New and Improved!

A week ago I had posted a short time-lapse of my Mammillaria longimamma blooming.  It is an unusual looking cactus with striking flowers, and as I learned, its blossoms last longer than usual cacti and their day-long flowers. After posting the day-long sequence, I started another the next day, then again on the third! The second day the second bud opened, as shown at left. On day three I was looking for something a little more unusual to add, so stopped as they were opening to zoom in on the center of the first flower. Watching the time-lapse later, the vibrations of the flower petals and the interior flower parts seem to be natural and not caused by insects or wind. Since the images were taken every 3 minutes (20/hour), buffeting from outside sources would be herky-jerky, so the gentle swaying seems natural.  Note that all this activity takes place in an 8cm square plastic pot!

Finally, on day 4 I kept an eye on it, but the now-aged buds refused to open, and a snapshot appears at the end of the sequence below. Good thing too, as it was Mercury transit day, and both cameras were busy, and didn't have another to spare!

So without further ado, here is the now-78 second clip.  Feel free to go full screen and hi-def if you have the bandwidth.  Enjoy!

Spots on the Sun - the Mercury Transit!

Today, 9 May, was the latest transit of Mercury, where from the Earth's vantage point, the planet's disk is seen in silhouette against the disk of the Sun.  You would think that it would happen every inferior conjunction as it swings between Earth and Sun, but because of the inclination of Mercury's orbit, it only happens about 13 times per century.  It is always fun to see the inky black disk slide across the sun, much darker than the sunspots, magnetic storms on its surface, demonstrate. 

For us here in Tucson, the transit started about 1.5 hours before sunrise, so of course, we miss that part. I had envisioned shooting the sunrise against the Catalina Mountains so that it could be spotted as soon as it rose, perhaps a few saguaros seen in silhouette too. I spent nearly an hour scouting locations Saturday evening, finally settling on a spot near the east terminus of Roger Road where it meets up with the Rillito Wash near the UA Farm.

Of course, documenting the sunrise means getting up well before sunrise, and since I never use my alarm, actually had to try it to see if it worked! It does, but I ended up waking 10 minutes before it was to go off at 4:50. That gave me plenty of time to set up and be sure of focus, exposure, camera level - all those little details.  My setup consisted of the TEC 140 telescope with a Canon 1.4X converter used with the XSi camera.  The shot at left shows the view where I set up next to the van.  For a few minutes I was thinking it would rise very near Thimble Peak, but ended up rising off the right side of the indicated hill.  In the image at right Mercury just cleared the horizon - the little black round spot at lower left.  Note how much clearer the hillside is than the edge of the sun, only 10 miles away compared to the hundreds of miles of atmosphere the sun's image traversed.

I always find it interesting in the edges of low elevation objects. Most observers know about the atmosphere acting like a thin prism that disperses the light into colors - the upper edge of the setting sun has a green rim, the lower edge is red. Yet, on a black, inky spot, the LOWER edge is blue-green and upper is red! Of course, when you think about it the upper edge of the black disk is really a lower edge of the sun, so should be red like the lower limb of the sun. An enlargement of the effect is shown here at left. The effect holds for the dark sunspot group at top too...

After the sunrise, just as I was starting to shut down, some walkers strolled by and got to see Mercury on my camera's Live View. Finally I shut down and retired to home about 2 miles away for the rest of the transit. Fortunately I had set up the AP1200 equatorial mount in the back yard, and aligned it Sunday night, so was ready to go. Unfortunately, my sleep-addled state didn't realize I had hooked up the wires incorrectly, so spent about 30 minutes figuring why it wouldn't track! The trees in the east side of the yard block the low sun anyway, so didn't lose much important time. At left is shown the setup in the "jungle" part of the yard next to the not-yet-completed observatory...

I set up the timer to take images every 2 minutes for a possible future time-lapse movie - we'll see! In the meantime, I can pick-and-choose images that have the best seeing to show here. At right is a full-frame image that is taken a little after mid-transit. Even though the tracking mount had a "solar" rate, which worked perfectly, BTW in keeping the largest sunspot on one of the camera focus marks, it needed a bit of touchup every 15 minutes or so as the sun continued to track a little northward as we approach Summer Solstice in a month-and-a-half.

While the full-disk views are neat, the resolution of this system is capable of so much more! At left here is a full-resolution picture of the TEC and XSi, taken about 15 minutes after mid-transit. Adjusting the levels of the image you can spot details in Sunspot Group 2542, as well as start to see the granulated surface of the sun.

The transit was a slow-motion event, the entire event lasting over 7.5 hours from some parts of the world.  I was fine with letting the camera run mostly unattended, checking the northward drift every 15 minutes or so.  Finally, it drew to a close about 1140 local time (MST), but before it did, just before 3rd contact I collected upwards of 10 frames in quick succession to make sure I'd get a couple good sharp images.  At right, 2 are stacked just before Mercury meets the edge of the sun.

After putting gear away, I went in to work, and finally looked at some of the images tonight.  The easy ones to do something with are shown here.  Anything more complicated may take some time!

But talk about setting a high bar! Tom Polakis, observing from his back yard in Tempe, AZ used a 4" solar telescope and high-speed video system to record many frames of Mercury. Here he made 31 images of the last 10 minutes of Mercury's egress off the Sun's surface, only keeping about half of the data, using only the sharpest images for highest resolution. In making the time-lapse, the flames and prominences at the edge of the sun are real, recorded in Hydrogen-Alpha. Just an amazing amount of work to get this, and a great achievement too. If you go to his Pbase page on this image, you can poke around his other galleries and find other gems he has collected!

If you had a chance to observe the transit, I hope you had a good one!  The next one is in November of 2019, so not so long to wait!

TAAA Meeting Night!

Most Tucson amateur astronomers know what happens on the first Friday of the month - the monthly meeting of the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association (TAAA)! Arguably living in the astronomy capital of the world, we have some pretty good meetings. With the Kitt Peak National Observatory, the Planetary Sciences Institute, Steward Observatory and the Lunar and Planetary Lab all headquartered in central Tucson, we are rarely lacking for world-class lectures about the universe or latest data from spacecraft. We even get great lectures from TAAA members themselves, some of them working at the above institutions!


Last night was the first Friday, so of course, we got together, but our normal lecture hall at Steward Observatory was being used for final exams - it is that time of year! So we arranged to meet across the street at the auditorium of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. The location fell into the theme of the evening - celebrating the history of LPL. The traditional Beginner's Lecture was a showing of the great documentary "Desert Moon", a 2014 movie by Jason Davis. Using archival footage as well as interviews with early employees, it tells the story of how LPL played a central role in the space race and eventual landing on the Moon. Gerard Kuiper, who founded LPL in 1960 is at center in the right image, and Ewen Whitaker, one of the main interviewees, is at right.


The movie is a testament to Kuiper's leadership and assembling this team around him, most just barely out of their teens! They played central roles as Kennedy surprised scientists by declaring the Moon as a goal for NASA. Starting with the lunar atlas Kuiper started at Yerkes Observatory, after founding LPL they supported virtually all the lunar missions leading up to the landing. Fortunately, the movie Desert Moon is free for viewing on-line, and at 35 minutes long, is a great watch, even on a computer screen. My favorite scene is the un-narrated final scene when some of the now "old-timers" who played such central roles, put their swagger on and strutted down the University Mall - shown at left!

The main meeting started promptly at 7:30, and after a few announcements and business (Springtime Board Elections!) the main lecture started - given by LPL director Timothy Swindle. He admitted that the first half dozen slides of his normal talk were well covered by "Desert Moon", so modified his presentation somewhat. He also announced that much of what he presented was covered in a recent book, recently published by UA press - Under Desert Skies by Melissa Sevigny. Reading her book would likely be a great addition to the information gleaned from Dr. Swindle's presentation.



Dr. Swindle points to the launch of Sputnik in the 50s, and the 6 week period in Spring of '61 in forming the direction of LPL's mission to the Moon and beyond.  So the developing space race kept funding levels high and the department focused both on the Moon and a fledgling planetary space program.  After the successes in the Moon landings, UA continued involvement in the Pioneer, Voyager, Cassini and Mars missions.



He told the story of Lujendra Ojha, an undergraduate from Nepal working on a student project with data from HiRISE, under the direction of principle investigator Alfred McEwen, and discovered "streaks" on the inner walls of craters and gorges that follow up spectroscopy showed was briny water - one of the first direct indicators of water on Mars.




He also told the story of Richard Kowalski. One of the primary research works of Steward and LPL consists of searching for Near-Earth Asteroids with the Spacewatch and Catalina Sky Surveys. Kowalski is the ONLY observer to discover objects BEFORE they struck the Earth, one exploding over Sudan, the other striking the Atlantic Ocean. He is shown at right holding a small piece of the asteroid/meteor that landed over Sudan.

He closed out his talk with the latest mission coming out of LPL - the OSIRIS-REx mapping and sample return mission to an asteroid. Facing a launch this September, it arrives at Bennu in 2018, and returning with its precious cargo in 2023. Answering questions for a good long time, it was a great talk and enjoyed by all.

After the meeting's conclusion, most stayed to interact outside the auditorium over snacks. Another great meeting!  The next one will be the day before the Grand Canyon Star Party starts the first weekend of June!

A Day In The Life...

On the way out the door this morning, I saw that one of my cactus buds were likely going to bloom today. You might recognize it from the center image of these three bought at the cactus show a couple weeks ago. A Mammillaria longimamma, I had also posted an anaglyph 3d image of the first flower a week or 10 days ago.  This morning, it looked about ready to pop, as shown at right... So what could I do but set up the camera and intervalometer to record it for a possible time lapse? I set it up for an exposure every 3 minutes, so got 20 frames per hour for what turned out to be exactly 10 hours! I had set the aperture to F/9 to keep most of the flower sharp, and guessed what it would look like so the bloom would be centered. I also used a ball cap fastened to the tripod to keep the sun off the camera for the duration. Mostly, it looks like I lucked out!

When I got home from work late in the afternoon, the flower had nearly finished closing, even though the sun was still shining on it. I was expecting it to stay open as long as the sun shone, but that wasn't correct. I let the sequence go on a little more, then after tonight's astronomy club meeting, loaded the images to inspect them. It was a lovely flower, waving perhaps in the strong breeze today,shown at left as open as it attained. And taking only a frame every 3 minutes, only caught one pollinator - a bee shown at right. This image is shown at full resolution to record all the details the macro captured. I may shoot it again tomorrow, as the last flower lasted a good couple days, and a comparison to the first day's bloom might be of interest.


And as promised, I loaded the 200 frames into Moviemaker and made the 20 second time lapse, displaying the images at 10 frames per second.  I ended up running the sequence twice to round it out to 40 seconds long.




There were some interesting things visible in the clip - the flower waving as it opened might be partially due to wind, but seems like it would be more "vibration" than the waving observed.  Also the small fingers and next bud to bloom also move around and wave some during the 10 hour period.  Fun stuff - glad it was able to run unattended - isn't technology wonderful?!

An Evening With Friends!

With a few days of good weather, there was an opportunity to make plans to try to get out of town for a few hours of observing. By my accounting, I've not had my 11" Newtonian out for an imaging session in 5 months - the last time I've been doing astronomy other than chasing LBT ARGOS lasers! Buddy and co-worker Roger joined me, headed towards Benson to another friend's house a couple hours before sunset. Roger questioned the early departure, but by the time I unloaded and set up the photographic setup, I actually started imaging a little after full darkness, so I could have used even more time!

Once "on the air" and the autoguiding system doing the heavy lifting of accurate guiding, there was ample opportunity to do visual observing with my binoculars, Roger's 8" refractor that he had brought along, and check out Pat's progress with his 12" Newtonian and his new mount. There was also a chance for some selfies shown here. At left with the 11" dutifully taking a programmed set of exposures, I'm checking the guiders performance on the notebook computer. In the background, a sharp-eyed observer might notice Corona Borealis near the top of the frame, and the Keystone of Hercules at the left edge. My selfie at right taken a little later with the first signs of the Summer Milky Way rising shows my favorite kind of observing - head back, eyes open, mouth agape with the wonders revealed by a dark sky!

In my starlight-deprived state, I didn't have much of an observing list - just a half dozen objects of interest. Springtime is galaxy season with the heart of the huge Virgo cluster on the meridian about 10pm. Some interested me more than others, and my list also prompted Roger and Pat to try chasing them down too. Roger is a refractor guy, and brought along an 8" that he had built. Most refractors need multiple glass elements, and he thinks little of polishing 6 glass surfaces to make a triplet lens system! Being much lazier, I'd rather do a single aspheric on a mirror, so that is why I'm fond of Newtonian mirrors, while he prefers the high-resolution view afforded by a fine refractor. At left, he is shown with Scorpio rising behind him, modified into unrecognizability with brighter Mars and Saturn both in the constellation.

Pat has built a very nice little roll-off roof observatory on his acreage, and he is having issues with his new mount.  At right he is shown trying to figure it out with his 12.5" Newtonian mounted atop it.  It will be a nice go-to system when he figures it all out.  The amount of ambient light is misleading in the 13 second exposure.


Finally here are some of my results of the night. These are the quick-and-dirty processing of the jpeg images. Working with the raw images are better, but more time-consuming, so quickly turned these out for the post. My first object at left is likely the easiest galaxy to find photographically! Located just north (above here) of the bright star Regulus in Leo, this is the dwarf galaxy Leo I, thought to be a distant satellite of the Milky Way(at about 820,000 light years distant). While very faint (it wasn't discovered until 1950!), it looks very similar to a reflection or ghostly glow, perhaps even caused by a reflection of Regulus in the optics. But it is real, and clicking to load the full-size image, you can see the glow is partially resolved into stars. Roger did a search for it visually in his 8", and while some of the field stars were seen, the glow was not spotted. This exposure is 32 minutes total, the lines coming out of the bright star Regulus are diffraction from the spider holding the secondary mirror. There are also a couple satellite trails visible on the right side of the image.

Next up was the Leo Triplet, a trio of galaxies located along the rear leg of Leo, the lion. While I've shot it before, none of the shots were great, and even this one needs more time than the 25 minutes of exposure shown here, but still, a nice field. Here north is to the right. The rightmost edge-on galaxy is NGC 3628, and the pair at left are Messier 66 above and Messier 65 below, all about 35 million light years distant.

The last galaxy of the night has never made an appearance here, though is about the most famous in the sky - the edge-on NGC 4565. BTW, NGC stands for New General Catalog, a listing of non-stellar objects dating back to the 1880s. It sits about 45 million light years distant and is aligned nearly exactly edge-on to our line of view. Also called the needle galaxy, it is thought that the smaller galaxy to the lower right, NGC 4562 is a companion. I've observed it visually many times in the past, but was amazed I've never shot it before. Again, it deserves more than the 18 minutes devoted to it here...

Since it was a "school night", I didn't want to be out till dawn, but really wanted to shoot a comet that passed very close to the earth a few weeks earlier - Comet 252P/Linear. Located in Ophiuchus, I was able to spot it in binoculars before getting it in the telescope - perhaps 7th magnitude or just below. Even a short 20 second exposure shows it as a greenish glow, caused by the dissociation of carbon molecules in sunlight. It moved quite rapidly across the sky when it passed just over 3 million miles from us in late March, but is moving quite slowly now. Even though, when the images were aligned on the comet's nucleus, the stars are trailed slightly in the 10 minutes of exposure...

We hated to leave Pat's with the Summer Milky Way just clearing the horizon, but with a work date in the morning we packed up, hit the road about 1215. After dropping off Roger and his equipment I hit the hay at home right about 2am. A rewarding night, spent with friends both human and celestial. I absolutely can't wait 5 months for the next one!

Still Springtime Cactus Season!

We're receiving a reprieve from an early approach towards 100F here in the desert. In fact, we've enjoyed recent highs in the 70s, which make for some spectacular Spring days! Everyone knows that it won't be long, though... But we're enjoying the moderate temperatures while we can - even the extended weather forecast doesn't include 90s.  The moderate temperatures are extending the cactus flowering season as they aren't in such a hurry to blossom when it is cooler.

It seems I spend a lot of time in my neighbor Susan's front yard. The image at left of her prickly pear appeared over a month ago, and this same plant is featured almost every year as a neat demonstration of focus-stacking, like the image at right - this one from 2 years ago. One of the joys of shooting this particular cactus is that over the years it has grown to about 5 feet in height, so no more groveling on the ground to get a close-up - standing looking through the viewfinder is a nice luxury!

But while the buds have made an annual appearance, I've rarely shown the flowers! They don't last more than a day, and often are wilty-looking by the time I get home in the afternoon, so haven't chased them down often. At left is a shot of nearly the entire bush. Fortunately all the buds don't bloom at once, but at a couple dozen per day, the estimated 200 buds still last over a week. Likely a Santa Rita Prickly Pear, I love the color contrast of the purple-ish pads and bright yellow flowers this time of year. And, of course, you wouldn't be able to get away without a close-up of the flower and buds. Shown at right is a focus-stack showing a few flowers and buds that remain to bloom. This is a 6-frame focus stack, where each frame had a slightly different focus to assure everything was sharp.

But that isn't the only plant holding my attention these days! They also have a few saguaro cacti. I've been at this location for 30 years and I remember these cacti before they had arms! Anyway, this one has seen better days - in the wide view at left, you can see it has lost the top of the main column, and even though the downward-pointing arm is covered with buds, it is mostly hollow and can be seen through from several points. All this damage was brought on by cold temperatures in the teens a few years ago. Many plants died off that winter and even many native plants suffered, including this saguaro. But while it is here presenting flower buds (and soon flowers, I hope!), I'll gladly take photos of it!  The close-up at right is a 7 frame focus-stack. Can't wait for some blooms here - look for some anaglyphs below!


My friend Dick told me about a cactus show and sale a couple weeks ago. I had never been to one and didn't know what to expect, but ended up buying a couple different cacti. They are still in pots - not in the ground yet, but hoping to before it gets too warm as it lessens the attention I've got to pay to them for watering as they get too hot in pots... The three specimens I ended up with are shown at right. The left one was mis-labeled an echino fossil cactus, which I can't find on the Google, so not sure what I've really got here. The middle one is a mammillaria longimamma, with flower bud at right, and the right hand cactus is an oreocereus trollii. Our friend Donna called it "Einstein", but I think it more closely resembles Bernie Sanders!

And because it's my blog, here be anaglyphs! Grab the red/blue 3D glasses and be amazed! Because I just showed the shots of my new cacti from the sale, will show them first. As I normally do, these are put together from a pair of images, taken from slightly different perspectives. When each is viewed with the appropriate eye, your brain interprets them into 3D. For these macro shots, the baseline is quite small - only an inch or less.

At left is my still-unknown "fossil" cactus. I love the surface wrinkles and the spines that threaten to poke you in the eye! And at right, "Bernie's" hair shows up quite nicely in 3D...


Here is the mammillaria longimamma, both when I first brought it home, and 10 days later when it bloomed the other day. The brilliant yellow flower is shockingly different, and with the cool temperatures and partial shade, has opened 3 days in a row! This cactus is supposed to be easy to start new ones - tear off one of the fingers, let it dry a day or two and plant it for an entirely new plant...




And finally, closing up with a couple anaglyphs of Susan's saguaro. I was shooting from a stepladder, estimating what the baseline should be (generally going too large), but the result is very interesting! I hope you enjoy!

A Visit, an Outing, Repeat...

Last week Melinda Jo's buddy Sally Jo (both of them nee Johnson!) came down for a few day's visit. Sharing a middle and last name through nursing school and Delnor Hospital, how could you not learn to be great friends? Everyone who knew their names assumed they were related, but nowadays, they only act like sisters! They spent a good three days gabbing like crazy for 12 hours/day. Sally's only request was to go out observing one night since she had never had an opportunity to look through a telescope. Well, how can I turn down a request like that?!

We had a couple partly cloudy evenings, so finally went out Wednesday, the last evening Sally was in town. Even though only a day short of Full Moon, we drove the hour up to Geology vista. In case views of the heavens fell short of expectations, there were always the pretty lights of the Tucson Valley to entertain!

The atmospheric seeing was quite good! After plopping down the TEC140 down on its mount, I first went over to Mercury, low in the west. A couple weeks short of its transit across the face of the Sun on Monday, 9 May, it showed a nice, if not colorful (from atmospheric dispersion) crescent as it passes between us and the Sun. The planet Jupiter passing high overhead was just stunning, with the moons showing their disks. We could identify Ganymede merely from showing the largest disk!

I didn't take many pictures as running the telescope took most of my attention. But I did take a shot of the Pima County Fair, the center of attention on the southeast side of Tucson. Shown at left it is the bright collection of lights under the profile of the Santa Rita Mountains, about 45 miles distant. Pointing the scope at the fairground midway (about 25 miles distant), Sally was amazed at the amount of details visible.

I had noticed an array of red lights blinking in unison to the east looking out past the local hills. Shown at right is a shot, both of these taken with my 100mm macro, which was what was on the camera... They looked to be pretty distant - clicking on the picture shows the most distant peak to be Dos Cabesos over 60 miles away past Willcox. My comment to the crew was that the only time I've seen red lights flashing in unison like this was for a windmill farm, though I was unaware of any in Arizona. The view in the camera and in the telescope revealed nothing - at least they didn't appear to be moving, so UFOs were out of the question, but their source remained a mystery.

Heading towards home, I talked the girls into pausing at "Bad Dog" (actually Babad Do'ag - the native American name of the mountain).  I was thinking with the full moon it might be possible to record the domes of Kitt Peak over the lights of Tucson.  I dug out the 300mm lens from it's case in the back of the van and took a few shots.  It was a tough get - expose too long and the lights of Tucson were way overexposed.  But much less and the feeble light of the moon off the 60 mile distant domes through the haze might not be recorded.  I took 4 frames and stacked them once home to reduce noise - the domes are there, but took a bit of image manipulation to pull them out.  Click on the image to see them at all - above the red cell tower towards the left side of the image!

So while we had a good outing, it gnawed at me to figure out what the lights were. In addition there were a couple other targets that I would have taken in had the chance permitted. On Sunday I went up again, this time before sunset, to chase down some of them. As soon as the scope was plopped down this time, I went straight for the source of the lights to the east - windmills! Shown at left is a 5-frame panorama taken with the TEC140 for maximum details. I had not been aware of any, but seeing is believing, as they say. Then I remembered some pictures I'd taken as we flew back to Tucson last June. I hadn't seen any windmills, but had seen a solar photovoltaic "farm" in the area. Shown at right is the image I took flying over the area. Looking on the Google today, I found the complex is called "Red Horse 2" and combines 650 acres of photo-voltaics and 16 windmill turbines, generating 71 megawatts of power. Located on the western slopes of the Winchester Mountains, it is located midway between Willcox and Cascabel. I've never noticed it from I-10 driving east, but will have to look for it now...


A couple other targets seen in daylight... There are many mountaintop observatories seen in and around Southern Arizona. Among them are Kitt Peak, Mount Hopkins, several atop Mount Lemmon and Mount Bigelow and of course, Mount Graham. Few know about the one south of the border near Cananea, Sonora. The Guillermo Haro Astrophysical Observatory is located about 20 miles south of the US border and 8 miles NE of Cananea, a copper-mining town in Sonora. I took a series of images of likely mountaintops with the TEC140, waiting till I got home to find the correct one after goosing contrast in Photoshop. Shown at left, it is about 100 miles distant from Geology Vista... Mentioned above, Mount Bigelow is home to some UA scopes, hidden among the trees, but from my vantage point, a nice array of TV transmitters for Tucson was visible from about 3.25 miles distance. It makes a nice resolution target - here cropped slightly from the Meade 80mm F/6 (480mm focal length).

Finally, as the sun set and it started darkening, I swung down towards the fairgrounds and took a few frames of the county fair midway. No great shakes with 25 miles of air between us, but the stripes of the big U.S. flag flying over the midway are easily resolved - still fun stuff nonetheless.

By the way, whenever I shoot through a telescope with this long of a focal length, there are a couple tricks to follow. Since vibration during even a short exposure can blur the image, I tend to always make sure "mirror lockup" on the camera is enabled, along with a 2-second (or more!) delay. That way, the vibration caused by the moving mass of the DSLR mirror has passed before the much lighter shutter vanes makes the exposure. This always helps get the sharpest images when shooting with focal lengths of 1,000mm or more.

It is always fun to spend time with telescope and camera, especially from a high location, just to see what you can see. Generally more than you think you can!