Panic From The Skies!

My friend Roger and I were visiting buddy Pat in Benson, Arizona last night doing some dark-sky observing from his sky, at least dark compared to downtown Tucson! Pat had stepped into the house to assist wife Betty with a medical procedure when I noticed a brilliant light and expanding white cloud in the western sky. I've seen enough rocket launches from the west coast to know that is what we were seeing. They are particularly spectacular when launched at or shortly after sunset and the vapor trail and exhaust are illuminated by sunlight. In well-dark Arizona it can be an amazing sight!

I was already exposing with one camera on the telescope, so ran for the spare and clumsily set it up on a tripod, fumbled with settings, tried to focus on the distant lights of Benson and aimed to the already dimming cloud. It seemed to take 10 minutes to accomplish all that before my first exposure, showing the amazing expanding vapor cloud. It didn't take many minutes and the email chatter started among astronomers around the state (aren't cell phones amazing - even in our "remote" site!). Most agreed with my assessment, but Melinda at home confirmed later that the public along the west coast had jammed the media wondering what it was. Seeing my first frame above, you might think there was an incoming bomb exploding.

This morning I quickly performed some minimal contrast adjustments and sent them to our TAAA resident missile expert Jim O'Connor. He identified the blue cloud as the likely result of the 1st stage separating and ignition of the second stage. Of the 6 frames I got at approximate 1 minute intervals, frame 3 and 4 show a "puff" that might be the 3rd stage ignition, and the other plume he indicates may be the steering jets for aiming the warhead towards its target.

Finally this afternoon the notice came out: "The unusual light show observed last night from California and outlying areas was the unannounced launch of an unarmed Trident II (D5) submarine launched ballistic missile. The Trident was launched off of the southern California coast by the submarine USS Kentucky." So that's the story - Pat came out a few minutes later, disappointed he missed the whole thing! Below is a short time-lapse of my 6 frames on Youtube:

EDIT:  I was thinking that at 600 miles, we must be about as far from the launch as you could be - but I'd be wrong!  I got a message from some friends observing from near Portal, AZ who saw it (likely another 70 miles further east) and had dinner with a friend tonight who saw it camping from near the AZ/NM border last night.  Looking at Google maps, that is close to the distance from Portal as well - well over 670 miles, depending on the exact launch point!

A Break From Cancer!

Melinda had her latest PET Scan on Monday. It is the gold standard for monitoring the progress of her treatments and how the tumors are responding to the chemo. "Her last one 2 months (2 cycles) ago in early September was scary good - showing a big improvement with the current chemo regimen (Irinotecan).  This after over a year of cycle after cycle of various chemo drugs with her tumors getting larger, more numerous, and more active. It was so good that I was suspicious that the techs had done something wrong, and that was the reason for the September scan showing so much improvement.

So it was with some nervousness that we went into today's oncology appointment to go over the results before this next cycle started. But the news was great! Continued huge improvement - only three tumors still visible, all smaller and less activity! Dr. Garland was hoping to keep things stable (no one talks about "curing" small-cell lung cancer), and she is as shocked as us that the drug is working as well as it is. We heard later from her nurse that Dr. Garland used her previous scan result in a meeting showing the resultant improvements.

Anyway, Dr Garland offered her a chemo break - taking a full cycle (month) off from treatments to let her body recover, and continue the attack on 3 December. We decided to take it - we're hoping to travel over Thanksgiving, so that would put her at full strength other than suffering the effects of her just-finished treatments. It is nice to know that the improvement is real and the side effects she has suffered through is leading to some real progress in beating this. And it will be nice to have a month to skip blood tests, chemo, and the cancer center in general! We're looking forward to 4 weeks of "normal" life!

Star Party!

When talking to "normal people", ie, NOT astronomy nuts, you often get a strange look when talking about "star parties". Most are taken aback, not knowing what you mean. A few think of the idols of the screen as "stars", but that is certainly not what we mean. Generally, a Star Party consists of folks with telescopes or other optical gear (binoculars work too, or even naked eyes!) set up at a location to observe, generally willing to share equipment with others for viewing the sky.

Our friend Dick had put out a call about midweek last week pointing out that good weather was forecast and he had a number of newly acquired scopes to try out. Dick is an optical designer by trade as well as a bit of a connoisseur , purchasing (normally) used equipment, trying them for days or weeks, then selling them back on the market for the same or bargain prices. His specialty is refractive optics - those that use lenses to focus the light for the eyepiece to magnify before going into the eye. Since there isn't really any such thing as a perfect refractive optic (they all have at least miniscule flaws), he ferrets out the details of why a particular design can work well, or more typically, is mediocre or of poor quality.

I've been working on refurbishing a telescope (more on that in a subsequent post), and was about to the point where I wanted to take it to a dark site, but Melinda was up for some social activity, so we attended. My 11.25" Newtonian scope uses a concave mirror to focus light off a smaller secondary mirror to the eyepiece. On this night, it was handy to use the alt-az mount I made for my TEC 140, so pointing was done by shoving it away or towards you, and up or down to find various objects. A couple views of the scope on the mount are shown here.

I had some work to do on it - a final
collimation (alignment) of the optics on a star, after doing a preliminary version with a laser beforehand. With the 17mm eyepiece I used, we got nearly 60X, which was just about perfect for manually moving around the sky with such a largish instrument. Thinking ahead to a blog post, I thought I'd try a selfie with a big, bright object like the Pleiades that was low in the east. Setting up the tripod and camera, I used a delay, ratcheted down flash, and a long exposure (30 seconds) to catch the scene with myself and star cluster. It only took 3 attempts to get the "perfect" image shown at left.

Dick held little interest in reflective optics - not sure he even looked thru my scope, but he had just gotten one of his "babies" back from factory repair. His Meade LS8 is advertised as the perfect scope for newbies as it uses GPS technology and a built-in camera to find its way around the sky and give the user a sky show with no knowledge of where anything is located. After obtaining it used, it never worked satisfactorily, and it spent 4 months getting "fixed". At right, Dick looks at an object that it found. The happy ending is that after failing to find its way around the sky initially, after turning it off and back on, it worked!

The star party was rather under-attended, but the 4 astro-nerds had fun, and we took occasional breaks to go into the house and mingle with the Significant Others. We all got a good look at a couple of 4" diameter F/8 refractors of high quality, and with Dick's tutelage, looked for the indicators that pointed out the flaws in one of them. Thanks to Dick and the other attendees to make it a memorable evening - always fun to be under a clear sky with friends, even with some light pollution!


We didn't stay late - Melinda tires easily and I was anxious to put my camera in place of the eyepiece to take a couple images. But I'd forgotten a key camera adaptor piece, so had to wait till we got home. Set up in the front yard, with the non-tracking mount, the only object I could shoot with more than a few seconds of exposure was the North Star - Polaris, shown here at left in a 30 second exposure. There is a weird artifact in the diffraction pattern on the bright star - I suspect that it is because it is in a tube that is a little small (12" diameter) for the size mirror (11.25"). In addition, I think the coma corrector, which fixes the aberration in fast reflectors, sticks into the beam slightly, so that is the likely cause. But for 30 seconds, in town, most stars are pretty tiny, so I'm pleased. If you click the image for the full-size view, you will see there is even a little trailing in 30 seconds so close to the pole star. Just for fun, I decided to move the scope about 5 degrees south to NGC 188, a star cluster very close to Polaris. Shown at left, note that the same 30 second exposure shows a huge amount of trailing!

The key is to use the tracking mount (that takes a lot more to set up) which allows exposures of unlimited length from a dark sky - sometime soon, I hope!

Modern Ghost Story!

Since Halloween is upon us, I wanted to tell you the story of something that happened today.  Perhaps you can help me explain it, but I can't.  It is certainly spooky  - I'm thinking my "new" van is haunted!

The weather in Tucson has been spectacular - that is except for all the clouds and rain!  But at least it hasn't been in the 90s for over a week!  Today the high was in the low 70s (all temps in F), so was almost cold going to work in short sleeves and shorts, my usual uniform.

Anyway, after work I swung past Sam's Club to get the normal 10 pound bag of candy for trick-or-treaters, and a few other things.  It was nice-enough weather that I likely had the driver's side window down.  There was a storm in the distance that I didn't pay much attention to, in fact, it was starting to sprinkle as I walked into the store.  Not sure if I closed the driver's door window, though...

I was in Sam's for less than 30 minutes, but as I exited, it appeared it rained pretty hard for at least a bit.  Everything was pretty wet.  I got into the van after loading the goods and immediately noticed that the interior of the driver's door was wet, and the seat was so wet that it got my butt wet through the shorts, yet the window was up!  I was thinking that perhaps I'd left the window open and a passing good Samaritan had closed it, but with the power windows and the keys in my pocket, hard to justify that excuse.  Driving in downpours before, I've never seen the door or windows leaking, but it certainly seemed the window MUST have been open during the rainstorm, but was closed on my arrival.  Weird stuff - what do you think?

Large Caliber Entertainment!

Every once in a while, when it isn't to hot out in the desert mornings, a few of the "gang" go out shooting. I've blogged about it before last Fall. Seems a little weird, this mix of ultra-liberals and conservatives gathering to shoot guns, but hey - it's Arizona! Thursdays are generally the days they go out, preferred by one of the doctors, but interestingly, he never goes the Thursdays I can make it... Since Melinda's treatments are normally on Thursdays, we were only able to join in a couple weeks ago on her last chemo break.

Doc Chuck is sort of our motivator to get out, and is always looking for new ways to compete. In the previous post from last year, he had a "dueling tree" that swings around when you hit it. That way you can compete against another shooter and usually the best shot hitting the 4" targets is easily recognized. This time they had a paper target with zones worth various point totals. Six shots and your point total is recorded. Ironically, I volunteered to be first out of the gate with my little .380 and immediately scored a perfect 60! It has little recoil and I seemed to aim better than with my 45.   In the images here, Chuck and Sue take a look at the scatter in her shots, and at right, the collection of guns available for shooting is shown.

Chuck then got the idea from Detective Dan (retired police detective) to shoot as fast as possible, where you got a higher score for both accuracy and speed. Not unexpectedly, police-trained Dan did the best with this method. Chuck thinks he can get a timer from his brother that records the length of time from the first-to-last shot for more accurate timing one of these next sessions.


I happened to take some pictures of the guys shooting and discovered some interesting things. Far be it from me to criticize anyone's style, but the pictures don't lie! At left are a pair of images of Sue shooting her 9mm, one just before firing and the next just afterwards as the cartridge is being ejected. The two images are stacked in Photoshop, and demonstrates the effect of the recoil. Sue has an unusual "lean-back" posture, and also the recoil seems a huge 20 degrees or more. She had a large scatter in her shooting, and corrective action might be in order. Dan, in comparison at right, has the more conventional "lean-in" posture and suffers much less recoil with his .38.


Finally we put the target away and shot a few rounds on the "dueling tree" again. At left, Sue and Sam are shown firing away, and at left Sue and Dan are competing. I did pretty mediocre in this round, but was still glowing from my perfect score on the paper target!

With November comes nearly perfect Fall mornings, and Chuck has dates in mind already. I've warned him we're generally not available Thursdays, so will see if we get out anytime soon, but will look forward to the next trip out...

Another Learning Adventure!

On Thursday after a long day in the Arizona Cancer Center keeping Melinda company for her latest round of chemo, I was ready for a drive just to get out of town. The IV drugs they administer help her with the immediate side effects of the chemo for a few days, so knew she would be ok at home. They make her a little sleepy, so likely she would relax at home, surrounded by cats.

For my adventure, there was a bright moon, so no astronomical imaging of the usual sort, but I'd been keeping my eye on ARGOS from a distance. ARGOS is an instrument on the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) and stands for Advanced Rayleigh guided Ground layer adaptive Optics System. In short, a laser makes an array of guide stars around the field of view and instrumentation partially corrects the distortion caused by turbulence in the atmosphere over an extended field of view. Most large telescope's artificial guide star systems work over a field of view of a few arc-seconds, but ARGOS corrects a field of 4 arc-minutes, a huge improvement. I've blogged about it before - the 18 watt lasers can be seen for many miles, and with post-storm clearing, I was hoping to get another chance to take more images. The image at left shows an shot from 22 miles away that I was hoping to improve on. This image, taken on 8 November, 2013 resulted in a blog post, but the images taken with a 200mm lens at left and the William Optics scope showed some color shifts, and even though I had intended to do a time-lapse, I never attempted it with all the work involved.

So I made the 90 minute drive, arriving just at dark, looking for a site a little closer than that I used before. I quickly found a nice quiet deserted site a little off the paved road. Unfortunately, my first exposure showed that the only cloud in the sky was found hugging the profile of Mount Graham, my target! Shown at left through the 200mm lens, it was pretty close - stars were above the mountain, but residual moisture from the storm left a defiant cloud cap. Staff on the mountain had found the season's first snow the previous day, and I know from my experiences on Kitt Peak that even the humidity that sticks around after the clouds dissipate would likely keep the scope closed. Fortunately, this trip I had the phone number for the console room of the telescope, so could use my cell phone to find out directly what was going on! And the operator Thursday was Geno - who I've worked with occasionally a couple decades ago when he worked at a metrology place here in town. Geno confirmed they were, indeed, in a cloud cap and were unlikely to open anytime soon, because of humidity as above... Oh well, it was such a pleasant evening too!

Well, since I was there, I got out one camera anyway and took a few frames. My first shots of the night provided a learning moment for me! I saw Ursa Minor with Polaris nicely placed so thought I'd take a short exposure of it. After carefully focusing on distant farm lights, I pointed it up to Polaris and took a 30 second exposure. My eureka moment was seeing not pinpoint stars, but little wormy trails. While I had carefully turned off the autofocus feature of the lens so it wouldn't go hunting for focus in the dark, I had NOT turned off the image stabilization (IS). For longish exposures (30 seconds here), the corrective optics get lost and drift, resulting in trailing star images. I corrected the issue and re-exposed, shown at left. The inset is from the exposure with IS turned on and you can see the effect. Also in my sky, the Big Dipper asterism was hugging the horizon, so I took a 2-frame panorama to capture it and Mount Graham. The lights are from local farms and the nearby community of Fort Grant. The Dipper is at left and the cloud-capped Mount Graham is at right. There is an artifact from the vignetting of the two images that result in a darkening in the center...

With the bright moon and little chance of LBT and ARGOS making an appearance anytime soon, I decided to head back to Tucson for an early evening of it. I got back pretty much right at 9pm. The next morning, I got an e-mail from one of the engineers that said that was about the time they were able to open the telescope... Which was ok, because with that late start, taking a couple hours of images would have resulted in a return time well after Midnight. Will try it on another time...

But when searching for the topmost image on my last ARGOS imaging session, I returned to the files taken nearly 2 years ago. I've spent the last day or two going thru them and making the time-lapse I had hoped to. On that trip, Melinda and I recorded about 2 hours of images through my 70-200 zoom set to 200, and also on the William Optics scope, with 770mm of focal length. The former had 1 minute exposures at F/3.5 and the scope needed 2 minute exposures working at F/7. I do not know the details of the program that night, but they apparently were set up on the same part of sky for those hours. Also visible are a number of planes, cars going to and from the mountain, and of course, the LBT can be seen rotating to keep the object in the field. It apparently was tracking something just north of the zenith as the dome was turned north, not south towards us. Since I've got a new telescope with more focal length (the TEC 140), I'm ready to try it again when I get a chance. Enjoy the time-lapse - watch it full screen in HD if you can...

Rainout at the KPNO Fall Star-B-Que...

Last night was our Fall, 2015 Star-B-Que at the Kitt Peak picnic area, held for about 20 years now. Last night's reminded me of the very first one - Kitt Peak had been very paranoid about anyone outside astronomers being on the mountain after the death of Marc Aaronson in 1987. It was nearly a decade later that we convinced them that the picnic area with its open-air pavilion, flush bathrooms and 6500 foot elevation was the perfect place for a "Star-B-Que", a cookout and star party, and it has happened ever since. That very first one, where we were permitted only 25 attendees, filled up with those wanting to join in, and even though the weather was questionable, 23 still showed! I recall it rained so hard that we had a hard time keeping the charcoal grill going! But it was a memorable time, as is nearly every trip up that mountain.

Again, the weather was questionable, but there were lots of blue skies and sun on the 60 mile drive to the SW of Tucson. As organizer, I had to arrive a little early, head to the visitor center and collect the keys to the picnic area and staff area where the gas grill is now locked up. Arriving a little after 3pm, I found the night time programs had been cancelled for the weather, but as I'm fond of saying, at least we'll have a cookout!

Upon driving up, I grabbed a camera to take some more time-lapse of the VLBA dish. It was just a week ago that it was moving multiple times per minute to a new object, and it seemed to be sticking to that schedule. I took a short sequence with a frame every 20 seconds and show it as a GIF here at left.

We had a few attendees dribble in, so the grill was pulled out and set up adjacent to the restrooms. We also had some auspicious visitors! Mike Spooner, telescope maker extraordinaire and his wife Elvira attended after I contacted them a few weeks earlier. Mike has joined the ranks of the recently retired, and had brought one of his gems down with which to observe. Also, Demetry Papadopoulos, a doctor, had flown in from where he lives in Charleston, SC for some desert observing. Ironically, it was clear back home, and the Peach Star Gaze in Georgia, where he usually goes to observe this weekend, also had clear skies! Besides Jim and Elaine Miller and Paul Lorenz, TAAA stalwarts, that was about the extent of our crew.  With Melinda and me, we could all fit at one picnic table!

But as I said above, even if the skies don't cooperate, there is usually something of interest going on, and storms can be spectacular from elevation where you can see them for 100 miles! While we didn't have any raindrops early, the view off the west side of the mountain was at times breathtaking. At left is shown a view of vertical rain shafts to the distant west, alternated with some slanted crepuscular rays where the sun shown through breaks in the clouds.  You can see that the distant west looked to be clear, and if it looks familiar, I've mentioned them before in identifying the Pinacate volcano field. The flat-topped range are the Mesquite Mountains, about 40 miles west of Kitt Peak, and the peak to the left is Mount Cubabi, just into Mexico south of Sonoita/Lukeville border area. As time passed, the storms grew a little nearer, with associated lightning too as shown at right. While I was using a timer at the moment this was taken, I actually pushed the button manually, as these strokes sometime last long enough to react to. I would have been lucky indeed to catch one taking an image every 15 seconds with intervalometer!

Locally, the rain picked up and I was out protecting the cameras I had going with my trusty umbrella! Behind a bush I saw a glow and thought the sun was sitting on the horizon already... Walking a couple meters, it was the sun reflecting off sheet flooding out in the desert! The sun, still hidden behind clouds, eventually dropped into the clear gap and gave a spectacular encore setting behind some storms and providing some amazing colors. I shouted out to the attendees, hunkered down in the pavilion to come see and all were amazed. Unfortunately in my haste to catch it, the camera was slightly out of focus, so didn't make a time-lapse, but did catch 3 representative frames as the sun moved through the gap. The top one shows the sun reflecting off the flooded desert I mentioned, then the sun eventually coming into view and momentarily being partially hidden by clouds.

As the sequence neared its end with sunset, the rain intensified and everyone ran for the cars.  I stayed to the bitter end, holding the umbrella against the downpour.  Between the lightening and rain, everyone was long gone before I packed up, and I had to return the key to the mountaintop before leaving.  It has been a long time since driving in rain that heavy, but at least the near-constant lightning helped light the way!  At 7:45, it was about the earliest we've ever gotten back from a star party - even got to catch the last inning of the Cubs playoff game!  The storm followed us, arriving in Tucson about 30 minutes later, but lacked the intensity of the Kitt Peak version.

But as I've said before, a trip to the mountain is always entertaining, and this one was no exception!