Invasion of the Crane Flies!

It started a couple weeks ago - it seemed as though one of the plagues of Egypt had descended as swarms of mosquitos over 2 inches long arrived! Not only was Melinda freaking out, but even the cats were chasing the few that sneaked into the house. The local paper had a short article with an identification - they were Crane Flies, a harmless insect that appears in wet years. Since we've had a moist Winter and Spring, there you go! They certainly don't bite, and there is some discussions as whether or not they even eat during their 2 week life span.

But even though they are harmless, having these mosquito-looking bombers flying around your head sends you swatting...  Of course, I grabbed my macro lens and went a-hunting.  Fortunately they stop and rest occasionally.  At left is a shot showing the entire insect at our front door under our entry light.  The on-camera flash was used for illumination in all the images.  With the macro lens, I moved in near the closest-focus that resolved its compound eye at right.

One of the first images I took of the flies was through our sliding glass rear door. Viewing it from below at left, I noticed something interesting right away - it had a pair of stalks coming out of its abdomen near the wings, with little balls on them. They reminded me of the long poles that tightrope walkers use to maintain their balance. While the Wiki site above didn't identify the appendages, another site talking about crane flies in Texas identified them as halteres, which vibrate while in flight to provide a balance and guidance system - just what my first thoughts had been! In both this image and another on the front door from above (at right), they are quite apparent.

The wings are quite spectacular in close-up. They are gossamer-thin, almost transparent, yet have a stiffening structure embedded to strengthen them. They seem quite the marvel of engineering! While the adult insects only live a couple weeks at most, they do take a beating - note the wing close-up at left, which has suffered a puncture (marked with an arrow). Almost all careful wing examinations in my images showed similar tears and rips.

So they will be gone soon enough, but one of my nightly chores is still to dispose of the 6 or 8 that have managed to get into the house and gather around the lights in the kitchen and adjacent to the bed.

Change in Plans...

Time to bring you up to date on Melinda's cancer treatments... We saw the oncologist today, and went over the PET scan she had done earlier in the week. This is the gold standard in monitoring her small-cell lung cancer and tracking the progress of her chemo treatments. The news is that since her last PET scan, the spots she had have gotten slightly larger, and there are now more of them. Her previous scan told us her last chemo combo had stopped working, and now this one indicates that the treatments she has gotten the last couple months haven't been effective either. So another change in plans is called for...

Our oncologist recommends joining a study on TH-302, a hypoxia-activated prodrug. This drug is inert when administered, and converted to an active form through a normal metabolic process, in this case, where oxygen levels are low. The theory is that cancer tumors rapidly outgrow their blood and oxygen supply, and these areas would locally activate the drug into cytotoxins which would kill the cancer cells.  Sounds great on paper!  There are currently 6 patients in the study under our oncologist's care, at least 4 for more than 6 months, one for nearly a year, so it is effective in most of these cases.  PET scans are done every 2 cycles (months), so if the process doesn't work or loses effectiveness, they are pulled from the study.

Even though the drug is considered "inert" when administered, there is a page-long list of potential side effects besides those normally seen in chemo warnings.  The worst we see listed is a skin toxicity, both from the inside and if it leaks on the outside of your skin.  There are also clotting and kidney issues, but Melinda is already on blood thinners and they are quite careful in their blood monitoring. 

We need 3 weeks from her previous chemo to start, so have 2 weeks to wait - about what it will take to get the insurance company up to speed on all this.  Generally the study pays for expenses not covered by insurance.  And if this course of action is ineffective, our oncologist already has a fallback set of drugs to try next.  We'll let you know of progress or changes...

Keeping Busy...

One of the joys of wide-angle astronomical imaging is that once the camera, tracking device and intervalometer start their work, they are quite happy running unattended. This leaves me to sit and watch the sky wheeling overhead, usually with mouth open in awe at the naked-eye view of a dark sky. Or if I had a van full of gear, I could set up a scope for viewing, but I'm normally not that organized. The other night, while imaging the "ghost comet" and current Comet Lovejoy, I had another impromptu experiment to try...

This is not an original idea - I most recently saw it on Optics Picture of the Day - an always interesting site on atmospheric phenomena, in a recent post on "Time Varying Lights". But I've seen this done even earlier. Imagine hand-holding a telephoto shot of a star for a several second exposure. The results can be interesting, as shown in the link and also here at left.  The star Canopus, only a few degrees off the southern horizon, was twinkling moderately, and in its long path through the atmosphere, different colors are refracted differently, resulting in a constantly-changing, almost psychedelic light show. The short time exposure, with the hand-held wiggles added record the changing intensity and colors. I braced myself against the open door of the van to provide a little extra "bounciness" to the image. I suspect that I could have done a better job of hand-holding otherwise. If you use an image-stabilized lens, make sure you turn that feature off! These shots were taken with the Canon 70-200 lens set to the maximum.

Another 30 degrees higher, Sirius, only a little brighter than Canopus, was visible, but the much-less air path to me showed much less scintillation and color effects. Generally astronomers avoid observing near the horizon for this very reason - the atmosphere is generally a lot steadier above 30 degrees or so off the horizon. The only exception are for objects that don't get that high, like comets that set shortly after sunset, or objects that skim the southern horizon and don't rise higher...


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By this time, the planet Venus was getting low in the west, and was displaying a nice warm orange tint. I was wondering if the same color effects could be seen with the planet's disk. Venus was actually considerably lower than Canopus, and as a result, the atmosphere had already absorbed much of the blue part of the spectrum. The color ranges from greenish into red. In addition, in comparing it to Canopus, the scintillation, the variability of the brightness was lessened by the disk of Venus, even though small. Twinkling affects the point-sources of stars much more than a planetary disk.

So of course, I had to do another planet, perhaps higher in the sky. Jupiter was conveniently placed only about 15 degrees from the zenith. Even though the zoom setting and exposure didn't vary much between objects, Jupiter displays enough of a disk that it is easily seen in the widened trace of the image. So high in the sky you would expect a minimum of color variation, and also of brightness variation. Sure enough, the only place the trace dims is when the camera/lens was moving faster.

This was a fun little 10 minute project to do while my other camera was busy exposing. Would I do it again - absolutely! Perhaps even a little more focal length would show scintillation and color even better. I've got a little 80mm Meade scope that might be perfect! Go ahead and try it!

A Couple Hours of Darkness...

Since the full moon last week, I've been waiting patiently for clear skies, and enough dark time between twilight and moonrise to get in some exposures of a few objects. Sunday seemed to be a perfect afternoon - there were some clouds well east of Tucson, and with moonrise scheduled for about 9:15, I had almost 2 hours of dark time. I loaded up the van with a couple cameras, tracking mounts, and a case of lenses towards Kitt Peak. I set up along the mountain road just past milepost 8 at about 5,500 feet elevation. Some scattered high cirrus appeared right at sunset, but it was a lot calmer than the gale from last time!

My first target of the night, shortly after it got dark, was the continuing planetary grouping in the west. As mentioned in my last post from town, Venus and Mars in the west are currently serving as guideposts to locate Uranus in binoculars between them. I was setting up a 135mm lens for my first primary object, so used it to barely fit the scene in that telephoto. I stopped the lens down to F/5.6 to give a nice diffraction pattern around Venus, and even Mars shows one at the bottom. Uranus is between them, and even if you don't know which of the points of light it is, the greenish tint guides you to it in the image. I provide the labeled version at right. In a few more days it will drop below Mars (Mars is moving away from the sun faster than Uranus), so do check it out soon!

As it moved towards darkness, I was able to align the Polarie tracker on Polaris and line up on my first target.  Discovered barely 3 weeks ago, Comet SOHO C/2015 D1 is/was a sungrazing comet.  SOHO, a spacecraft designed to observe the near-sun environment has also discovered 2,875 comets, including C/2015 D1.  After passing 2.6 million miles from the blistering Sun's surface, astronomers started watching for it in the night-time sky, but evidently the nucleus disintegrated - all that is visible is a remnant tail!

Never having seen a "ghost comet" before, I was hoping it would last long enough that I could try capturing it, so that was the first object on my list. Fortunately, a couple websites like that last link provided a map of where to look, so started exposing with the Canon XSi and my ole' reliable Nikon 135 lens set to F/4. I wasn't expecting to see it on the screen - I suspected that the power of stacking images would be needed to be able to see something like this. Sure enough, nothing detected, but when my lucky 13 exposures were stacked at home later (22 minutes total exposure), out popped a little Cheshire Cat mustache! Shown at left is the full frame of the 135mm field and APS sensor, the remnants of Comet SOHO is bottom center. Unfortunately, the comet was on the northern edge of the Zodiacal Light, so there is a nice gradient across the field that I'm not really interested in removing as it is real...

Doing a little cropping reduced the effect of the gradient and lets the comet stand out a bit more. Shown at left is the cropped view of the comet among the stars of Pisces. And I've done the work for you in identifying nearby stars, and even a galaxy in the field of the telephoto lens in the labeled version at right. I had the camera oriented square to the horizon, so north is towards the 2 o'clock position in these views. I've not quite recorded anything like this before, and I think it is quite amazing! If there is another chance of getting out in the next 10 days or so, I'd definitely go after it again!

To round out the night, another bright comet is still around - old reliable Lovejoy C/2014 Q2. I've posted a few times, my favorite was when I shot it passing the Pleiades when I was fresh out of the hospital with bronchitis in January. Now on the opposite side of the sky when it first moved above our southern horizon, it is up in Cassiopeia, back in the Milky Way again. It was competing a little with the skyglow with Phoenix from my location, but it is a shadow of its former self. While obvious in binoculars, try as I might I just couldn't quite make it out naked eye. But is it in a beautiful field with lots of open star clusters and even scattered dark nebula. The bright star to the comets right is Delta Cass, Arabic name Ruchbah. The image at left is only 12 minutes of stacked exposures, and stretched enough that I can almost imagine the tail stretching to the top of the frame.

Cropping the frame again allows more detail, showing ultimately how sharp the film-era Nikon lens is, and how well the Polarie tracks for the 2 minute long exposures. The exposure at left is shown at full camera resolution (no downsizing for the blog). Comet Lovejoy is passing a pair of star clusters here, the bigger one being a popular visual target. With the pair of bright stars involved in the edge for eyes, it is sometimes called the Owl Cluster. Don't see it? Excuse my photoshop drawing of an owl, but may jog your brain into seeing a bird - though my sketch looks more like a bat. Definitely needed more exposure, but moonrise was imminent, and I promised Melinda I'd be home shortly after 10pm - it was a school night, after all! But by recording these two comets, I was a happy camper!

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.