The Harvest Continues!

The harvest of blog posts from over 1200 pictures of our Christmas trip to Puerto Peñasco continues!  Watching the world go by from Margie's rooftop astronomy deck, was always a favorite activity of mine.  While Puerto Peñasco has a population of a little under 60,000, the lighting in use is old-school from a few decades ago, so a lot is unshielded.  This leads to a considerable glow to the northwest towards town, likely amplified by a little humidity from the sea and dust off the desert. The east was pretty dark - only low-level residential lighting with a little glow from seaside development and if you try really hard, Caborca can be detected 80 miles to the southeast.

Generally our schedule was ruled by the sun - we awoke early with the sun and headed for bed usually within hours of sunset.  The girls did a great job with all our meals at home, but they always wanted to eat dinner just as it was getting interesting right after dark!  Christmas was the time of year that Orion dominates the eastern horizon as the stars dissolve out of the sky, and for 2 of our 3 nights I missed it too...  But finally I was able to grab some frames for the mosaics shown here - a 4-frame shot at left, and 3-frame shot at right.  I was concerned the program (Microsoft ICE) would have difficulty joining the earth and sea since there was a gap in time between frames, but there didn't seem to be any issues at all.  The subframes are only 30 seconds of exposure and there was some vignetting that showed in the assemblages that I corrected in Photoshop to some effect, but otherwise these are good representations of what could be seen by eye.  In the left image, bright Jupiter can be seen rising with Gemini, while Orion dominates the center.  In the right image, I wanted to show the pair of clusters in Taurus above Orion, the V-shaped Hyades and the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades above that.  Click for full-size views, realizing the 1600-pixel-wide limits of the blog.

It is always interesting how homeowners take advantage of local materials.  In the Midwest everyone has grass in their front yard.  In Tucson where you would need to pay for water to grow grass, most yards have a layer of pea gravel.  In Puerto Peñasco, Margie has a layer of white turret shells to serve in the space between the parked cars and where the patio begins.  Very eye-catching!  She claims the locals sell large burlap bags of them for a few dollars...  Shown at left is a closeup, and at right one I ran across in the wild down at the beach.

Finally, an innocent napkin holder caught my eye one morning.  From the outside covered dining table, she had a couple of her gold plate spoons keeping the napkins from blowing away.  I caught my reflection in them and attempted a variety of "selfies" catching my reflection.  I liked the structure and tone a lot, and then, while manipulating the image yesterday noticed the "twofer" aspect - the twin images of me serve as an accidental stereo image too!  Cross your eyes slightly to merge the two images of the right-hand image and you will see a coarse 3D image of me taking the picture, camera closer to the reflection that my head and roof beyond.  I like it!

Las Conchas - the Cupola Collection...

Yet another post from our Christmas visit to buddy Margie's house in Puerto Peñasco.  Never having been to the Mediterranean, her little development in Las Conchas (the shells), is what I expect it to look there - pretty nice whitewashed houses against the perfect blues of sea and sky.  And they have one thing you never see elsewhere in Arizona - cupolas!  A large percentage of them have these little domed peaks to the roof, that let in outside ambient light, and acts as a vent to let out hot air.  Their exteriors run the gamut from unadorned tile or plaster to tile and mosaics.  Margie's astronomy lookout on the roof is a perfect spot to look over the village, and presented here are some random shots from that vantage with the William Optics 11cm, F/7 apo - effectively a 770mm focal length telephoto lens.

This exercise in architecture also pushed me to learn a few new techniques I'll use later...  Note the above image - with the long focal length of the telescope, the depth of focus is quite small, so if there is considerable distance between points of interest, one will be in focus, the other will be fuzzy.  Note the upper cupola is out of focus...  At left, I took 2 images, one focused on the front dome and a second on the rear, and used focus stacking techniques using Photoshop to combine the 2 images to keep both domes in focus.  It is a powerful tool that I can see myself using with my macro photography in the future using multiple exposures.   At right is another example, this time against a distant mountain peak - actually the Pinacate volcanic range, of which one crater can be seen to the right.  The Pinacates dominate the northwestern view on the drive to Puerto Peñasco, and are here nearly 40 miles distant.

Since this blog usually contains some nuggets of astronomical knowledge, this next example can also serve as an analogy to other principles.  From a fixed observation point, some cupolas appear bigger because they are closer.  Some appear bigger because they are physically bigger.  Sort of like star brightness - some are bright because they are close, some bright because they are intrinsically brighter.  In the case at left, Margie's neighbor's house has a spectacular tiling job on their cupola, and appears large because it is close - at the inner focus range of my scope, it turns out!  If this dome looks vaguely familiar - you have seen it before!  It served as the early morning roost for the ringed-bill gull a few posts back, re-shown at right...

The rest are pretty conventional, but vary from the simple red clay square version at left, to another nice mosaic of the cobalt blue tile at right. For some reason, I prefer the randomized pieces placed together better than the regular pieces of tile placed at regular locations, even though the latter is likely hard to do well without regular gaps, as the one at lower left in green tile...

That's all I've got!  Of course, Margie's flat astronomy deck isn't conducive to a cupola, but there were plenty of others to enjoy from a distance, and a good target for a small telescope!

Mexican Beach in 3D!

There are still a couple of Mexico posts in me fighting to get out.  You might recall that Puerto Peñasco is on the Sea of Cortez.  Margie's house is only about 125 meters from the beach, so is a short stroll, though a little work to fight your way down (or up) a pretty steep and very sandy access slope. I've written about the tides there - because of the "bathtub effect", small tidal changes down at the south side of the Sea near La Paz result in some of the highest tides in the world up at Puerto Peñasco.  At Christmas while we were there at last quarter moon, the tides were only about 1.5 meters, but during new and full moon it can be well over 6 meters (over 20 feet)!  Even at 1.5 meters it was a substantial change.  At left, the tide was near high when I made my first trip down to shore.  At right the next morning from near the same vantage point it was near low and the water was quite a bit further out if only 5 feet lower...  Both of these views are looking west towards town, the hill and lighthouse overlooking old town visible in the distance.

In Tucson, we've got lots of sand, but don't have many sea creatures!  It was fun to roam and explore the high-water mark to find shells and evidence of sea life.  In previous springtime trips, low tide was the interesting time for lil' sea animals, but this trip, at least with the minimal tides, little was seen of the live creatures we've spotted before.  But the photos here show that at least at the upper tide limits, there is more shell and what used to be shells than sand!  At left the nearly-setting sun added a warm cast to sand and shell.  At right, the next morning reveals that most every granule is an eroded piece of shells.


That morning, macro lens in hand, I worked on developing a new technique to simplify and improve my taking macro 3D pictures.  If the reaction from my readers is good, perhaps I'll write it up, but for now, enjoy the 3D beach pics below.  As always, these are cross-eyed views...  Cross your eyes slightly to look at the right picture with your left eye and vise versa.  You should see 3 pictures in your brain, the center one will be interpreted as showing depth.  If you are a newbie at this, you will likely find it easier to fuse the thumbnails, and if successful, you can try the full-size images for higher resolution.  Folks ask why I post them this way - well, with this technique you don't need any accessory viewers that are usually needed for parallel-eye viewing.  Try this and see! 

I didn't take note of the picture separation, but suspect they are likely taken from vantage points further apart than normal eye separation, making them "hyperstereo" images.  But they effectively amplify what little relief is visible on small objects on the beach, so I love the effect - I hope you do too!

Unfortunately, I don't know the identity of any of these shell types - I need my buddy Donna, who was with us and is a bit of a shell collector from her earlier Florida days, to help with these.  If I hear from her, I'll pass some IDs along!  I love the amplified depth of the hyperstereo effect on these almost microscopic shells...  The left one here is the same type as the left above, both eroded open, but still showing some interesting shapes, especially in 3D.

Ok, these are the last ones.  I'm showing literally every stereo pair I shot because I can't decide which ones I like best - I like them all.  Sorry if they give you headaches, but do let me know if the technique works for you and if you enjoy stuff like this - I sure do!

What A Difference A Day Makes!

Twenty four little hours...  And so the song goes...  I looked out this evening and the sky had changed dramatically since last night.  The moon, so tough to make out deep in twilight last night, is now much higher than Venus, which was the higher of the two last night and is quickly heading towards the sun, passing between us and our nearest star a week from Saturday.  So, of course, I had to document the new and revised evening view, first, the wide field view with a normal zoom lens (set to 65mm, .5 second, F/6.3) against my neighbor's palm tree and saguaros, then another showing the now-much-easier to see moon.  The "dark side" of the moon is lit up by earthshine, because when the moon is skinny, the Earth (from the moon's perspective) is full, and even a moderate exposure (1 second with Meade 80mm F/6) shows this light from Earth.  While to many the sky is unchanging, the last 24 hours proves this is definitely not so!

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!

The Best, The Worst, The Memorable!

In an idea spawned by bloggin' buddy Andrew Cooper, as the year ends, it is time to look back on the memorable images of the year appearing on these pages.  While not presented in chronological order, dates referenced will allow you to search out the original posts for more information if needed.

The major jolt to our normal-way-of-life was Melinda's diagnosis of small-cell lung cancer in August.  She went from biopsy on Tuesday, meeting the oncologist Thursday, and admitted to UMC for chemo that night!  Posts from 24 August show her as an inpatient at UMC getting her first round of chemo.  Since she works a couple floors above at the NICU, she had a constant queue of visitors, especially at shift change!

The news has been good.  She made it through 6
cycles of 3 week duration, finishing on 11 December. They make a big deal of small steps - on the completion of her last chemo, the nurses all gathered at bedside for an emotional bubble-blowing salute!

Even with all the seriousness of the medical
news, it seems like we travelled a lot!  A springtime trip to speak at the Southern Star astronomy event in North Carolina allowed us to visit family in South Carolina.  At right, niece Shannon wrestles with a tree on the grounds of the Biltmore Estate (18 April), and on a walk along the Congaree River in Columbia (27 April) revealed a multitude of minnows evidently beloved by egrets fishing in the shallows...

The Grand Canyon Star Party, which I organized
for 18 years before retiring, is still a must-do event on our annual calendar.  Showing pristine skies to summer tourists just can't be beat.  This year I carried a scope to the edge of the Canyon a few times, recording a mule train on the South Kaibab Trail at left (15 June).  The same post also showed a nice display of banded airglow visible in a wide shot to the north.

I'm always looking for the best way to show the
star of the Grand Canyon Star Party show - the rising Summer Milky Way.  The dark skies show it off to best advantage - we've had some folks mistake it for incoming rain clouds!  The shot at left is a 1 minute exposure with an 8mm fisheye shot showing the arch of our galaxy's profile over the red lights of the star party's parking lot.  At right, walking back from the rim, I paused to catch the center of the galaxy over the scrub trees growing at Canyon's edge (12 June).

While we waited for the "Comet of the Century",
comet ISON, which became a non-event when it disintegrated in its close pass to the sun on Thanksgiving, we got lots of practice on comet PanSTARRS (C/2011 L4).  We heard good reports of its visibility from the southern hemisphere before it popped above our horizon in March.  My first spotting was on 10 March, but 2 days later, appeared in conjunction with a crescent moon over Kitt Peak (posted 13 March).  Besides the 3-way alignment of comet, moon and Observatory, a 4th object is little reported - gas giant planet Uranus is just below the comet in the left shot.  The right image makes the green-tinged planet pop out a little better in the closeup.

And PanSTARRS wasn't done with the show!  While never a visual spectacle, it was a nice binocular and telescopic comet.  A couple months after the above appearance, the Earth passed through the comet's orbital plane, making another feature visible - an anti-tail!  Normally the tail is pushed outwards by solar wind, but when crossing the orbital plane, dust and gas trailing behind can sometimes appear by perspective to point towards the sun - thus the anti-tail.  At left on 19 May, on the C-14 plus Hyperstar the anti-tail appears as a spike towards the left, the real tail points to upper right.  On 30 May, as it passed Polaris, as a proof-of-concept, I used a tripod-mounted (untracking)camera to stack 15 one-minute exposures as it passed the Little Dipper.  Amazingly, it is almost all anti-tail!

Sad news reached us as Melinda was finishing her cycle 5 of chemo on 20 November.  Her older sister Susan died of an apparent heart attack overnight.  Ironically, she had been diagnosed with non-small-cell lung cancer within days of Melinda's diagnosis and had been responding well to treatments.  The image at right was taken during happier times at our wedding in June of 2008, Susan at right.

With the green of Illinois revealed in the last
image, we continue to trek to our place there every couple months.  While we generally don't do any astronomy there, an entertaining alternate activity is searching for prey with the macro lens.  On 2 August I posted about the bizarre insect at left, a two-spot tree-hopper, which have apparently evolved to resemble dead leaf stems to avoid being eaten!  On 19 October, I loved the raindrops on the oak leaf acting as little magnifying glasses...

On 14 May were some closeups of the wild flowers in our "native" lawn.  At right is a stereo image of the trillium flower.  This is a "cross-eyed" view - cross your eyes slightly to look at the right image with your left eye and vice-versa.  You should see 3 images, the center one showing depth.  And on 30 October, I was out on a frosty morning with the macro to observe some tubular frost crystals that morning...

In our frequent flights to the Midwest, we just recently started taking the early-morning flight that gets us in at noon instead of much later, usually after dark.  Of course, with full sun the whole time, and now that cameras are "approved electronic devices" that can stay on the entire flight, pictures of flights are more fun to take.  On 30 November, one of my favorites of the year was a newly-frozen slough off the Illinois River.  The wind had blown ice or snow to create interesting clear spots on the surface.  A few minutes later, as we banked to turn around, a bird's eye view of the Chicago skyline presented itself.

Kitt Peak National Observatory was featured in a
lot of posts.  A job there is what originally brought me to Tucson, and I still work there on a part-time basis in their public programs, but my love of astronomy and observing makes it a destination for me.  We bookended the entire year with sunset alignments involving the Observatory.  On 18 December, from the Mount Lemmon highway, we watched the sun silhouette the observatory, then the clouds provided a spectacular sunset for desert!

And way back on 16 January, while watching yet another sunset over the Observatory, we marveled at an amazing display of observatory domes casting shadows on the hazy air just after the sun dipped below the horizon.  Other times during the year, Kitt Peak featured prominently.  On 20 September, we trekked up the road to take time-lapse of datura flowers opening in the twilight almost in the shadow of the moon-lit domes.

On 25 April, on a night when it was almost too
windy for the domes to be open, camera and I survived buffeting to make a time-lapse of Omega Centauri and a pair of bright galaxies rising past the "vintage" 2.1 meter telescope.  A few months later, on a rare clear night during the monsoon rainy season, we again shot the 2.1 meter against the Summer Milky Way as the last rays of the setting moon died out.

A few nights previously (9 August) I had also
gone up to shoot some star fields as well as capturing an Iridium flare cross a Milky Way field with a telephoto lens.  Flat shiny antennae briefly shine the sun down to your location, and this "flare" also passed some deep-sky objects.  A month and a half later (30 September) at an astronomy club "Star-B-Que", I shot a 9-frame mosaic of the Milky Way center with diffuse airglow, mostly as a test for the Microsoft "ICE" mosaic assembling software, which it excels at!

While not astronomical, at the same Star-B-Que (posted 29 September) we saved a little lizard that had managed to get stuck in a short length of hose.  How many engineers does it take to free a lizard?  In the remote location, the one with a variety of tools won...  This is the before picture...

At another observatory about 100 air miles away,
we snagged invites to the LBT employee's picnic on Mount Graham (11 October).  Working at the Mirror Lab, we polished the nearly 30 foot (8.4 meter) twin mirrors for this telescope.  At left is a mosaic of just one of the pair of scopes, in this case, the Gregorian secondary and tertiary are swung out of the way, and a prime-focus camera installed.  A month later (9 November), from the valley floor below, we watched the first run of ARGOS, the laser beams help correct for atmospheric turbulence.

More recently we reconnected with our niece and nephew Kathy and Rick (9 December).  They had been estranged from Melinda's sister Susan (their mother) and as a result, our family.  Between Melinda's cancer diagnosis and Susan's death, we've reconnected with them, which is about the highlight of the Fall!

In the potpourri section, I talked a little about my
"little" binoculars that are fun for both daytime and night time viewing (2 February).  Made by Nikko during WWII, they are spectacular in use at the edge of the Canyon... And interestingly, there was a BHS meeting in Tucson (Binocular History Society), where we had a couple days of talks and a tour of the optics museum at the Optical Sciences Center.  Shown here are 19th century opera glasses, mostly French and European (22 February).

In the "strange" categories, there was the image
of moiré fringes at a McDonald's in Omaha (1 August).  The screen patterns of non-uniform hole spacing created the  pattern seen from inside the restaurant.  And I checked out the operation of my IR modified camera before sending it off for a friend to use for the summer on 1 June.

We made a couple trips to Whitewater Draw to observe cranes and whatever else was wintering there.  On 7 February I lugged my William Optics APO to get some closeup portraits of sandhill cranes.  The depth of field is so shallow that the rear one a couple feet back is out of focus.  On another trip with our visiting friend Carolyn, I used the on-camera flash to capture a great blue heron fishing in near-total darkness.  I was after the cats-eye reflection from its eyes, but also got focused lines of light across its body - waves in the water concentrating the flash.

Finally, from one of our last posts (28 December) an "omega" sunrise from our Christmas visit to Puerto Penasco.  The omega shape (named for the Greek letter Ω which resembles the outline of the disk) is caused by an inferior mirage (warm air near the water next to cooler air above).  The lower section next to the sea is a squashed, inverted image of the lower disk of the sun.  The apparent waves on the water are also a magnified aspect of the mirage...




It was a great year, one of contrasts certainly.  As this one draws to a close, we have optimism regarding Melinda's health, and look forward to getting back to something resembling a normal life!  All we can do is do what we can, and hope the best to all of our readers, wherever you may be.  Do keep in touch, and hopefully I'll be able to continue to entertain you with some aspects of our lives here on the blog.  Happy New Year!