The "R" Word!

We've travelled a hard path for the last 7 months.  Melinda's initial diagnosis of small-cell lung cancer was a shock, but we jumped into the battle without hesitation.  We've done everything Dr. Garland has wanted us to do, and she has an aggressive outlook on treatments.  We know there is no cure for small-cell, but today we finally heard the word, brought on by yesterday's PET scan, the definitive measure of her cancer.  When Sandy, Dr. Garland's nurse first called this morning, Melinda thought there must be bad news, until she said the radiologist report said "continued complete metabolic response to treatment", in other words, there was no detectable cancer activity!  When Melinda first dared ask if her cancer was in remission, Sandy confirmed that was the case!  HAPPY DAY!  She still has a week of the full-brain radiation to zap the microscopic cells that may or may not be in her brain, but when we see Dr. Garland on Monday, we're expecting confirmation of Sandy's news leak, more details and likely get to see some images too.  At that time she'll go over the schedule for continued long-term monitoring for a possible return.  While we've hoped for good news, it looks that it has finally arrived, and it is time to celebrate. 

Addendum: For those interested in the tech speak, from the radiology report:

IMPRESSION:
Complete response to therapy. The primary right pulmonary hilar mass and paratracheal lymphadenopathy are no longer identified. No new FDG avid disease is identified.

Today's Box at the Door!

The ingenuity of our friends knows no bounds!  Melinda has continued to get cards and notes to keep her spirits up as her radiation treatments resume again today for the home stretch.  This weekend we got an "Edible Arrangement" of fruits, she has a prayer shawl waiting for her to swing by work and today, another box waiting for us at the door as we returned from the hospital.  Most, or at least some of you likely know the radiation warning symbol at right.  Well what way to poke fun at the process than little cookies of radiation symbols!?  They were sent by Gretchen, who lived up the street when the Johnsons were still living in the 'burbs of St Louis.  As Homer Simpson would say, "Hmmmmm, radiation cookies!"

The View From Here!

The struggle is nearing an end!  When we started all this cancer stuff back last August, we knew we had a fight on our hands.  Melinda made it through 6 cycles (3 consecutive days every 3 weeks) of chemo, ending in mid-December.  Then she started 2-a-day radiation to her chest for 36 treatments (!) in January plus another chemo round to make those cancer cells more susceptible to radiation.  Some of the side effects (esophageal burns, low blood counts) threw her into the hospital for a couple stays, but she has come through this step 2 as strong than ever.  All that remains are 10 more once-daily treatments of full-brain radiation in case any cancer cells made it into her brain. That starts 17 March after a week off, so by the end of the month, we're hoping to be all through the treatments the oncology experts deemed to throw at her!

So while we're not sure what side effects will pop up the next few weeks, we are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, not unlike this view of the Catalina Mountains past the entrance to the Diamond Children's addition.  We've been walking past this view on the plaza between the main hospital and the Cancer Center for all her radiation treatments to get to the lonely elevator that brings us down to Radiation Oncology...  And finally when the sun popped out to brighten our sky Friday, it seemed to indicate the end was in sight.  She has heard from some of the other patients that brain radiation is nothing to worry about, so perhaps the worst is behind us!

Eye in the Sky!

I've certainly extolled the virtues of Heavens-Above - the website that predicts the location of virtually every satellite that is circling the Earth.  While the bright visual ones are easy to spot, if you have a particular little satellite you want to follow telescopically, you can find positions of those too.  And besides objects that circle the earth, you can also plot out sky maps for any time and date, as well as make finder charts for comets and asteroids and find out information about other solar system objects.  It is a great resource!  Just enter your location by city name or from Google Maps, make sure you enter your time zone correctly, and you should be ready to go.

Thanks to the heads-up provided by a TAAA member earlier today, I saw that the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) would be making a favorable pass over Tucson tonight shortly after 1900 (7pm).  Heavens-above provided a map where it would appear in the sky.  You can also print out a ground track, the positions on the globe that it passes over.  Interestingly, the HST's orbit is inclined 28 degrees to the equator, the same latitude of Cape Canaveral, Florida where it was launched.  It takes a lot of extra work to launch a satellite into an inclination different from your launch point's location.  As a result, it NEVER passes directly over Tucson, which has a latitude of 32 degrees.  The best you can do is a situation like tonight where it gets about 51 degrees high to the south - as reflected in the ground track, it passes us well to the south, but thanks to its relatively high orbit (550km, about 330 miles), it is still easily seen.  The circle on the ground track at right indicates where it would be visible.  I just checked, and if we had been observing from our home in Illinois, HST would only have been about 12 degrees over the southern horizon - a big difference in appearance!

Of course, to see it, it needs to be mostly dark at the observing location, but the HST needs to be still lit up by the sun and that was the circumstance tonight.  Looking at the sky plot at left, you can see where the track stops at the left side below the constellation Leo - that is where it enters the Earth's shadow.

I decided to try photographing it from the back yard with a tracking mount so at least the stars wouldn't be trailed.  Since the Hubble would be passing through Orion, not far from Rigel and the Orion Nebula, it was a natural to try getting those in the images too.  Of course, it always takes longer to set up gear than you think it does, and just about the time I finished focusing the lens I happened to look up and it was right there about to enter the field!  I quickly snapped the picture, but it was only set to 15 seconds - shown here at left is the cropped part of the image that shows the trail of HST with Rigel at lower right and the Orion Nebula at left center.  The focal length of the zoom lens was set to 85mm, and F/3.5.  Unfortunately there were some think clouds in the field, but that is nothing new - we've had at least thin clouds for seemingly months!

So spotting the Hubble was a great success!  It won't be many years that the Hubble will have another failing reaction wheel or something that will knock it out of commission.  While there have been several servicing missions over the decades, with the retirement of the Space Shuttle, the opportunity to repair or upgrade HST is over.  The 6.5 meter James Webb Space Telescope is not a direct replacement and is still years from launch, so it will be sad to see Hubble end, though it will likely continue to circle the Earth in its orbit for a long time.  In the meantime, hopefully some day it will clear again here in Arizona, without the moon, and with my schedule allowing me to get out to a dark site.  Until then, these little back yard excursions will have to do!

How We Spent Our Week...

We're just poking our head up after nearly another week holed up at the University of Arizona Medical Center (UAMC).  While Melinda's throat is improving to the point where she can eat solid food again, this last weekend she developed bad ear/head aches, and while waiting for a fluid infusion to improve her hydration last Monday, developed a fever and the Cancer Center decided to admit her.  Six days later she was released today - with no obvious cause for her head/ear pain, which she still has and which is little affected by the pain meds she is taking.  The fevers she was having have subsided, the ear, nose and throat (ENT) doctors at UAMC indicate no signs of ear or sinus infection, so she'll ride it out at home for now.  The good news, if any, is that they started up her 2-a-day chest radiation treatments this last Wednesday, so we're checking those off her calendar again, and she's down to the last week's worth this upcoming week, assuming no problems.  After another week off for recovery, they then plan 10 treatments (2 weeks) of whole-brain radiation so she'll be finished by the end of the month if there are no more setbacks.

After splitting my time between home chores, time with Melinda, and a couple hours at work every day, it feels good to be home again, looking at a normal schedule.  The big news in Tucson this weekend is the arrival of a honest-to-goodness storm for the first time in over 2 months.  The last measurable rain was on 20 December, and usually Winters are a secondary rainy season here.  But the normal weather patterns that brings that rain has brought California and us unseasonably warm temperatures and drought, and the eastern half of the country the "Polar Vortex" and the snowiest, coldest weather in decades.  As the storm clouds moved in yesterday, we had some spectacular cloud patterns, making me wish I had a camera with my comings and goings from UAMC.  Finally, upon our arrival at home late this afternoon I got out the camera and took a few shots.  In a run to the drug store, I saw an impressive display of what looked like Mammatus clouds.  By the time I got home, they had lost some of their rounded bottoms, but still looked impressive.  A 3-frame mosaic is shown at left.  A few minutes before sunset, it slipped into a clear spot in the west, and though we didn't have much rain falling at the time, there were a few rainbow segments to be seen, including the one at right against the Santa Catalina Mountains.  This is an HDR image - a combination of 3 slightly different exposures for better illumination.

Finally, just as the last rays of the sun left the sky, a few segments of the rainbow arc could be spotted from the back yard.  It literally faded as I watched, so this was the last of any rainbows.  There are still scattered storms west to LA, but whether they will make it across the desert to us remains uncertain.  Knock on wood, at least we'll be home, not in the hospital, to document it if we get more rain or photo ops!

A Spectacular Jupiter!

While Jupiter is the Solar System's largest planet, it doesn't get closer to the Earth than about 400 million miles, about 4.3 times the Sun-Earth distance.  As a result, it appears pretty small, about 1/40th the diameter of the Moon, not much larger than a medium-sized lunar crater.  It is just visible as a tiny disk in a pair of binoculars, and to see any details, you need a pretty decent telescope, at least a 2" or 3" with moderate magnification to see the cloud belts and perhaps spot the Great Red Spot (GRS) - a giant cyclone three times larger than the earth that has been observed for nearly 400 years!  But while it lacks details in small telescopes, it is my favorite planet, because in a really good telescope, you can achieve views that approach spacecraft quality, and with its 9.7 hour day, details on the rotating disk are readily seen, as well as the even tinier disks of the moons, moving around Jupiter like a tiny solar system.

A friend of ours, Tom Polakis, recently outdid himself on an image of Jupiter While no stranger to planetary imaging, his image from Sunday evening is shown here at left.  While admittedly it was a night of "decent" seeing (the wavering of the atmosphere usually limits resolution) I think this might be his finest Jupiter shot.  He was actually observing it because the little moon Europa was transiting the disk, and he observed its ingress before deciding to image.  While easily visible when he saw it enter the left edge of the "limb darkened" edge (the edge of Jupiter appears darker because of its dense atmosphere), as it moved into the disk, it was much harder to see against the same-brightness band it had entered.  The image at right shows Europa's location pointed out (still difficult to make out against belt detail), as well as the GRS.  The image is shown as it appears in the sky with North up and East to the left.


A few comments on how he gets these incredible images.  His workhorse telescope for these is a 10" Newtonian, of 55" focal length, using a 2.5X extender to enlarge the image a bit.  He uses what is called "webcam" techniques, where video frames are taken in quick succession.  While in the last decade and a half, amateurs have successfully used actual webcams for these images, newer cameras with rapid video frame rates are currently in vogue.  In this case, he uses a monochrome (B&W) camera, so to get a color image he needs to shoot image sequences through red, green and blue filters.  Because Jupiter rotates so quickly, this has to be done in less than a few minutes.  For these images, his usual routine is to take 1,000 images in each color, and uses a freeware program called Registax to discard the worst of the images, and slightly shift and align the remaining images (correcting for shifts caused by seeing)for a final high-resolution image for each color, then assemble the final color image.  He is currently about to upgrade to a new camera that has a bigger sensor, is more sensitive, takes data faster, and is less expensive than the camera he's used the last 7 years!  He must be doing something right - whenever you are getting details inside the GRS, you are doing pretty well!

Backyard Observatory Project!

In recent years, I've been thinking more of building a back yard observatory.  While Tucson skies are okay for a city of nearly 1 million (brightest part of the Milky Way just visible on dry nights), it just isn't suitable for dark sky observing.  But there have been lots of times that I've wished there was a ready access scope for checking out a planet or lunar view.  It is a real pain to set up a scope out of the house or van, then have to put it away again afterwards.  A couple years ago, I even obtained a telescope from the estate of a telescope-maker north of Phoenix - a 12.5" Cassegrain, perfect for such applications.  It has patiently been waiting for its moment in storage for construction of a structure.  Our back yard is a little small, though, so have been giving some thought to what to build.  While one where the roof rolls off is straightforward to build, the supports and frame for the roof while it is off the building automatically doubles the footprint.  A dome might be nice, but are expensive in larger sizes, and I dislike the restrictive sky view out of a dome slit.  What other options are there?

A friend of mine, David Oesper built a really neat observatory design a couple decades ago.  It was featured in Sky and Telescope magazine in May of 1993, and the photograph shown here is from that article.  The roof panels roll down a rail, while supported by a pivoting strut and counterbalanced with weights inside the structure.  David is shown here at left with daughter Julie (now grown) and their builder Andy Orngard who came up with the design.  It has no structure outside the building when closed, which fits my desire.  However, the steep roof angle isn't needed in Tucson (no snow or ice), and I couldn't figure how to modify it to work with a shallower roof.  Another good feature of this design is keeping one side of the observatory up to keep out wind or an obnoxious light.

So I was thinking of something similar but wanted to go larger because of the larger scope and having room for a friend or two.  I gave up the rails and tried running off  pivoting struts.  Using paper and cardboard models in 2D only get you so far, so I decided to make a scale model out of wood, about 1:12.  This is what I came up with...  Shown at left with the roof closed, it is 10X10 feet inside clearance, and the outer walls are 5.5 feet high, with the peak of the roof 8 feet high when closed.  With the roof open, as shown at right, the 2 struts per side rotate the panels up and out alongside the building, providing good horizons in all directions.  The little stick figure is nearly to scale for a 5 foot tall person w/a 3" refractor.  The roof sections reach a balance point about half way open, so like David's design, would need a counterweight system to aid in starting it opening, and to catch it as it reaches its open limit.

A shown in these pictures, it also works, like David's with one of the roof panels either partially open or closed altogether.  Although not shown well, the pair of struts do NOT work off the same pivot.  Different pivots points and strut lengths are needed to get the roof moving up off the walls, fully clear the rear wall and then to stay close to the wall when it is open.  The struts would scale directly to a full-size building, perhaps aluminum bar stock 4" to 6" wide and 3/4" thick or so.  The weight of the roof panels rests on the rear wall via the inside strut when fully open.  Pivot axes made of 1" steel shafts could be made into an angle-iron bracket to be fastened to studs in the wall for strength and security.  And though I haven't figured out a door yet, the 5+ foot tall walls should allow easy access from outside.

Not wanting to rush into anything, I'll likely dig a hole and put in the telescope pier first, get the mounting installed, and perhaps even the telescope too before building the observatory around it.  But I think the design has possibilities.  If any of you see why it won't work, let me know or come by and play with my little model with me!