The Continuing Conjunction

The last couple weeks, I've been posting about the approaching planetary conjunction, then close approach while in Mexico.  With so many parties involved (Venus, Mars, Uranus), the conjunction continues as their motions reposition them in the sky.  Tonight I took a break from TV viewing and shot another perspective.  Mars' slower motion can't keep up with Venus' sprint away from the sun, so is now far below Venus.  And much more distant Uranus, 10 degrees above Venus just 10 days ago, was passed yesterday and is now below.  The shot at left shows it in a 4 second exposure with an 85mmm lens against my neighbor's palm trees.  I'm hoping the palm fronds make our friends reading from colder northern and eastern parts of the country feel a little warmer.

A few of you might well ask how I keep track of where things are.  Well, certainly the brighter planets have a characteristic "look", and they move slowly enough that from week-to-week or even month-to-month they can easily be tracked.  Uranus and Neptune I don't even try to keep track of, and I need to look up their position when seeking them.  Fortunately, there are tools!  The most helpful one I use is the sky map feature on "heavens-above".  After entering your location on the earth, a full-sky map can be generated.  When clicking on an area of interest, an enlarged image such as shown at left appears, with the date and time set to whenever you want or anticipate making an observation.  With this as a guide, Uranus was simple to pick out of the nearly equally-bright background stars.

Of course, this is when I ask you to spot the 4th planet in the top images in the post.  Before you squint too hard, you should know the palm trees are on planet Earth, and should clearly count when taking a multiple-planet conjunction image!

Mexico Sunsets!

Our 900th post! Who knew we'd get this far when we started 6+ years ago, and that I'd have this much to blather about, but it has all been fun, and I hope you are enjoying our little corner of the Interwebs!

I was thinking I'd milked all the posts from our recent Mexico trip save for this last one, but once I started looking at some of the mosaics taken from Margie's house, I knew it was a post. We've posted some great sunsets before, and even theorized what it is about Arizona sunsets, but as this last trip to Puerto Peñasco  attests, we've got little over Mexico - and they have beaches to put in the foreground! It started with my first beach visit an hour or so after our arrival on Saturday. My goal was to photograph the Venus/Mars alignment, but clouds conspired to make me sit through a spectacular color show. A single shot appeared in that post, but didn't do it justice. At left here is a 9-frame (!) panorama of the sunset, covering nearly 90 degrees of sunset colors. Note particularly there are NO breaks in the wave action or clouds. The secret, if there is one, is that I shot as fast as the XSi would (about 3 frames/second), while panning slowly. The 200th of a second exposures froze the motion fine, but the main thing is that it went together pretty seamlessly.  I really like the subtle colors at far left in the image.  A few minutes later the image at right was taken, all these with the kit lens, a 17-85mm zoom lens, but zoomed in for a single shot.  Be sure to note the distant mountains below the sunset which are across the Sea of Cortez on Baja.

The next evening, I was set up on Margie's roof, an astronomy deck, so to speak. The main imaging instrument was the William Optics (WO) 110mm diameter APO, F/7, so 770mm focal length - a very strong telephoto! The image at left shows the disk of the sun. With my new observing position the sun set directly behind the peaks across the Sea of Cortez. These highest peaks on Baja are part of the Sierra de San Pedro Martir, the tallest peak being Picacho del Diablo (chair of the devil) which at nearly 10,200 feet is the highest point on the Baja peninsula. Interestingly, we'll be building a 6.5 meter telescope mirror at work to be placed atop that mountain. The observatory is already in place with a 2.1 meter telescope, about 5 miles NW and 1,000 feet below the peaks shown here. I was hoping to get a twilight profile of the mountain profile, but the clouds chose not to cooperate (don't forget we had a major storm system moving west a couple hundred miles to our north). However, using the 700mm telescope, I took a 5 frame (shot vertically) mosaic that showed a very nice display of crepuscular rays!  The double-peak of the mountains is at left (barely visible), and is likely responsible for the wide shadow cast into the sky at left.  Note that in compositing these shots, the few seconds between frames resulted in non-perfect alignment of the sea, though the clouds (which software likely used to align) are pretty good. The clouds likely were moving pretty fast, so aligning them mis-aligned the sea surface.

This Sunday night sunset was spectacular too, though not much a field could be photographed with a 700mm lens!  Then a small bright section of brilliant color appeared, and I shot a few frames with the telescope.  Shown at left here is the full-frame with the telescope.  And while in the normal course of cropping and manipulating the images for the blog I usually adjust the brightness, contrast and sometimes saturation and sharpness, this image is absolutely unadjusted except for downsizing for the blog.  These colors are straight out of the camera!

Finally on Monday night, our last night, did we have just an ordinary sunset.  Clouds blocked the horizon, so no mountain shots.  But I did have the camera on the WO scope again in case anything appeared.  I did notice that the seeing was quite good, and looking far out to sea, noticed a shrimping boat or two as specks near the horizon.  Now Margie's house is up on a hill and we were on the top deck, so a good 30 meters above sea level, so I didn't expect to see any curved-Earth effects, but being that the boats were a good 5 miles or more out, I was amazed at the resolution - clicking on this full-resolution image, you can see birds lining the rigging, and many details on-board.  I've never looked for shipping before, but might have to add it to the list of observations to look for while we're there!

Spot The Controversy?

While driving around Puerto Peñasco last week with our friend Margie, she had us stop at an art gallery where she was having something framed. Turns out it was this ancient Navajo rug, where the artisan made her the frame of saguaro cactus ribs. She thought the use of the saguaro materials seemed appropriate. While the swastika became an emblem of Nazi evil during WWII, it has been a symbol of luck and well-being back to Neolithic times, at least 12,000 years throughout the world! It was also a common Native American motif, appearing commonly in weaving and jewelry.  To the Navajo it represents the whirling log, a sacred image used in healing rituals. In another blog post I found, it was a common symbol all around Arizona in Indian country, used in road signage, postcards, and public signs. This same link also mentions the symbol's whirling image denotes a rotating star field, and I've seen an astronomy text that denotes the crooked swastika arms to the crooked handle of the Big Dipper represented at different times (of course, I can't find the reference at the moment). When the U.S. entered the war in Europe, Native American tribes renounced the symbol and pledged not to use it in their artwork. As a result, Margie's rug would definitely be pre-WWII, likely '30s or earlier. So no, the whirling log design is NOT the controversial part here...

No, what she was afraid of, was that in bringing it back into the United States, it would be confiscated because it was constructed of saguaro - a protected species in the States. So the fact that it is made of restricted material is the issue.  In looking around the Interwebs, sure enough, live plants are strictly protected, and can't be moved or cut down without a permit. But it does not appear to be illegal to build a frame from saguaro ribs, though there are limits to collecting - according to an Arizona BLM website, ribs can be collected for personal use from a "down and dead" saguaro, but your annual allotment is what you can carry in one trip back to your car!

Last I heard was that she made it safely home, and didn't mention the rug, so assume it also made it safely to her U.S. residence just fine.

Tides, Pelicans!

Growing up in the Midwest, and then living over half my life in Arizona, the shoreline is still an amazing place to me. The trip to Puerto Peñasco especially is interesting as the desert doesn't change much until you get about 10 miles from the shore when it suddenly goes from desolate desert to desolate desert mixed with beach sand... Oh yea - and there is the 4,000 foot tall volcano complex we pass on the way too, the Pinacates, that stand out too. But anyway, once on the shoreline, the blue of the sea contrasting with the pale sand just hurts your eyes it is so pure!

And since the place is so alien, I'm still amazed by simple things. Puerto Peñasco has some of the largest tidal swings in the world, interestingly enough... While down at the southern tip of Baja the tidal change is something less than 1 meter, like the little waves in a bath sloshing up over the end of the tub, tides can move up to 7 meters at the end of the Sea of Cortez near Rocky Point! We always seem to visit near new or full moon, so the tidal swings are generally near their maximum. The photo at left was taken 5pm Sunday, at high tide. You can see a woman climbing up the shore, crossing the high tide mark left the night before, helped with a strong southerly wind. At right is the same vantage point the next morning at 11am, low tide. This was only a 4 meter range, but with the 150 meters of beach exposed, you can see how far out it can go if that vertical range is almost doubled. One of my early time lapse clips was of the tide coming in, blog post from 4.5 years ago is here, and the Youtube video is here!

Perhaps helped by the steady winds blowing strongly during our entire stay, the brown pelicans were a constant presence drifting over. I've seen them gliding in long lines seemingly inches off the water, a risky proposition with the blustery, rough sea this time. I've also seen them fishing in large groups, soaring almost motionless, then tucking wings to dive underwater, often hoisting a large fish down their throat when they surface. But this time they were conservatively high, nowhere near the water, as they soared by the dozens, if not hundreds in small groups, perhaps headed home after hanging out by the shrimp boat docks.

On Monday afternoon, our last full day in Mexico, we headed into town for some sightseeing. For no particular reason, I took along the 300mm lens in case anything interesting came up. We went in to the Malecon, the sea wall and walkway along the bay in Rocky Point. Comfortably seated, the pelicans flew by at head height or below us, so I fetched the lens and monopod to try shooting them. Thanks to the marvels of autofocus and image stabilization, it was almost like shooting fish in a barrel to get close ups as they paraded by. Both of these pictures might be the same bird, the frame at right taken a second or two past the left image.  Like I warned you, simple stuff, but still fascinating!  I've got lots more, so stay tuned!

Road Trip And More Alignments!

After the sad passing of Pixel, and with no medical appointments for a few days, we decided to hit the nearest beach to Tucson and visit our friend Margie in Puerto Peñasco, Mexico last weekend. The 220 miles takes less than 5 hours with a couple stops for snacks and bathroom breaks, and the beach and Sea of Cortez is a nice break from the dry desert of Arizona. 

You may recall from my post way last week that in the western sky there was a very nice alignment of Mars, Venus and the Moon. That was on Friday night... Arriving late on Saturday afternoon, I headed down to the shore to catch the sunset and hopefully the next alignment phase.

Suffering from considerable clouds in the above post, I was hoping for better weather. Unfortunately, with a massive Winter weather system stretching across the southern parts of the country, our visit was marred by heavy winds, but variable clouds. The sunset, shown here, was quite spectacular. Of course, the only way to get a spectacular sunset is with clouds, but I'm always hopeful for clear spots... At left is part of a 5-frame mosaic showing the most colorful part of the sunset. The sun actually set behind the highest peaks of the mountains on the Baja peninsula, seen just between the sea and clouds. They are better seen in the nearly-full resolution image at right taken with a longer 100mm lens. Taken about 10 minutes later than the mosaic above, it shows the last light of the "second sunset" as the last bit of sun hit the distant clouds. The mountains, across the Sea of Cortez, are about 130 miles away.

The clouds played havoc a bit with imaging the alignment. First nearly the entire western sky was nearly hidden, but eventually they moved to the east, exposing first the planets, at their closest tonight, and the moon a little later... At left is the close pairing of Venus and Mars in the dim twilight (a 10 second exposure, taken 45 minutes after the sunset pics), with the Moon still partly hidden in clouds. Clicking on the full-size image shows there are lots of stars visible, so at right I've made an annotated version identifying the nearest objects to the pair. Note also that in the nearly 50 minutes since the twilight picture above, the tide was going out and is exposing the rocky bottom of my beachside location! A shrimp boat is also seen as a streak as it heads to port in the 10 second exposure.

What I really wanted to get was the 4th object in the solar system alignment! As shown in my Zodiacal Light post a week and a half ago, planet Uranus should be in the mix too! And sure enough, it was right next to the Moon. I had given up on catching it from the beach, and I was late for dinner - the girls were likely wondering where I was since I had left a good 90 minutes before. Just about the time I reached Margie's, the clouds finally cleared the Moon, and I took the image at left with kit lens and the on-camera flash for a bit of illumination on the palm tree across from Margie's house. The 6 second exposure shows the primary planetary pair and over-exposed moon, but right below it, the little greenish dot is the planet Uranus - a 4-way conjunction! I've included another annotated version at right to point it out.

We're back in Tucson now, and without internet in Mexico there was no way to post from there.  But I took over 400 images, so suspect I'll have another post or two to show you our Mexico adventure...

Saying Goodbye...

The last 28 days we've lost 2 of our cats, both of them to old age and kidney failure. We provide a good home to a slowly-changing population - regular meals exchanged for a little affection. Most all are strays who somehow know we live at the end of our cul-de-sac. We don't have to go looking for cats - they come looking for us!

Pixel was a young adult who walked up to our house 20 (!) years ago, trading his freedom for a ready food source and home. He didn't get along with the other cats that well, but tolerated us, mostly living in isolation in the garage and "cat proofed" back yard where they are free to roam, safe from cars and predators. Mostly he was just "there", we saw him daily at mealtime, but he spent most of his time on his own. A few years back during one of his regular checkups at the vet, he was down a pound, so they did some bloodwork - kidney issues and high blood pressure, meaning pills and occasionally we'd give him sub-cutaneous fluid, which would make him even less available to us as he would hide from that sort of attention.

One of our summer trips to the Midwest, we took him with us on the plane rather than leave his pills and special care to the cat sitter, and boy, did he bloom! Without the other cats around, he would follow us from room to room, and was more of a trip hazard than anything else. If we were watching TV, he was beside us on the couch.  Until I learned the techniques of "defensive sleeping", with my arms in front of my face, he would sleep 3" in front of me, reaching out with his paw to touch my face every 30 seconds. In other words, he was transformed into the most affectionate cat ever! In Illinois he wasn't allowed outside, but the "new" Pixel was content to hang out with us and gaze upon the lush green of our yard through the safety of our windows, as shown at right.

We had high hopes for his return to Tucson, but alas, with the other cats, we again rarely saw him as he moved back out to the garage. But he didn't forget about us, occasionally sleeping with us again, and in recent years would bless us with his presence again in the living room, letting the newer cats know he was in charge. But in recent months, his appetite slowed, became pickier, was harder to sneak him his pills in the soft treats we used. The weight loss continued till he was a mere shadow of his former athletic self. We brought him in a couple weeks ago and the vet put him on IV fluids for 6 days, his appetite rebounding a little. But at home he refused even the Fancy Feast, surviving on a jar of baby food turkey per day with his meds crushed and hidden within. You could see it was time for that final trip to the vet, and blood tests confirmed the backslide. It was so hard when in a time of clarity he made eye contact with me as if to ask - "we going home soon?" I had no answer for him - not this time...

Hootie appeared a few years after Pixel. Hootie, actually a perversion of Houdini, seemed to be able to come and go over my "cat-proof" fence at will, and generally wake us early in the mornings in our kitchen eating the dry cat food uninvited. I surprised him one morning by closing his escape route, catching this wildcat in midair in my arms wrapped in a towel to bring him to the vet for the required checkup before exposing him to the rest of our group. Once he discovered the canned food and sheltered way of living, he was done with the street, and showed his gratitude to us every day of his life. I swear he thought he was a dog - he was on you as soon as you sat on the couch convinced your lap was his personal space and by the way, you need to pet me now! Off your lap he was an "invisible" cat - almost never saw him eat or drink, but his muscular build kept me from worrying about him. He seemed to nearly live in the litter boxes, though, seemingly a dozen or more times a day, and occasionally had poops that were so stinky they would rouse you out of a sound sleep! Many a time I'd need to get up at 3am to do litter box chores thanks to Hootie...

This went on for a decade and a half without change and suddenly a few weeks ago he didn't bug you for attention, was content to sleep alone, a big change in his behavior. We immediately made a vet appointment - this last month with me fresh out of the hospital. It was when I was tying my shoes that (I now know that) I re-broke 2 ribs and was in agony, we took him to the vet with niece Kathy assisting. A delay at the vet's and it was decided Melinda would pick me up and take me to the ER, while Kathy stayed with Hootie. Little did we know that the vet would declare him deathly ill and we decided to have him put to sleep too. I'm sorry I missed it and also that we had to press Kathy into service to being with him at the end...

Both of our buddies had good long lives, but you always hope they will be with you forever. They are family to us, sharing our homes, our hearts, wanting little, giving so much. Even with our eight cats remaining, we've got holes in our hearts that will take time to refill. Meanwhile there is a shy Persian/tabby mix out front that looks like it needs a friend. There always seems a constant supply of hole-fillers showing up out front...

Alignment of the Spheres...

Back a few thousand years ago, it was thought that all the celestial bodies rotated around the Earth, mounted on transparent nested spheres. Of course, the Earth was in the center, and the stars, that did not move with respect to each other, were on the outer layer. The rest, the sun, moon and planets all had their own sphere in their complicated motion around the sky. Of course, now we know that the Earth and other planets rotate in orbits, locked to the sun by gravity. But no matter, tonight in the western sky 3 of those bodies came into alignment! From our perspective, the planets Venus and Mars appeared right next to the crescent moon. Of course, they are not really close in space - only from our viewpoint.

We've been suffering some cloudy weather lately(I know, with millions of people freezing or under snow, we can't complain about temps in the 70s, so I complain about clouds!). I knew the alignment was coming up, so didn't think there was a chance given the thick layer at sunset, but the sun popped out right as it set, so kept an eye on the west. Fortunately, we had a 5 minute window where it was thin enough to catch the major players! Shown here is a .6 second exposure to partially make up for clouds with a 300mm lens. cropped slightly.

In real life, of course, Mars is nearly all the way across the solar system, about 205 MILLION miles away, while Venus is coming around the sun towards us at 130 million miles, and the moon a mere 225,000 miles.

The show continues - Venus is rising higher from the setting sun, and Mars is diving towards it, so that pair will be even closer tomorrow. Unfortunately the Moon was only in the picture tonight and will be 12 degrees higher tomorrow. But do keep an eye to the west after sunset if snow and low temperatures allow!