we are nearing the winter solstice and the holidays are upon us, it is time once again to travel up the Mount Lemmon Highway to once again document the sunset alignment against Kitt Peak National Observatory. I feel like an astronomer of old, looking for alignments to tell the turning of the seasons, and indeed this is true. From "my spot" (about milepost 8.7) along the Mt Lemmon Highway, the alignment is nearly perfect when the sun hits a declination of -23 degrees, 24 minutes which happens on the sunsets of the 18th and 24th this year. All of the telescope domes atop the mountain will fall within the observed disk of the sun.

This year we had 3 other TAAA members observing with us. Meeting at the base of the mountain at McDonalds at 3:30, it was a 30 minute drive up to the spot, providing plenty of time to set up equipment. This year, rather than take still images every few seconds and turn them into a movie like last year, we decided to use Melinda's T1i to take HD video - duh! It should look much nicer, and at 30 frames a second, with sound besides, it should be the ultimate reproduction of the sunset. Besides Melinda's Canon T1i, I also used the Celestron 5 I got from Elinor and David Levine - it provides the perfect image scale for the moon or sun to just fill the short axis of the APS-C sensor. I practiced using the video mode the night before on the moon, and freshly collimated on a star to provide the sharpest images.

While the alignment has been reduced to a science (no question anymore of a perfect alignment), the weather conditions were questionable even as we met at the base of the hill. High clouds were gathering and they looked even thicker towards the west, but we were all motivated to try, so off we went. After setup, focus and alignment, we got to gather, offer advice and guidance as "magic time" came. It appeared luck was with us as a clear strip appeared over the mountain, from our vantage point at least, 60 miles away. As the sun moved ever closer to the horizon, it finally came into the telescope's field of view and I pushed the "record" button. I was anxious as a cat near a rocking chair, but the image on the camera screen looked just about perfect. After the sun disappeared behind the 90" telescope, I removed the solar filter and recorded the sunset colors for a couple more minutes. In all, we got nearly 9 minutes of video, recorded at the medium-HD resolution. Still, it is about 1.4GB, so impossible to display on the blog at anything approaching full resolution - we'll have to see how we can display it publicly. Shown here are a few frames pulled from the video... It was fun gathering around and watching the replay. Playback at normal speed with the sound is quite fun, approaching the anticipation of even a total solar eclipse as it progresses!  {We have uploaded the video to YouTube.com.  If you click on this link "Mt. Lemmon/Kitt Peak Sunset" you will be able to watch it!  Remember, it is a huge file and if you have a slow internet connection it may take a very long time.}


But the fireworks were not quite over. Even well after the sun had gone down, the western sky was ablaze with color and shifting clouds. This was, without a doubt, the most amazing, dynamic sunset I've seen. Cloud patterns and colors shifted minute to minute and it seemed to go on for much longer than most colorful sunsets. Just amazing! And for dessert, we stopped on the trip down the hill at one of the overlooks showing the city lights, Kitt Peak far in the distance (the flat-topped mountain on the horizon). We continued on to a holiday party at my boss', but what we had just witnessed will stay with us for a long time!

Birthday Present for a Desert Rat!

Yes, today is my birthday. What could a guy possibly look forward to, living in the desert where rainfall barely averages 12" in a year? Well rain showers, of course! And while not exactly on my wish list, it did rain today, nearly 2 months since we got our last measurable amount (.07") on 21 October. The extended forecasts point out that the La Nina weathern pattern is in position, leading to higher temperatures and less precipitation than normal. Unlike last Winter where it rained weekly through the season, expectations should be lessened into Spring and Summer. Good news, I guess, for amateur astronomers - less rain means clearer skies perhaps, but sometimes a good rain seems the perfect prescription for clearing the air and setting the world straight again.

From Somewhere Over New Mexico...

We had a very nice return flight to Tucson, arriving nearly 30 minutes early, and of course, leaving temps of about 10F, arriving to about 70F! During the flight I was thinking (I had the window seat) that stars should be visible, but it was tough to look up very high when adjacent to the window, so I did the next best thing and used the Canon camera! Shown here is the view to the south from 30,000 feet. I think El Paso, TX is distant center, Alamogordo, NM to the left, Las Cruces,NM to the right. Orion and the bright star Sirius are visible to the upper right of the wing of our aircraft. The bright moon provided some ambient light, but also visible are some reflections, as there were some reading lights in use in the seats in front of us. I used Melinda's winter coat to block most of the lights, and hand-held the camera against the Plexiglas window for the 15 second exposure with the 10mm zoom (wide open F/3.5, ISO 1600). Not a great image, but you have to make your own fun when held captive for 3.5 hours!