Mining the Archives!

We've not been out of the house much the last week other than visits to the oral surgeon and cancer center, which generally make for boring posts, so have been reviewing some of the photo archives to see potential post material I've missed lately. So not really timely, but this one is recent...

Just 2 months ago (13 December), on my way back from watching the sunset behind Kitt Peak from the Mount Lemmon Highway, I paused at Babad Do'ag ("Bad Dog" as I sometimes refer to it) as I frequently do. About 3 miles up the road to Mount Lemmon, it has a great parking lot and overlook with a spectacular views of the Tucson Valley and beyond. It is where I've shot images like at left with Kitt Peak in the far distance in silhouette behind the lights of metropolitan Tucson.



But there are other targets, including other observatories! To the south across the Tucson Valley are the Santa Rita Mountains, with Mount Wrightson as the highest peak on the left at about 9,500 feet. Mount Hopkins, about 1,000 feet lower at 8,500 feet right in the center of the frame at left is the home of the Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT). Originally so-named because its innovative design combined the light-gathering power of 6 individual smaller mirrors each 1.8 meters (72") diameter, now consists of a single primary mirror 6.5 meters (256") diameter. I've got a connection to it as it was the first large mirror over 3.5 meters I polished the Mirror Lab where I work. A before-and-after image of the telescope from the website above is shown at right. People ask why it is still referred to as the MMT - my thought is that most large telescopes consist of primary and secondary mirrors to get the lights to the instruments, so "multiple" still applies!


Both of the above photos were taken on 13 December with my 200mm lens - the Kitt Peak shot a panorama put together from several images at 200mm focal length. The Santa Rita's shot was a single-shot taken with the same lens set to 110mm. Mount Hopkins at about 40 miles distance, is a little closer than Kitt Peak's 54 miles from "Bad Dog". At left here is a panorama put together from 8 images taken with the Meade 80mm F/6 APO (480mm focal length). Shown at the Blog's 1600 pixel limit, you can spot the squat building of the MMT atop Mount Hopkins at right center. At left is the frame showing the MMT at nearly full-resolution. Not a lot of details can be spotted compared to distant views of Kitt Peak, but you can see how the conical mountain profile would provide smooth laminar airflow over the peak, which is supposed to provide excellent seeing at MMT. There are actually a number of smaller scopes making up Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory near the peak at Hopkins, but they aren't visible here, since they are located on the south side on a saddle below the peak.


Finally, before leaving "Bad Dog" that evening, I took another set of images with the Meade scope in full darkness to see if I could still capture the mountain profile. Sure enough, with 30 second exposures, it can be spotted, since the profile is backlit by the light glow from Nogales, AZ another 30 miles to its south. The bright lights are either from the drag strip or the Pima County Fairgrounds near Houghton south of Interstate 10, about 20 miles away (halfway to MMT!).  Interestingly there are no star trails visible, though there is a lot of extinction that close to the horizon...  Even 30 seconds at F/6 failed to catch any. 

This is the second post mentioning MMT or Mount Hopkins. The last was from 2009 (!) when Melinda and I took part in a star party for the public at the base camp at the base of the mountain. I've not been up to MMT in over a dozen years - might be fun to take it in again since going digital!

"Bad Dog" Sunset

It was such a lovely afternoon yesterday, and with Melinda feeling a little better every day since she is skipping the chemo this month, we battled rush-hour traffic for an evening drive! I had seen on some planetarium software that the post-sunset skinny crescent moon would be low in the southwest somewhere near the silhouette of Kitt Peak, so we headed east towards one of our favorite outlooks, "Bad Dog" (in actuality, Babad Do'ag - the native name of the mountain range north of town, "Frog Mountain"). Similar to "A" Mountain, it is paved to a nice parking lot a few hundred feet above the local elevation, though instead of overlooking the downtown Tucson skyline, you have a panorama view of the entire Tucson valley from the south to the west.

Traffic was bad enough that we missed the sunset, though we watched the last golden rays disappear on the peaks and witnessed the Belt of Venus rising as we sped down Tanque Verde. Missing the sunset was ok, almost expected, and we arrived pretty far into twilight. The views are such that almost anything you take pictures with comes out great, so had brought a number of lenses from the TEC 140 to the kit lenses for the camera. Since the former was longer to set up, I did it first and captured Kitt Peak against the twilight. First thing I noticed was that the seeing was quite poor. Granted we were looking through 60 miles of atmosphere, the stiff surface breezes were doing a number on the image sharpness.


Undeterred, I went on - setting up another scope, the smaller Meade 80mm, which at F/6 has less than half the focal length of the TEC scope, and corresponding wider field. And to make things more interesting, I shot some images with a vertical format, shifting between them to make a panorama. Shown at left, this is the result of cropping somewhat from the panorama made from 7 individual frames. Of course, I could have shot it with a single 180mm lens or so, but I like having the higher resolution the longer focal length provides, though the blog limit of 1600 pixels puts a crimp on displaying the full resolution images. Granted, with the poor seeing, a single exposure with shorter lens wouldn't have been a bad idea... More on that below...

Next up, since the TEC was still set up but the lighting behind Kitt Peak was dimming, I took a series of shots of the "Tucson skyline", such as it is. This is built up from 3 exposures of 4 seconds duration each and shows the University of Arizona area, from the Arizona Stadium at left to Aloft Hotel at right a half mile to the north. From Babad Do'ag, it just happens to lie on the same path as Tucson's downtown area, then up beyond that you can see housings up what I suspect is the Star Pass area up west into the Tucson Mountains. There were some lights on in the stadium for preparations for a game today, and also there was an NCAA Soccer match on the field to the south, thus all the lights. There also appear to be other lighting centers on campus, and I'm thinking it might have been a pep rally for today's football game.


Finally, as it got a little darker, the crescent moon sank low enough to get it into a picture with a normal camera lens. So here I can make the comparison between a single wide shot or panorama from several shots. At left is a single shot with my kit lens for the Canon XSi, set to 60mm focal length. At right is a 4-frame panorama with the same lens set to 70mm, and combined with Photoshop. Unfortunately, with the blog's 1600 pixel-wide limit, you can't really tell the difference between them, so these likely look pretty identical. Certainly with the original files, the panorama was 8500 pixels wide and the single shot only 4500, so the panorama should be sharper, all things being equal!


Even when you go to the full-camera-resolution, the difference is hard to see, but perhaps detectable. At left is the cropped image at Kitt Peak both from the panorama and single shot with no subsequent processing. Since the panorama was taken at a little longer focal length on the zoom (70mm vs 60mm), the image looks larger. Also, the single exposure was a 4 second exposure at F/5.6, while the panorama was taken for 10 seconds at F/7.1, pretty much equivalent. Looking at the 4-meter and 90" telescope profiles on the right side of Kitt Peak (the flat-topped mountain), I think the longer focal length helps pull out a little more resolution. If more exposures at longer focal length were taken I think the difference would be more visible...

We didn't wait for moon set - it would have been against a black horizon anyway, so packed up and headed home, stopping at Pinnacle Peak for a steak dinner on the way. A fun evening and a chance to get out of the house!

An Alignment Scout Trip!

I'll bet you thought with the solstice sunset alignment with Kitt Peak 10 days ago that that stuff would be over for the season, but you would be wrong!  Again, based on my daily astronomical on-line reading, I "discovered" that in a week or so Mercury and Venus would have a lovely close conjunction in a week or so.  Knowing that Venus is in about the right spot to catch it behind Kitt Peak (again!) from the Mount Lemmon Highway, it was time to hit the road for another sunset!  Also, it is about the last field trip I'll be taking with the ole' Ford '88 van with the smashed-in rear end.  I take it and sign it over to the insurance company Wednesday...

Anyway, I made it out to "Bad Dog" over look (Babad Do'ag  for sticklers...) at about milepost 3 on the Mount Lemmon Highway just in time to catch the sunset.  Shown at left, it went down about 2 degrees south of where it needs to intersect the Observatory.  According to my calculations, for those who might want to observe the alignment of the sunset w/Kitt Peak at this lower location, rather than the one near MP9, Friday the 16th is the day to be at the "Bad Dog" overlook.  It moves much more every day than near start of Winter, so you only get the one chance on this side of solstice.

But I didn't come today for the sunset, only to get there before it got dark to get setup!  BTW, with snow atop Mount Lemmon, the highway was packed with cars heading down.  Luckily I had this lower overlook mostly to myself most of my 80 minutes there.  Venus popped out shortly after sunset, and about 10 minutes later, Mercury was spotted below the brighter planet.  Still a few degrees apart, by this next weekend they are less than a degree apart.  Waiting for it get dark enough to have it stand out from the sky and get a little lower with Tucson's city lights as well, it is shown at left.  That is Venus above and Mercury mostly below it and a little to the right.  I waited another 10 minutes to catch it just before Mercury set behind the Quinlan Mountains.  While the sky is darker, the rising Full Moon behind me helps light up the "A" of "A" Mountain, and in fact, the telescopes atop Kitt Peak have the pale illumination due to the moon.  In the next few days, Mercury will rise up nearly to the height of Venus and both will move to the right a couple degrees, so should be a pretty pair directly above the Observatory.  Perhaps I'll see you there!

I also had time to take a 5-frame mosaic of the pretty lights of Tucson with Kitt Peak in the background.  Down-sampled here to the 1600 pixel-wide maximum, you can't see a lot of the details of the original mosaic, but you can perhaps see why I do them to keep the details of the original files...  I also took a time-lapse of the twilight including the swiftly moving clouds...  Perhaps I'll be doing something with that soon.  I guess I'm just easily entertained!

Introducing an FIV Cat Into the Herd

It was about time we passed along some experiences we've had with bringing new cats into the household. We are up to 11 cats now in the house and back yard (but not outside our back fence!), and all of them are strays/ferals/rescues. While they all have adapted with a minimum of bloodshed, some new techniques were tried with our last 2 and it has worked out so well we've got to spread the word. A lot of the credit (or blame) goes to our vet, Dr. Kayomee Daroowalla, who got us started using this technique.

The short story is this - just over a year ago we moved in "Scruffy", a feral we'd been feeding in the front of the house. He was a bag of bones when we first saw him, and I literally fed and monitored him for nearly a year to fatten him up - I was afraid the vet would put him down he looked so bad. When he went in for his neutering and health check, the routine feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) blood test came back positive. Thinking that we wouldn't take him into our healthy cat population, where others could be infected by fluid exchange, she suggested introducing him by living in their midst in a dog crate. Over the years, I'd actually had 2 other cats that are FIV positive, so was aware of their health issues and their threat to others, but they can also lead long healthy lives, so not taking Scruffy was ever an option. The crate method was first used with him.

So with our recent invite for YellowCat to join the family, the procedure was fine tuned. First we caught him and moved him into isolation into an extra bathroom we had. We'd been feeding him for nearly a year, so he was used to us, and we were able to work towards petting him and picking him up, leaving the rear feet in contact with the ground so they don't panic. I suspect he was a bit shocked for me to rush him into the bathroom, but he took it well. We made up a pet carrier in the tub into a little "cave of contentment", covered and lined with towels for privacy and comfort. Here he was made to feel at home and get used to the sights and sounds of the house and other cats. Of course, YellowCat's health was still an unknown, so he was in isolation for the sake of our other cats. We had a vet appointment for his neutering, but an upper respiratory infection got him sent home for another week with antibiotics. He did fine in there - took to the litter box immediately, enjoyed his food and housing, but when we went in to socialize with him, we found he was a biter. He got me once on the knuckles and my swollen hand got my doctor to get me antibiotics too.

Finally neuter day came. I delivered him to the vet in the morning and picked him up late in the day. He was moved back into his bathroom for the surgical recovery. He did very well and seemed his normal self in a day or two.

But then the bad news - the FIV test had come back positive like Scruffy. Our other cats were at risk if a fight broke out - not permitted! So like Scruffy, we borrowed the dog crate from Dr Daroowalla, and moved him from the bathroom to the middle of the living room, but safely behind the bars of the crate while everyone got used to the sights and smells of each other. He had his litterbox, food, a little shelf with a towel as bed, even a little play mouse. He was very comfortable and contented there, never tried to get out when feeding him or cleaning his box. The other cats came by hissing occasionally, but it was interacting, not fighting.

After about 2 weeks of this, we spent about another week with the door to his crate open when the other cats were out of the living room. The doors were closed, his crate opened. I actually had to reach in and pull him out the first time, resulting in another minor bite. He circled the room a couple times over the course of 45 minutes, then walked into his crate and ate some dry food. Door closed behind him. First we did it once a day, then a few times a day. Finally we let him out with a cat in the living room, with us as referee. Hootie regarded him from a distance and mostly ignored him. Finally a couple cats in the room. Marley and Atticus hissed, but our stern vocal discouragement defused any situation.

We are now about 3 weeks after his surgery. We just today started leaving his crate door open whenever we are home. The doors out of the living room are open, our cats come and go. No issues so far. YellowCat has explored our bedroom, but hasn't learned to use the catdoors to the back yard, and really hasn't shown much inclination to leave the living room and his favorite napping sites on the futon or cat scratcher (he loves his catnip!). We still occasionally find him sleeping in his crate with the door open, and he seems perfectly comfortable being locked up there when we leave the house or go to bed for the night. I think allowing him to be comfortable with his own space, yet allowing the other cats to see and get used to him is key. He definitely seems not to be a lapcat, preferring to be by himself, yet he doesn't run from us as we walk up to him, and occasionally follows us around the house.

Oh, and the biting - that last nip I got pulling him out of the crate a week ago was the last one. We pet him a lot and go out of our way to talk to him and scratch him on the head as we pass him and he has lost interest in biting as his trust in us grows. In the next day or two just before their evening feeding, we'll likely let him into the back yard to explore a bit, then coax him back with food. A day or two later we'll show him the cat doors so he can find his own way in and out. Any issues (cat arguments) and we'll slow down the acclimation, but he is doing so well I'm not anticipating any problems.

From my experience with FIV positive cats, they will likely develop health issues. Buster and Scruffy both lost their vision, and Buster died shortly after of unknown causes (while I was in the hospital with a valve replacement). Scruffy always seems to have the sniffles, and we've got antibiotics on hand if he were to suddenly get worse. But he seems happy in his routines, even though blind, and both he and YellowCat certainly have better lives now than they did living on the street. And they joy they give us when they join us on the couch to watch TV makes our efforts worthwhile...

We highly recommend the crate method of introduction - it would seem simple for healthy cats where there are no health issues. Try it and let us know how it works!

An Interesting View...

Often times you don't think about a viewpoint - it takes someone else to note how unusual it is.  Such was the case lately, when a month ago one of the outreach people at the NOAO offices happened upon one of my pictures - it is at the bottom of the post from Christmas day.  It is shown at left here, taken with a 200mm lens.  I've taken similar shots for at least a year or more - the nearly exact same shot was taken exactly 2 years earlier in 2009, but it needed a new set of eyes to see it. 

Anyway, they asked permission to use it in a story about light pollution, and a few days later it appeared in a Yahoo News on-line article.  With the lights of Tucson only 40 miles to the east of the National Observatory, most pictures of Tucson are FROM Kitt Peak.  I've got lots of those too - like the one shown at right above - boring without the observatory.  But the ideal shot would be just like at left, with the lights in the foreground and the observatory shown in the distance! 

Even before the Yahoo article appeared, in another sunset trip to "Bad Dog" overlook (a simplified version of Babad Do'ag, the Tohono name for Mount Lemmon and the actual name of the overlook 3 miles up the Mount Lemmon Highway), I took some additional pictures, this time with a small 80mm Meade telescope I use (480mm focal length).  I took a series of photos as part of a 4-frame mosaic to retain more details over the relatively wide 200 mm lens used above.  Unfortunately, Photoshop had issues assembling it, but with another application in mind, I recently got some new mosaic software that handled it just fine (Kolor Autopano Pro).  The results are shown here at left. 

There is a LOT to see in the photo, unfortunately, Blogger limits the file dimensions to 1600 pixels wide, so it cannot be shown at full resolution.  Of course, Kitt Peak with it's armada of telescope domes is at upper left.  Tucson's skyline, such as it is, is shown at right.  Interestingly, with the perspective view from the NE side of town, the football stadium looks to be right at downtown's foreground, with the red neon "Home of the Wildcats" visible.  In actuality they are separated about 2 miles...  Just to the left of the stadium a large flag can be seen flying over the new Centurylink Building (formerly Quest).  Above and to the left of the flag are some headlights and tail lights from atop "A" Mountain, which entertains a line of cars through the evenings.  Right under the profile of Kitt Peak is a cell tower (red lights visible) that are about halfway to the mountain out at the town of Three Points.  The shadow of the nearby mountains are the Tucson Mountains, the one to the right of Kitt Peak I believe is Cat Mountain, which you pass on the way to the Observatory.  Much beyond the familiar landmarks and I quickly get lost due to the low viewing angle and the diagonal view that isn't square to the street grid...

So a new perspective is sometimes good!  The crops here are from the main mosaic, just a little closer to the native resolution, but still downsampled a factor of 2 or 3.  The  Kolor mosaic software has samples of mosaics assembled from hundreds of images with telephoto lenses so you can zoom out for a wide view, or zoom in to see people hiking on distant mountain trails.  It is quite spectacular!  I'll likely be using it for much more mundane applications, but I see fun in the future!

Oooh - A Close Miss!

As I mentioned in my last post, there was to be a sunset alignment with Kitt Peak National Observatory from "Bad Dog" Overlook (actually Babad Do'ag - Frog Mountain in the native tongue).  So I was joined by 2 of my local Tucson readers to observe it.  It was a spectacular afternoon, very clear sky, though a brisk breeze out of the east was going to play havoc with shaking long focal length telescopes...  At left is the view shooting almost directly up-sun with the zoom lens set to about 70mm, distant mountains Baboquivari on the left, and the flat-topped Kitt Peak on the right side of the view.  The Catalina Highway, used to access the mountain, is the diagonal road across the bottom of the frame.  At right, a mesquite tree and yucca line a ridge about  a half mile or mile away to the north.

After getting set up for imaging, I visited some with Jim and Dick who also came up to observe the sunset.  Each of them brought gear - Jim an H-alpha telescope, Dick a little refractor with white-light solar filter.  As soon as the sun touched the horizon, I knew it was a little too far to the north.  It never touched the solar telescopes that make up the left side of the Observatory profile.  Oh well, these things happen!  Looking at these images, calculations indicate that the sun should be about 6 arcminutes further south, or a declination of about -20.895 degrees.  Like I warned in the previous post, unfortunately, the sun moves about 12 arcminutes/day this time of year, so you've got to be lucky for a perfect alignment this far from Solstice!  By the way, you can look closely and see some nice sunspot groups on the suns face.  While atmospheric refraction gives the upper edge a greenish/blue rim and the lower edge red (another recent post!) interestingly the sunspots have the lower edges green and the upper edges red!  When you pause and think about it, the explanation is pretty simple - the lower edge of a sunspot is actually the upper edge of the bright edge of the sunspot, so has a green upper edge like the top of the disk. 

 

The thin haze or smog shown in the up-sun picture above had a surprise waiting for us after sunset.  Once the sun disappeared below the horizon, it made a perfect screen to see shadows cast from the domes and mountains!  I don't think I've ever seen an effect this strongly before.  With the contrast stretched just a little, you can see each mountaintop structure very clearly casting a shadow.   These are officially called crepuscular rays, and are often seen by casual observers, mostly around sunrise and sunset.  They tend to fade fast, but even after a few minutes, they were still visible after switching to the hand-held zoom lens for a wider exposure.  One is even faintly seen from a peak far to the left side of the picture.  It was really cool to see.

Ok, I'm officially done with these Kitt Peak sunsets for the season - I promise not to submit any more till the end of the year - I promise!

Chasing Skinny Crescents!

Earlier in the week, Sky and Telescope magazine told us of a New Year's Day observing challenge - from the western US, it was possible to spot a very young moon, well under 24 hours after new moon.  It favored us as this time of the year, the ecliptic (path the moon, sun and planets follow), is nearly vertical in the western sky, the moon is near perigee so it appears to move faster, and the timing was right since new moon was at 4:14am Mountain Standard time earlier in the day.  The difficult part was picking it out of the bright twilight shortly after sunset, so a mountain location for clearest skies were perhaps called for...  Hey, it was a holiday, and it was a beautiful New Year's Day, so why not go for a little drive and go for it!

In addition to the skinny crescent of the moon, Venus is nose-diving towards inferior conjunction in a few days (11 January), and would be less than 8 degrees from the moon.  Trying to image the small crescent like we did in Rocky Point last week would be tough because of its low elevation, so again, with the day off, I went after it as the planet transited high in the sky! According to the planet information in Heavens-Above, it would pass due south about 40 degrees high at 1330, so set up the William Optics 11cm APO to try to find it. Binoculars helped to sweep it up, but it was tougher than I thought, since it was only 15 degrees from the sun. I never saw it visually, but once in the scope it was easy. It was still bright enough that I had to use 1/2000 second exposure (a single exposure shown here), and it still might have been overexposed. That is why the sky looks pretty dark, but it is a good shot of the skinny crescent as it passes between us and the sun. The crescent was also easily seen in binoculars, but you only have another couple days to spot it!

About an hour before sunset, Melinda and I
jumped in the van with a couple scopes and cameras and headed to the Mount Lemmon Highway, to the Babad Do'ag (Bad Dog to its sacrilegious friends) lookout.  From this vantage point the sun would set just south of Kitt Peak National Observatory across the Tucson valley, and with any luck, the moon would also be near the silhouette of the Observatory!  I set up a sturdy tripod and  used a little Meade 80mm F/6 (480mm focal length) for some shooting, as well as the 70-200 zoom.  Melinda spotted Venus before sunset, but as the minutes ticked away, I was worried we wouldn't spot the little lunar crescent in the still-bright sky...  Finally, with minutes left before I figured we might as well pack up, I spotted it in 10X44 binoculars!  It was just to the right of Kitt Peak, and barely as high as the top of the mountain!  After I pointed it out to her, Melinda swept it up too and I spent the next few minutes shooting a little mosaic with the Meade, and also catching it with the zoom with Venus in the frame (1/4 second, F/6.3 @90mm focal length, ISO 200).  It was tough to spot, I don't think there was a chance to see it naked eye, but the little elevation we got off the first 3 miles of the Mount Lemmon Highway likely helped.  Looking at it in Photoshop, it was even tough to see in the wide frame without zooming in, so I inserted a magnified, enhanced sub frame to show it better.  It is much easier to see in the 4-frame Meade mosaic with longer exposure (1 second, F/6, ISO 200) and slightly darker sky.  It is visible way on the right edge of the frame, so make sure it is on your screen if you load the full-size image...

In the end, looking at the time stamp, corrected to proper time, we spotted the moon at 1806 local time when the moon was 13h52m old (after new).  Likely a new record for me, though I'm not sure I've ever gone out looking for young moons before.  It was fun - any excuse to get under a clear sky!

Sibling Visit!

We got back safely to AZ on Thursday evening (actually Friday morning), only 3 hours late or so - no reason from the airlines - just the way it is these days! At least they didn't cancel the flight like a year ago, stranding us in Chicago for 2 extra days!  We found upon arrival that Tucson had just broken 100F for the first time Thursday, and is supposed to be something close to 110F over the weekend! It makes that final day in Chicago with a 77F high temp look mighty fine! But anyway, here we are back in Tucson...

And I'm still catching up on May posts even though the calendar sez June! Way back 3 weeks ago, before we even left for the Midwest, we were paid a visit by my sister Linda and her husband Lauren. He had never been to Arizona and she had not since she helped care for me after my first aortic valve replacement surgery 12 years ago, so figured it was a good time for a visit. They camped out at a nearby hotel and spent a few days with us, then took off to the Canyon and northern Az while we flew off to Chicago, to see them up there later in the weekend!

Anyway, we had a great time - I got to impress them with a tour of the Mirror Lab where I work, and they took an early morning tour of the Desert Museum on their own while I got some work hours in. Otherwise we spent lots of time and meals together and tried to give them a taste of Tucson. Lauren was impressed with the "dry heat" and how he never sweated with temps in the 90s, as it evaporated as it was supposed to once he got away from the humidity of Illinois. He was also impressed with the view of the mountains circling the city, so what better day trip to take than a leisurely drive up Mount Lemmon for a late lunch at the Iron Door Inn up by the ski slopes of the mountaintop? While a decent host, I didn't play much of a photographer, so don't have a lot of images of their visit other than the Mount Lemmon trip... Our first stop was at "Bad Dog" (actually Babad Do'ag) overlook shortly after ascending the slopes. That is where I pointed out all the saguaro flowers we could see from that viewpoint, yet another mile up the road and there were no saguaros to be seen at the slightly higher elevation...

Another 10 miles and we got to "Windy Point", another fine place to stop for bathrooms if not for the view. While I've not been there for ages, Linda took off scrambling over the rocks like a native, so I tried to stay within range and took a few pictures. We finally got to a point where you couldn't go much further, a great viewpoint of the Tucson Valley and the mountains beyond. Of course, knowing me, with a willing model that would hold still for a few seconds, I took a stereo pair - at left presented as an anaglyph - so get out your red/blue glasses to view the image at left. Linda told me her granddaughters enjoy looking at the 3D images I post, so they should be doubly thrilled to see grandma on the edge of the cliff! She also tried the "flying" pose a couple times, claiming it felt natural overlooking the canyon. Holding it again for a few seconds, I took a 6-frame panorama to take her and the full view in. Cropped down to reasonably fit a rectangular format here, I printed her out the original 12"X36" banner print and framed it for her while we were in Illinois - she liked it!  Note that Kitt Peak is on the horizon over her right shoulder!

We finished our drive to the mountaintop, enjoying the cool temperatures and the hummingbirds at the Iron Door patio, though we ate inside. We made the short trip down to Summerhaven to check out one or two shops, then headed down the hill. We stopped once more just above Windy Point at Geology Vista - a more regular stop of mine. Grabbing the binoculars, I pointed out a few objects of interest to Lauren, including the view at left of part of the "Boneyard", a storage yard of military aircraft for parts and available for return to service. This image is taken with a 300mm lens, and is shown at full resolution of the Canon XSi (pretty severe crop). Besides the hundreds of acres of planes shown here, at the upper part of the picture is shown the Pima Air and Space Museum, with its own impressive collection of planes. I've also paid a couple visits there the last 2 months and have yet to post about those trips, so still have more to catch up on!

So they had a great trip, and talked about another visit sooner than the 12 elapsed years since Linda has been here.  While we were a little concerned about how draining their visit would be on Melinda, she handled it fine, though perhaps their not staying with us was key to that.  I recall Lauren might have an allergy to our cats too, and with 9 of them around, that might have been a problem!

Five Sunsets!

We've just passed the Winter Solstice, and for those that know me, it's the season for imaging the setting sun past the silhouette of Kitt Peak National Observatory. Like the ancients gathered around Stonehenge for celestial alignments, I've been drawn to this one for well over 20 years, first recording the sunset behind the Observatory in 1988! Those days was with my 12" Newtonian telescope and film (!) camera pointed out of my old van! It is much easier now with portable refractors and digital cameras. I can park and be set up in minutes these days. At left is a GIF file I put together on the "optimum" date of 17 December - click for a larger version. At right is shown my current setup - TEC 140 triplet apochromatic telescope and the venerable Canon XSi camera. Note the home-built solar filter that we made in the TAAA filter workshop about a month ago - it has gotten lots of use lately!

The GIF image at left is quite remarkable. While it shows a few circular artifacts that I didn't see in the original files, what is amazing are the layers in the atmosphere. Formed from air at different temperature profiles, you can see their effect on the image both at the suns edge, and also in the appearance and spacing of the two sunspots. It looks like watching an image at the bottom of a wavy pool!

Why the "Five Sunset" title? Well it hit me that I really didn't know how the image correlated to Kitt Peak very exactly. I knew if you were at "the spot" a few days before and after solstice, you could catch the alignment. I wanted to learn a little more about the situation. About the time I decided to do this, it was 10 days before solstice, so went up alternate days 5 times. It really was an amazing experience! Every sunset was different. Most were clear, one had some clouds during sunset, the last night it completely clouded up 30 minutes after sunset.

The end result is shown here at left.  I started on the 13th, when the sun was still moving southward more than a fifth of its diameter every 2 days. Of course, its southward motion slowed and stopped on solstice day on the 21st, taken just a few hours before the start of Winter. While the casual observer might think the sun wouldn't cover the observatory on most of those dates from this image, note the suns sweeping left-to-right motion for us here in the Northern Hemisphere. Because of the horizontal motion, I caught the full Observatory silhouette on 3 of the 5 evenings, all observations from the exact same spot. As you can see at right, after the first alignment happens about the 17th, the sun continues to move southward, appearing to lower from day to day as it sweeps past the Observatory. On solstice day, it BARELY covers the full silhouette - it helps to move northward as far as you can along the curve to help you catch more solar disk.

But the silhouette wasn't the only thing to see! Like I said above, every one was different - the first day it was very hazy - at least the inversion layer was above the observed level of Kitt Peak and it appeared very hazy. The result was that when the sun dropped below the observatory profile, the peaks projected their shadows into the hazy air, shown at left. Similarly, the next trip up on the 15th, I was shooting the disk (Meade 80mm F/6) as it dropped below the mountain and I caught a bit of blue/green flash between a crack in the mountain, and at the same time, caught more rays being cast upwards and outwards from the suns position, shown at right.



It often paid to not to hurry home. On the evenings when there were clouds, there were spectacular sunsets. At left is a nice example - a 3-frame panorama taken with a 300mm lens plus a 1.4X tele-converter. On another night, I had planned to pause at "Bad Dog" (actually Babad Do'ag) overlook near the lower slopes of the Catalinas to shoot Kitt Peak silhouetted not by the setting sun, but with late twilight glow with the city lights in the foreground. At right is a 5 frame panorama taken with the Meade 80mm F/6 (480mm focal length) and 10 second exposures. I love catching the contrast of the dark-sky observatory within view of the urban lights of Tucson. Besides the lights of Tucson's downtown skyline, the bright lights are from the UA football practice field, where the team was practicing for their upcoming bowl game.

I've got some more items of interest here, but will have to wait for a subsequent post.

(Yawn) Another Sunset Trip...

After today's cheap movie matinee (Les Misérables ), we exited to continued cold temps, but blue sky, so we decided to take a little sunset trip to Babad Do'ag Overlook (shortened to "Bad Dog" to those familiar with it!) near milepost 3 on the Mount Lemmon Highway.  I've been sort-of looking to figure out the date that the sun sets behind Kitt Peak from this alternate location, which broadens the Solstice-only observations from 6 miles further up the mountain road.  A check a week ago indicated it would be this week, so we went for another data point tonight.

With the lower elevation and later sunset, we didn't leave till an hour before sunset, but we still had plenty of time to set up the William Optics APO I posted about 10 days ago.  And sure enough, more pictures with which to take some measurements, shown at left.  While it missed the Observatory, it did catch the solar scopes on part of it's trip to the horizon.  Apparent also are some really nice sunspot groups, even though viewing right over the horizon is not optimum.  Sure enough, the alignment is this week, Wednesday the 16th if my calculations are correct and anyone is interested...  Unfortunately, the problem with this later alignment is that the sun moves a considerable amount from day to day, so only this one chance!  By my calculation, the needed solar declination is -20.788 degrees, Wednesdays is -20.796.  Not sure if I can get away on Wednesday, we'll see.

 

There were some other great items to image.  Across the valley is a nice antenna array that makes a nice, high-contrast object upon which to focus.  I believe several FM stations broadcast from this peak in the Tucson Mountains, shown at left.  At right is a view of the cubical-shaped Multiple Mirror Observatory about 45 miles south our observing spot atop Mount Hopkins.

 

A little after sunset the Moon that was such a sliver yesterday was quite visible.  And since it washigher in the sky than yesterday, the "earthshine" became visible after it got a little darker.  This "old Moon in the new moon's arms" is actually from the earth!  The phase of the Earth, as seen from the Moon is complementary - in other words, if the moon is new, near the sun, the Earth would be fully illuminated and extremely bright, resulting in the "dark side" of the Moon being visible.  At left, a short exposure shows craters down to the maximum resolution of the camera and telescope (shown at nearly full camera resolution).  At right, with an exposure of nearly a second, the crescent is purposefully overexposed to show details revealed by the earthshine.  Since I wasn't tracking, the Earth's rotation blurred the moon slightly, but not enough to degrade the shot too much.

 

And of course, high in the eastern sky was Jupiter.  An exposure of just .1 second overexposed the disk of the giant planet, but revealed the 4 Galilean moons.  From lower left are outermost Callisto, Europa, innermost Io, and on the right side of the disk is Ganymede.  This shot is displayed at full camera resolution, and while the 770mm focal length of the telescope doesn't show a lot of detail in this tripod shot, it is fun to see what you can get with the snapshots we're showing here...