NOW It's A Holiday!

Looking at the calendar, it is almost a week past Winter Solstice, long past the normal times I'd try the Kitt Peak solstice alignment.  The pull off along the Mount Lemmon Highway is normally the spot to be about 3 days before and 3 days after solstice for a good alignment, but it isn't an exact science.  Melinda and I were out of town on the normal dates, and to really make it seem like Christmas, I needed the tradition of chasing the alignment!  I also noticed something else to shoot for...  More on that later.

I helped the alignment a little by biasing my position along the pull off so that I was on the far southern edge of the spot along the busy highway.  The image at left shows the spot along a long bend to the left, paved pullout on the outside edge.  The image at right shows my setup this year - the TEC 140 (1,000 mm focal length), and a very sturdy home-built mount and tripod.  Of course, the smashed-in rear of my van is still there too, status still unknown... 

Even though I was pushing the limits of what I knew about the alignment, I was pretty confident I'd still catch it.  I got there in time to set up, let the telescope and optics cool down, and align the field to Kitt Peak National Observatory before the sun came into the field.  I was using a Thousand Oaks Type II photo filter which leaves the image too bright for visual use, but fine for photographic, especially near the horizon.

Finally the disk came into the field and I fine-tuned focus and exposure.  Sure enough, it is almost like I know what I'm doing as the Sun was just south enough to cover the extremes of the Observatory for just a couple seconds.  Taking a picture every 4 seconds, the one before and after the one shown I would call unacceptable...  There were even some nice sunspots showing a little activity!  With the XSi and TEC going on auto, I took a few hand-held shots with Melinda's T1i and a 300mm lens.  The unfiltered shot at right was a 2000th second exposure showing the 4-meter and peak of the mountain bifurcating the remaining disk of the sun.

It is always fun to tarry in putting gear away and looking to see what else can be seen in the twilight.  There are often some projection effects in the shadow of Kitt Peak, though the very clear sky minimized some of these effects, but still, the shadow of the 4-meter can be seen cast into the sky in the image at left.  At right, a transmitter array located atop  one of the peaks of the Tucson Mountains across the Tucson Valley is seen across a much nearer hilltop of the Catalina Mountains, where I was located.

While on the computer earlier in the day, looking up the sun's position to see if I could catch the alignment, I noticed that Venus, now up in the evening sky, was nearly at the same declination (north-south position) as the sun, so would also set behind Kitt Peak about an hour after sunset.  Actually, it was about a quarter of a degree north of the sun, so to help out the alignment again, I moved a couple hundred yards down the road to the "Thimble Peak Viewpoint" to bias my position a little.  Venus is now easily visible shortly after sunset, and re-setup my gear at the new position.  Sure enough, it moved almost into prime position, eventually setting behind the 4-meter telescope.  The left image shows a partially cropped view of Venus still above the observatory, the assemblage at right shows Venus at 10 second intervals setting behind the very peak of the mountain.  If Venus were more properly exposed, it would likely show more colors due to atmospheric dispersion.  Because it is so overexposed, the colors are re-blended into a mostly-white image.

Unfortunately, it was tough to balance exposure of the twilight-backlit observatory and brilliant Venus.  The planet remains very over-exposed, but needed a half-second exposure to catch the remains of twilight.  In addition, Venus, over 120 million miles away, subtends a very small disk.  It would be nice to try again when showing a skinny crescent.  So the opportunity for a "perfect" shot remains!

More Travel...

We've returned to Arizona nearly a week ago. Immediately upon arrival we got caught up in work and the Holiday whirlwind and here it is Christmas Day before getting a chance to blog. We had planned to go to Rocky Point, MX to visit Margie, but Melinda's back was bothering her, so decided to rest at home, so have enjoyed a quiet Christmas with just us and the cats!

Our 10 days in the Midwest was dominated by clouds.  We kind of saw the sun once or twice, but never saw a blue sky. Once taking off from O'Hare for our return, we finally saw blue after ascending above the cloud deck. Kind of a boring flight with only clouds to see and photograph with a stop in Dallas. After a while I started seeing patterns in them, which I guess humans tend to do. But these patterns were of the straight - line structure kind. While posting about fluid dynamics a couple weeks ago, I know little about the movement and dynamics of clouds. I can sort of understand gravity waves and parallel structures, but these patterns seems to be at right angles to each other, which seems weird. The two images shown here are examples, with lines added to illustrate the patterns I see.

Somewhere over what I suspect was Oklahoma, we hit a few gaps in the clouds, and I kept photographing. Of course, the regular readers here know I'm a fan of 3D imaging, so tried a couple taken by 5 - 10 seconds apart, that show some depth between land features and clouds. I like them - hope you do too. These are for cross-eyed viewing which is easiest for me. Cross your eyes slightly so you are looking at the right side of the image with your left eye and vice-versa. It is easiest on the thumbnails, then click on them for the full-size image for more resolution. I particularly like the one at left with the shadow of the cloud being projected onto the haze layer below.

Again, I don't understand the fluid dynamics of clouds, but saw an interesting structure that showed like something welling up from below, then some sort of periodic structure being projected downstream. At left is shown a stereo-pair taken about 15 seconds apart for larger-than-normal baseline, though still not really long enough to show a lot of detail of what is going on. A few minutes later I took another to show a close-up of the upwell section - weird stuff! I was able to take pictures of it for over 8 minutes - if we were going 500 mph that means it was visible for nearly 70 miles! I'm willing to field suggestions...

A little bit before landing we turned nearly south, and while I never saw the plane's shadow part of the glory like the trip up to Chicago, I was able to see enough of the ring to draw a circle on it and estimate the diameter, thus calculate the droplet size from the calculations from Les Cowley's page on corona and glory calculations. Up near Chicago I was able to measure droplet size of 19 microns diameter. Down here in Texas, the droplet size gotta be just a little bigger - I measured the diameter of the ring at 5.3 degrees, indicating a droplet size of 23.5 microns. Doing the calculations on a pair of images, they agreed to a couple percent... Shown here is an image with the saturation upped to ease seeing the rings better.

Another thing I've noticed recently are color bands looking through the Plexiglas windows at certain parts of the sky. I suspected that they were stress birefringence caused by looking at part of the sky that was polarized. We use these properties when inspecting glass for stress concentrations for the mirror castings at work. I remembered I had a polarizing filter in my camera bag, and WOW, the colors really popped out! It is shown at left here. The pattern didn't really change when rotating the linear polarizer, and the colors were still fainly visible w/out the filter, so I think my original theory stands...


One more image to close with. Melinda is still getting chemo treatments for her small-cell lung cancer, just getting a cycle before we came up to Chicago. Of course, an airplane with recycled air, overcrowded with germs from all over, she needed to wear a mask to protect her immune-depressed system. Shown here in full-disguise, she looks non too happy, but put up with it well. Interestingly, to protect from germs, it needs to be replaced every 20 minutes as it loses effectiveness in that timeframe. Fortunately the cancer center is willing to supply us with enough to use for the round trip, and it appears to have worked as we've not caught so much as a sniffle this trip...

Lost And Found!

I take a lot of photos, likely over 10K per year, especially with time lapses and stacking of astronomical images. Most are what I think would make good blog posts, and it is certainly easy to take lots of pictures these days without the cost of film or processing!  At the same time, I find that if I don't get them in the blog queue right away, they get lost under more recent images and get forgotten. 

While walking along the river the other day (we're still in Illinois), a set of IR images I took this summer came to mind.  In infrared wavelengths, water is a good absorber, looking mostly dark in images unless you get a reflection.  The above image shows the Wood effect clearly - very bright vegetation from the trees on the far bank.  But what came to my attention was the light streaks in the water at the bottom.  Turns out the Fox River is very shallow at this point, only about 25cm (10 inches).  What was coming into view was the river equivalent of seaweed or moss, growing in long strings.  Taking longer exposures, it took a couple shots for me to expose long enough for details, shown here at right and left.  It took about 10X the exposure to bring out the white-glow of the underwater plants.  In the shallows the local current carried the sinuous plants downstream, and getting a couple shots with different patterns was easy to do.  It made for interesting patterns, and it is also interesting to see how murkey the water looks due to the water absorbing the IR wavelengths.

Back in August our barrel cactus was in
full bloomin' mode.  While the buds were easy to catch, looking photogenic for several days before popping into flower, by the time I get back from work, they've been open all day and are well-worn from pollinators.  In any case, these pair of images were taken with a macro, with at least 6 frames taken at different focus settings to combine into the final focus-stacked images.  Clicking on the right image you can see how the stigma are wiped clear of pollen on the outward-facing side.

In October, my friend Bob Taylor invited me up for an observing session at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter.  I'd posted many images, but had taken a series of sky exposures that for some reason weren't up to my standards.  However, as a result, one of the highlights of the all-night session, of the Gegenshein clearing the pre-dawn horizon didn't make it into the blog.  Shown here at left, the conical glow in the sky is not from the rising sun, but rather sunlight reflecting off dust from comets and asteroids in the plane of the solar system.  Following the ecliptic path, it shoots right up towards and engulfing Jupiter, the bright object at upper right.  Visible nearly all year long from a dark sky, it is especially visible in the northern hemisphere in the early Fall morning sky and the early Spring evening sky when the ecliptic makes a large angle to the horizon.  And since I don't like unlabeled star fields, I've included an annotated version at right, including the outline of Mount Graham at lower left, an antenna array at bottom center, and the red-lit antennae 5 miles distant at Mount Bigelow.

So I'm glad I re-discovered these images that hadn't appeared here before.  Certainly worthy of blog-inclusion!

Birthday Bootie!

So Melinda and I celebrated my birthday yesterday, which included a surprise or two - it deserves its own post rather than an addendum to the previous entry. We agreed to meet our friend Carolyn for brunch at the Colonial Café (Pumpkin Pancakes!). We had just sat down when our waitress informed us that the person who had been sitting on our table had just bought our meal with a $50 gift card! What a birthday present! This is now the second or third time a stranger has surprised us with picking up our tab, and we've "passed it forward" and done the same, anonymously, of course (more fun that way!). After telling our waitress it was my birthday, I got another $5 off card for the next visit, so we can likely eat again for free with the remnants - how cool is that!

Beloved Melinda, after stating she had to go out and find me a birthday present the evening before (we kid each other about swinging past the convenience store for a car-freshener gift), surprised me with gold astronomical cufflinks! I don't think I've got any dress shirts that take cufflinks, but she has agreed to sew some buttonholes in a couple of my long-sleeve t-shirts so I can wear them! The cutest story is that she bought them shortly after we met - the above-named Carolyn was having an estate sale, liquidating some of the antique collections she and Bob had acquired, and she had only these two left. Interestingly, they are my (Sagittarius) and her (Pisces) signs of the zodiac!  So she has hung on to them for 8 years to give them to me - that woman plans ahead!

We made it out to dinner last night at one of our favorite pizza places here - Giordano's!  Famous for their stuffed-crust pizza, we'd not been there since Summer, so was a birthday-worthy event. We got what has been our increasingly favorite flavor, pepperoni, sausage and mushroom, both of us managing two pieces, assuring I'd have leftovers in a couple nights when Melinda and her nurse buddies have dinner together. It was pretty darn tasty - just what the occasion warranted. We even got home in time to relax in front of Rachel Maddow, as Melinda refers to her, "Dean's lesbian girlfriend", since I seldom miss her daily show. Anyway, a great birthday, now committed to the blog for all time...

Birthday Boi!

Sometimes during our between-holiday visit to the Midwest (nice to miss both Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday travel madness), we overlap on my birthday, which is today!  Sixty One times around the ole' sun.  To yank people's chain and provide a teachable moment, I used to provide it in Saturnian years.  Fifteen years ago that made me about 1.5 Saturnian years.  Of course, not having kept up with the math, I missed my 2nd Saturnian birthday, which would have been last year!


Anyway, we also spend a day in Iowa visiting my family each visit, so Sunday the Ketelsen kids got together at a popular pizza buffet place - Pizza Ranch!  We like it because we can also schedule a private room and they don't rush us out when we hang out a couple hours visiting.  Interestingly, Sunday was also my mother's birthday.  She would have been 81 (died in '88 at the age of 54...).  But all the brothers and sisters were there, save baby Sheri, now living in Texas.  My niece Marsha now manages a local bakery and provided an astronomical-themed cake - a great job!  That is her on the right with her nearly senior Uncle Dean.

Not wanting to blow the budget on candles, nor set off the fire alarm or sprinklers, instead of 61 candles, we grouped 6 and 1 candles before lighting to represent the correct number in earth years. I still had the lung power to extinguish them - in fact, Alivia didn't know what she was in for, using her hands to fend off the smoke and sparks from my huff and puff! Great nieces Mya and Alivia later joined Great-Uncle Dean for a portrait at right.

It was nice to catch up with everyone's lives.  At left is nephew Brennan - recently passed his nurses board exam and is now gainfully employed in Davenport in an ICU ward.  Wearing the Schwarzenegger shirt, I had him pop out a bicep, semi-emulating the pose on the shirt.

Whenever you get more than 2 of the brothers and sisters together, there are group portraits going on and for a special occasion like this one, lots of photos were taken.  At right we are gathered around Aunt Velma. In recent years we used to gather out at the farm where she and Uncle Arlo lived. Arlo passed 16 years ago, and Velma finally moved to town a couple years ago. Just this last fall, an illness put her into an assisted-living facility, where she seems content to live. Melinda and I were able to check her out to come join us for dinner and a bit of celebration, and of course, the group picture. Brothers Jim and Brian join me in the back, and Linda and Kathy in the front on either side of Velma.

It was a fun family time, and I have leftover cake for my actual birthday today.  Nothing big planned, just quiet time with my sweetie, perhaps dinner out, and cake in front of Rachel Maddow - what could be better?!

Another Classroom Session From Our Trip!

My bloggin' buddy Ken Spencer and I both love to watch the country slide past our windows while flying.  We're both amazed more people don't watch - on our trip last week to the Midwest, most even had their shades down!  Besides illustrations of fluid dynamics, shown in the last post, it was a classroom in other effects, even though it was cloudy for most of the trip. 

On a trip just over a year ago, I caught my first "subsun", documented in another travel post about this time last year. Les Cowley, who runs the "Optics Picture of the Day", a great website of atmospheric phenomenon, even devoted a page to the image last Summer!  While evidently pretty common, subsuns appear low with the sun high in the sky, so are likely normally unobserved.  This trip, about an hour before our arrival in Chicago, likely somewhere near Kansas City if we kept to our normal route, I spotted one, this time without "subsun-dogs".  It appeared as a very good, though dimmed, image of the sun without much scatter to blur the suns reflection from aligned flat ice crystals.  From my first image to the last, 6 frames were obtained in 90 seconds - the extent of the subsun data collection this trip.

The clouds were dense and constant from central New Mexico to our arrival in O'Hare, and as we banked for final approach, were still above the cloud deck.  I hoped-for and watched, but didn't see the Willis Tower (second-tallest building in the country) poking above the clouds.  We usually have a fine view of the skyline during that final turn.

This time, however, we had an even more interesting view. Now headed west towards O'Hare, and us on the right side of the plane, we were treated to seeing our shadow. If you had been looking, you would have seen a shadow of the plane, yes, but something extra - circular bands - a glory! The photo at left was taken with the camera at full zoom of 85mm focal length, with minimal adjustments of brightness, contrast, and a slight boost of color saturation. I'll let you go to Les Cowley's page about glories to learn more rather than me wave my arms here to explain. Make sure you look at the several pages of illustrations and explanations and other examples. Now what is really cool is that you can infer the water drop size from the diameter of the glory! The subtended diameter is inversely proportional to the droplet diameter. For grins, I took the full-frame image at left, and cranked the color saturation, and made some measurements, shown at right. The sensor size is 24mm long, and the number I've carried in my head from college is that 1 degree for any lens is .01744 X the focal length, in this case, 1.48mm.  Knowing the scale, the red rim of the first ring is 6.5 degrees.  With Les' equation from one of those pages, the droplet size works out to 19 microns - pretty cool!

Two minutes later, we approached the cloud deck and I shot again, this time with the lens set much wider to get in the whole shadow.   Note that the glory indicates where we were sitting, between the wing and the rear-mounted engines near the back of the plane.  As Les points out, every observer sees their own personal glory - the one the pilot sees would be centered on the front tip of the plane...  The calculation of the droplet size should be independent of the lens focal length, so I repeated the calculations on another image with the saturation cranked for this image's 33mm focal length.  This time I got 21 micron diameter droplets, a difference of 10% from the first calculation - good enough for me!  Whether the difference indicates a real change in droplet size, or an uncertainty in the or measurement remains to be seen...

The last science demonstration occurred minutes later as we descended below the clouds.  I saw what looked like a flash of "white smoke", but was actually water vapor condensing in the pressure difference caused by the turbulence between the flaps and ailerons.  The flaps, fully extended, with the ailerons in their neutral position, caused enough of a density change to cause moisture to condense into a stream (arrowed at left).  Again, the world is a science laboratory with much to observe if you only look!

Lessons in Fluid Dynamics!

The other day we again transited the country, flying to Chicago to visit family and friends at "Ketelsen East". Another uneventful trip, with my nose pressed against the window. I saw something today on the Interweb that prompted me to do this post - more on that in a minute.

As sort of an introduction, I've always enjoyed the views from mountaintops. The reasons observatories are built there is that many detrimental effects occur at lower levels. One of the first things you notice, particularly at this time of year when inversion layers form and trap haze and pollutants at lower levels, is that the mountains poke above these layers into clearer air. It wasn't 5 minutes after takeoff that the Whetstone Mountains short of Benson (at left)were seen sticking above the haze trapped from there down to Sierra Vista and the Huachuca Mountains at distant center. In this case, and likely all the others shown here, warm air above traps cooler air (and particulates) near the ground.

Not far across the border in New Mexico, even before we had reached our cruising altitude, I spotted an interesting cloud formation far below us.  Checking times and Google Maps, it appears to be ground-hugging clouds between the Pinos Altos mountains at bottom center and the Black Range at upper left.  Here again, the cooler, moister air appears to be filling the canyons and valleys in the mountains.  It seems amazing that giant cloud formations miles long can form these serpentine shapes following the terrain of the mountains.  It demonstrates the fluid properties of air and the material it carries along.  The right image is a closer view of the left edge of the left frame as we passed over.

I've seen some spectacular time-lapses demonstrating the fluid properties of clouds - "Vancouver City" comes to mind, as does "Island in the Sky".  If you have a few minutes, you REALLY should watch both, in HD, fullscreen, with sound! 

Anyway, all this is a lead-in to the cloud inversion observed at the Grand Canyon 2 days ago (Thursday).  A time-lapse, taken by Michael Quinn for the NPS, compressed 15 minutes of images into a 1 minute video.  Perhaps it is something so familiar to us regulars from the Grand Canyon Star Party looking so unusual that catches our eye, but the fluid properties of the clouds looks so much like waves rushing against a rocky beach. I'm not sure where this was taken, but I've seen some of his other images taken from Mather Point, so it might well have been taken there looking SW towards Yavapai Point, a couple hundred yards from where we set up in June.   No sound on this one, but very fun.  Enjoy!