I had a stroke at the beginning of October 2021. The observatory quit working well and so did I on my left side.
Right before my stroke I replaced the observatory camera with my modified Canon Rebel XT1 color camera. My aim was to make things a little more simple. So to keep things simple and test out the observatory I have chosen to take a picture of a star. The star I have chosen is named “Alpharetz” and oddly shares the corner of constellations Andromeda and Pegasus. Originally Alpharetz was in Pegasus but now makes the top of the “V” of Andromeda. The constellation Andromeda is in the northern sky and is not wholey visible south of about 37 degrees north latitude. The head of Andromeda overlaps Pegasus at the horse’s midriff. Alpharetz uniquely shares the northeast corner position of the “Square of Pegasus.” Continue reading →
It is September and I have not used the observatory for awhile. I had a stroke last fall and the observatory has not been working either. Continue reading →
Antares – Rho Ophiuchus Region, June 11-12, 2021,Torrey, Utah
The Antares – Rho Ophiuchus is low enough in the southern sky that I have to catch it while it is as high as possible but before it creeps behind the wall of my windbreak. It is a wide field area so instead of using the camera and scope in the observatory, I set up my modified Canon Rebel with a Canon L zoom lens on my Losmandy G-11 mount on the outdoor cement pier. Almost a year earlier I had set myself a tickler to look for an opportunity to capture this image while it was in the right part of the sky. I really should have just set up in the driveway on the tripod, like I did in the good old days, where I would have had a much longer view without obstruction. But I keep coming up with low objects I want to shoot and I keep having to use the tripod to find a place where I can reach them. Since I didn’t build the outside pier and windbreak for nothing, I used it this time, dammit.
The big surprise was the coma effect on the stars in the corners. I didn’t expect that from an L lens. Makes me appreciate the quality of the glass and configurations of the telescopes I use more. Next time I will stop down at least one stop. I also tried to use a nifty piece of freeware in processing called Dark Master which matches the temperatures of the dark calibration frames with the temperature of the light frames. But instead of helping, it introduced some serious artifacts. I was doing something wrong so I just skipped the darks and used flat and bias calibrations.
It is a crazy gorgeous region in the sky and while I may not have done it complete justice, I’m glad to have it in my gallery.
• Location: Torrey, UT • Exposure: 2 hours 45 minutes, 5 minute subs • Lens: Canon EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM at f/4 • Mount: Losmandy G11 • Autoguider: Orion Starshoot • Guide-scope: ShortTube 80mm f/5.0 refractor telescope • Camera: Gary Honis full-spectrum modified Canon T1i (500D) • White Balance: Daylight • Mode: Raw • ISO: 800 • Acquisition and guiding software: BackyardEOS, PHD2 Guiding • Calibration: Deep Sky Stacker (no darks) • Processing: Photoshop CS5
Brian Greene is a terrific science writer. We armchair science explorers owe him a debt of gratitude for sitting down and working out his thoughts and observations in terms laymen can understand.
I bought the recently published book based on my interest in consciousness and free will. This work presents a head scratching paradox: it delves deeply into both subjects while starting with the premise that they don’t exist. Greene is an ardent material reductionist. He claims that belief right up front and expresses a deep commitment to the concept. Most physicists are material reductionists, whether they know it or not. For a material reductionist everything is explained by physical particles. Greene’s position is a modern version of Laplace’s “Demon” written in 1814. Laplace supposed the world was a giant machine where if someone (the demon) knows the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe the future can be predicted. Like balls on billiard table, knowing where and how fast the cue ball is going can be used to predict where the other balls will all end up. In that sense, as Greene takes it, free will is nonexistent, everything that ever happened and is going to happen was determined at the big bang. Free will is just a sensation we have. As he is fond of saying, we are merely a bag of material particles. Explore the particles at a deep enough level and he is certain that everything will be explained.
Roger Powell, maybe your ears were burning. And you know that emulation is the highest form of flattery. For a few years now I have been vaguely aware that it was possible for amateurs to capture the light of quasars from over a billion light years away. To register as even a spec of light in one of my images when it is that far away it has to be incredibly bright. Which quasars are. It is estimated that this one is over 4 trillion times more luminous than the sun. Which seems like, you know, a lot.
Roger did all the leg work on identifying this object as a prime candidate and I am knocking him off shamelessly. But it is an honest tribute to him. Roger is one of the founding members of the Macarthur Astronomical Society in Sydney, Australia. So such a thing is not his first rodeo. You can see his blog on capturing this, his first quasar, here.
Levesque’s style is deceptively light and personal, the perfect touch to teach the reader, while they are not looking, a lot about modern professional astronomy.
Her writing is so invitingly personal that I constantly felt eager to share the experience of owning my own automated observatory with her. I looked her up and when I saw she was born in 1984, the same as my daughter, I thought it must be the charm of the age that was getting to me as a dad. Of course I knew this new author wouldn’t care about this reader, but it felt like Levesque was right there at the table with me swapping war stories late into the night.
Emily Levesque is a highly educated enthusiast about her profession and about the Cosmos. I look forward to her next book.
So, what are you working on Emily? Want to hear about my book? You’ll love it . . .
M86 and galaxies, 4/11-12/2021 (click image for technical info).
Spring is galaxy season. The Milky Way winds low around the horizon leaving the thin part of the galaxy overhead making the best time to look up and out through our galaxy to other galaxies millions of light years away. The larger galaxies in this image range from 15 million to 40 million light years away. Our galaxy is estimated to be between 150,000 to 200,000 light-years in diameter making these galaxies well beyond the stars and objects inside the neighborhood of our Milky Way.
The two brightest, fuzzy objects in the right center of the screen are the elliptical galaxies M86 and M84. The two galaxies in the upper left are known as “The Eyes.”
Speaking of eyes, in 1823 Wilhelm Olbers used his to look up at night and wondered why it is dark at all.
Nice eyes. Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers (lithography by Rudolf Suhrlandt) – Wikipedia.
I had a stroke at the beginning of October 2021. The observatory quit working well and so did I on my left side.
