Regulusastro Blog

More on Jet Lag

An interesting article just came out about methods of reducing jet lag: Ditch the Food, Ditch the Jet Lag. Interestingly it does cover the basics - hey it is Harvard after all - of getting the sleep patterns adjusted to your destination times…. but it states that researches (Harvard) recently discovered that fasting for some 16 hours before the trip, then eating on arrival (at the proper eating times) makes an even larger difference in the aftermath of jet lag. Ok! I will try it.

Getting ready for Russia

Got a 30” duffle bag for the trip. A new one. I am happy – having never owned luggage that was really my own. I have been a luggage borrower, loaner, etc, but never really had my own, to have and hold. Sad, eh? So, here I go into the world of luggage shopping and hunt down something that can hold (easily) some 40 pounds of material, has wheels, straps everywhere and pockets which can separate the shoes from the pressed shirts. Got it. High Sierra 30” Duffle. Happy man.

Portable tripod? No idea. I hate my portable tripod. With any amount of weight on top, the thing constantly aims the lens lower that it needs to be! Frustration! Here’s the snag. When going to Russia, there is a weight limit on their internal airlines for checked bag weight: 40 pounds! A portable tripod it must be, but I can’t seem to find one (easily) that can handle a Nikon D200 with extra battery pack and a 200mm telephoto lens without sagging. Mount flexure? You bet! Sigh.

Time zones? Dealing with jet-lag? Well they (whoever that might be) say that if travelling east, to go to sleep earlier and to wake up earlier each day leading up to the trip. This helps, so they say. I haven’t tried it, but since I have a 10 hour layover in Helsinki, I intend to be awake enough to handle a brief tour of the area away from the airport… oh, and to eat the strawberries. A friend (actually my dental hygienist) told me to try them: they have the best ones in the world, and it would be a shame to miss out on them. Ok! Will do!

Getting ready for eclipse day

With the August 1st 2008 eclipse headed this way, I have decided to get in touch with all the equipment and such that I’ll need for when I am there. There is nothing more frustrating than getting out to a remote site and not knowing how to work the gear! Here is the list:

• Learn the language: Since I am headed to Siberia to see this event, the language of choice would be Russian. I took my first term of Russian this fall, and did reasonably well. The grammar wasn’t too difficult, and the alphabet isn’t hard at all. They key is to build up a useful vocabulary. That is what I am doing now. Can you say “Rosetta Stone”? That software is pretty good at getting vocabulary into the mind. I recommend it for those who are needing to speak and hear languages.
• A Camera: I am going with the Nikon D200 DSLR. With some 10+megapixels of imaging space and some pretty amazing capabilities, it can do anything from low resolution, highly compressed JPEGS to completely raw, high resolution shots for the moment of the eclipse. I am bringing along two lenses: a handy 18-200mm zoom with AF and AV technology, and a 300mm AF telephoto for the great event. Also in the pack, a 4Gb memory card, a dual battery pack with 4 LiO batteries, a remote controller, and a magnifying right angle viewfinder.
• The manual: The camera is easy enough to operate as a point and shoot DSLR, but when it comes to the more adanved options, I am bringing along a cheat sheet. Right now, I am reading the manual (RTFM)… again. Yes. Again. There are a lot of auto focus and metering modes I want to really understand, so I can use them while out and about.
• Out and about with gear means a bag… I am bringing a backpack for the camera which also has a laptop compartment. Handy. Check out Kata bags. http://www.kata-bags.com/
• Laptop: A small 12″ wide tablet PC. Need I say more?
• Power! It turns out that most consumer electronics are pretty automatic about power. All you need is the correct cable and plug to go to the different country wall supplies. Russia is 220v with two round prongs. I found a cool kit which plugs from anything into anything. I like that. The wall warts for the camera charger and the laptop both take 110v - to - 220V. All set.
• Let me see: water, food, toilet paper, clothing, cash, bug spray, first aid gear, what else! Yikes.
• http://www.kata-bags.com/index.asp
• http://www.nikonusa.com/
• http://www.rosettastone.com/
• http://www.apc.com/products/family/index.cfm?id=236&ISOCountryCode=US&tsk=s149x 

Two Nights & a Couple of Hours of…

… observing.  KPNO, the dark skies of Arizona, the smell of oil, the sounds of business geting done, the creosote bushes and their tingly aroma, the hum of the dome, the rumble as the dome rotates, the whir of the mount, the hum and rattle of building fans, clicking of keyboards, no opera here: Songs for the Deaf. There are perhaps 30 to 50 people on the mountain this week which encompasses the whole group: scientists, students, teachers, staff, maintenance, technicians, cooks, you name it. Water: sarce as usual. Conserve. Showers with that amazing capacity to remove skin… the high pressure simulates the tool used by dentists to blast teeth white with baking soda. The food: fabulous. High altitude (for my old bones) is a good place to have decent food (ha!). The silences: so silent that a blue jay (those big western ones) flying overhead can be heard… no, not its squawking, I mean its feathers hiting the wind. Wild and freeing. The soul flies to be here. The mind clears.

We had two nights at KPNO with the 0.9m dome and the S2KB CCD imager. This imager takes 20′x20′ images with a 2′30″ download time. Cooled by liquid nitrogen (which requires that the dewar be refilled every 8 hours - rain or shine), it reaches temps of -109/-165C. That is cold. No darks needed, just flats and biases. 

Night One: Partly to mostly overcast with high cirrus coming in from the southwest. The glory of this is that sometimes it will clear out in time for a good night of work.  We headed into the dark hours by prepping the dome, opened, cooled and ready to go. Then, while working on mapping out a plan for focus, a little broadcast note came in from the 4m dome (those in power to declare observing ends due to weather): Dome closed due to threatening clouds. Hmmm… I saw stars a minute ago: nope, gone and gone for a few hours.  We visited the Coude Feed spectrograph folks: a scientist, teacher and student getting ready to collect their data in stunning detail.  While walking back the sky was clear and sparkling: stars!  Time to open the dome and work through the process. Focus: Done. Find the target. Image!  Seven images into the plan (which needed 20 images per filter and four filters) the sky went into overcast mode again. We closed down the dome and waited, ever hopeful for a clearing. None. In fact… it started to rain, not the hard rain but the light misty rain found in deserts at high altitude. It was almost virga, evaporating as it hit the skin. The smells of the ground was stunning and lovely. The Earth is such a beautiful and lively planet. We had data to play with.

So - here I am now, still on the mountain with about 3 hours to go before sleep becomes the plan. We woke up this morning with our heads in the clouds. Visibility was down to some quarter mile, if that. Wind from the southern side of the ridge blew stiffly up the side of the mountain. That wild upslope action with the water condensing into cloud on our doorsteps: it is fascinating, thick and almost bubbly like Perrier water. The conditions through the day and well into the night progressively got worse: rain, steady and unyielding. The surrounding wilderness is happy. The astronomers have lost this round.

Off to a Bigger Scope & Darker Skies

The news: On the 27th, I’ll be headed away from my New Hampshire abode to the warmer climes of Arizona for two nights of observing with the Kitt Peak National Observatory WIYN 0.9m telescope. With me will be three students who submitted a cool proposal: to take a slew of images in V, B, R and H-alpha of the M-31 galaxy to generate a new wide field atlas. I am looking forward to the project… so are the students. The best part: The Skies!  It is usually amazingly clear out there in AZ, though the local astronomers are complaining now not of Tucson, the nearest city, but of Phoenix which is some 2 hours drive to the north. Tucson is, well, one of the darkest sky cities on the planet. They have strict and well-followed light pollution reduction codes in place. Phoenix, on the other hand… it is a luminous dull grey glow to the north. It appears almost as if the full Moon was about to rise on the northern horizon. Sigh. Keep it dark people! Turn off your lights. Save electricity. Save the skies for future generations to enjoy.  Ok - enough of that. Check out the 0.9m telescope website and enjoy your day…

http://www.noao.edu/0.9m/wiyn.html

Scientists: Aren’t We All?

This has been an interesting week for astronomers: mostly the amateur ones. A comet has graced our skies in the form of a magnitude 2.5ish fuzzy ball. It’s named 17p Holmes, a periodic comet that gets about 2AU from the Sun at perihelion and rarely gets much brighter than 17th magnitude. Oh! You caught that!? Yes, this little ball of rock, ice and dirt brightened by some one million times. Something is up. Something is changing. Alert! 

Well, we all pulled our scopes out, opened the sheds, rolled back the roof, slid open the dome. It was definitely cool to look at. Each night, it has gotten larger in apparent diameter, and each night a bit fuzzier.

Two nights ago, I went out online and read all the back-issue commentary on this little fuzzball. Apparently there were now two nuclei. Ok! That is cool. It brought back some fond memories of researching our knowledge of comet nuclei through our human history (1850 to 1900). There were quite a few “great comets” which had their nuclei split. Maybe we were being treated to a new one…another comet p/Shoemaker-Levi 9…only this time without a Jupiter to splash into.

A colleague of mine and I went out to see what all the noise was about. We opened the dome, cooled off the CCD and grabbed some darks and biases. By then the comet had come up in the northeast above the treetops. It was plainly visible to the unaided eyeball. A little diffuse dot. In the finder it looked to be about as big as Jupiter (angularly, that is). We snapped some quick images: 10 each in V, B, and R. Neat!  Three “nuclei”. Maybe it was breaking up after all. We wrapped up the observing session and went back to the regular work world.

By then, the email lists were FULL of reports of the comet busting into multiple pieces: “Three nuclei” was a very common thread in dozens of emails. I am not kidding. It was bizzare. By then, a few phone calls had also arrived: people wanting to know if I had seen it, etc. “yes,” I said, “it appears to have three nuclei, but needs checking…” Indeed, that is so true. Taking our images and stacking them, I used one “nuclei” to align the images together. Once they were all stacked, the obvious came to light (ahhh! <<sound of angels>>): Those were not all nuclei. Two were stars. Done. End of story. End of message. I sent a short, brief note to those on the lists along with a small cropped JPG.

Excitement is easy. Good science takes patience. “Slow down. You move too fast…” ’nuff said.

The Best Part of Observing

• Holding a class with some 16 students and finishing just as the clouds roll in.
• Blow drying the dew off the objective lenses to continue for another hour.
• Seeing the ISS go overhead then fading gracefully into its own private sunset.
• Having a skunk not spray as it wanders under your tripod.
• A hot cup of coffee.
• The Milky Way.
• A sudden fireball… bright enough to cast a shadow on a moonless night.
• Hearing the oohs and aahs of young observers as they see Saturn for the first time.

My Favorite Time of Year

It is almost autumn here in New England. The weather is perfect, the skies, when clear are really clear. Those hot, humid, hazy summer nights are a thing of the past. In New England, the weather pattern is fairly predictable: Weather patterns flow generally from the west to the east and from the south to the north. Low pressure systems tend to folllow the Appalachian Mountains up to the northeast with their normal counterclockwise rotation. This brings in the wet air from off the ocean inland to dump rain or snow on us. We call these Nor’easters as the winds during these storms pummle us from out of the northeast, even though the storm moves from southwest to northeast. Confusing? Yes, but there it is!

In fall, there is a general pattern of cold front, warm front, cold front, etc. Each cold frontal passage leaves us with blustery crystal clear skies with blues that are astounding. It is a pleasure to hike on such crisp, cool days. It is also a great time to show off the stars!   Last week, I was introducing my classes to the observatory and the sky. For some, this was their first time out under a truly starrysky. We were not at all disapointed. The Milky Way was prominent along with its spectacular dust lanes and knots. The Sagittarius Star Cloud was visible along with Scorpius, the Summer Triangle constellations and the last of the spring group: Bootes, Corona Borealis, and Hercules. Rising in the northeast was the real treat: The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) was plainly visible. Students enjoyed all of this, I am sure, and even walked away remembering the star and constellation names. One thing I do know: They almost enjoyed the green laser pointer more than anything!  Lastly, we spent time looking at the setting Jupiter, low in the southwest just above the tree line.  Here’sto many more clear nights!

Adapter, oh, adapters, oh…

Oh me, oh my!  Adapters everywhere, and not the one I need! 

Astronomical equipment manufacturers have me baffled at times. “Back in the day” there was 0.965” and 1.25” everything… now there are 2” barrels and a whole slew of assorted thread sizes and bayonet mount types. My woes all began with my first Takahashi telescope, but the trend continues well beyond that illustrious brand. It seems that now, every telescope comes with some method to attach an eyepiece. Now, you need a specific adapter set to match your equipment needs… should it not be an eyepiece.

Matters get even more complicated when the receiver is a CCD camera, and either a field flattener or focal reducer are placed in the optical train. These beasts need very specific adapters and even more specific back focus distances, or your stars will never be just right. Focus will not be that pinpoint you were promised. My rule of thumb these days is to allot some 15% of the optical tube assembly purchase price for the various adapters you will need afterwards.

Ok – so there is my complaint and rant, above.  The end result, of course, is a plug and play scenario. What I failed to tell you about “back in the day” was that there was no easy way to attach anything to a telescope other than an eyepiece! If you had a special camera, best of luck. If things were going your way, a T-mount and 1.25” adapter barrel were all you needed… otherwise you were looking at expensive machining costs. These days, you just need to have a list of good sources for adapters. Here are my favorites:

• Finger Lakes Instruments: fabulous for their series of focuser adapters
• Land Sea and Sky (was: Texas Nautical Repair): good for all things Takahashi

• Anacortes Telescope and Wild Bird

• PreciseParts: good for those one-of-a-kind items

Of Mounts and Scopes

I have to fiddle with a mount today. This is a German Equatorial, which is usually controlled via PC, but there is also a joystick to slew around the sky. It works (for the most part) very well, allowing students to aim at a star, planet, nebula, etc, by star hopping. If time is of the essence, then a PC is hooked up. We can then use a CCD imager and slew right to the object, focus and shoot. Instant happiness.

The joystick was dropped last term. The joystick operated by potentiometer motion. The RA side was knocked a bit out of whack, so now the mount slews nearly uncontrollably in RA to the east. I ended up posting on a Yahoo! group to get some help as to re-centering the joystick and calming it down a bit. Answers were quick to come my way, so I have to try the fix. An Allen key, a Phillips screwdriver and some patience…. We shall see!

Interesting thing about mounts: They have to be more massive than the telescopes they support, or they are largely of little true value. Why is it then that most manufacturers supply weak mounts for their “high quality” optics? Inquiring minds want to know!  I suppose it is a matter of cutting corners some place and saving some money in production.  My first useful telescope (i.e. not my first, a 2” TASCO) had a fork mount and a metal tripod. While sturdy, the thing rang like a bell when it was knocked. It would vibrate for minutes. Also interesting: Its own drive motor would cause it to vibrate ever-so-gently at all times. High magnification views of Jupiter, Saturn, whatever, were never all that sharp… I always wondered how people could possibly see what they said they saw when looking at Jupiter. Red splotch? Really? Io has diameter? You have got to be kidding me.  … until I turned OFF the RA drive motor one fine night while looking at Jupiter at high power. It was like seeing with perfect vision for the first time. I was astounded! I was angry (at the mount manufacturer)!  I felt betrayed. Now I knew what I was missing. That mount had to go.

Away it went. I sold it at a local camera store on consignment with an alternate optical tube assembly.  I then picked up a lightly-used, heavy duty German Equatorial from a friend at work. He had wanted to get into astrophotography (remember film?), but found it all too daunting. I wanted to get more into astrophotography as well. I bought the mount, brought it home and stuck my scope on top. Night became day… or did day become night!? Colloquialisms get all messed up when thinking astronomy. A friend of mine has a bumper sticker on his darkroom wall: If you want to do astrophotography, you have a disease. Yes. That is true.

Looking at Jupiter now, while tracking in RA, was a blast. No issues. No vibrations… just a solid view of the planet. The cloud belts, festoons, swirls and red spot showed definition. Io even has a diameter. I had thought, in the worst case scenario, that it might have been my optics causing all this trouble. Instead it was the mount all along. Moral of the story: use mounts that are HUGE compared to your optical tube assembly. Friends will ask you if your mount is overkill. Your reply should be: “naaa…. it’s just about right.” When they look through your scope, they will surely wonder why their optics are not as good!  Grin and just enjoy the moment. Then share the news about mounts.

A picture of this first big mount of mine can be seen at:

http://www.regulusastro.com/regulus/photos/about.html