The immense damage I see to public lands in southern Utah caused by private livestock grazing motivated me to start Torrey House Press. The public would not put up with current land management practices if they knew about them and I want to get the word out in literature. The land practices are absurd, and I will get to that, but what concerns me even more about the Bundys taking siege to the public buildings at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge is how it makes a mockery of the American principle of equal justice under law. Continue reading →
My friend and Torrey House author Brooke Williams has been thinking about awe lately. He is intrigued by how we seem to disappear in the wonder of the wild moment. He thinks that in a moment of awe we shift “our focus from our individual selves to the great and potentially powerful collective.” Brooke is intrigued by what psychology professor at University of California, Berkeley, Dachel Kelmet, in his book, Born to Be Good, calls the “pro-social” behavior that is often the result of experiencing awe. Brooke and I have been comparing notes about consciousness and our awareness of beauty, connection and self-awareness of our awareness, what Brooke calls “Homo sapiens sapiens” (they who know they know), for quite a while. You can see his blog on awe here.
I tell Brooke I have a growing sense that consciousness is probably an element in the Cosmos, something like time and space are. It is consciousness in quantum mechanics that “collapses the probability wave function” and brings a mere thought into material being. I am not the only one who supposes that consciousness is the elemental source. If it is, when we are in the most beautiful and wild places our whole evolved being is called to greater attention. Our realization of something beautiful is telling us we are looking at truth and AWE is the feeling of the connection to that universal consciousness, the source of all being. I think about this often and wonder. Starry nights like we had lately are a good thinking and experiencing catalyst.
Heart and Soul nebulae in Cassiopeia
And just in case I need a hint from above, there it is . Two fantastic nebulae about 7500 light years away in Cassiopeia are called the Heart and the Soul. Here is my cropped capture of a two by two mosaic. The conditions on the first night out were exquisite. It was cool, utterly clear, moonless and calm. It felt like I should be able to reach up and manipulate the constellations or scoop of a handful of stars to pocket and give to my kids. Kristen would think that was a cool wedding present. The second night had high clouds, not all that thin, but the photons made it to my telescope anyway.
These nebula are emission nebula where the red areas are glowing gas with dark dust bands interspersed. The gas glows from the radiation of the clusters of hot stars in the nebulae centers. In fact, in the center of the Heart nebula are, according to Wikipedia, two stars locked in orbit, accounting for the unique shape of the Nebula. The stars are doomed to fuse together and explode into a supernova in 700 million years. According to researchers, this discovery, reported in Nature in February 2015, was the first confirmation that giant white dwarf binaries exist, and the first record of a system with such a fate.
I posted more on the technical aspects of this capture, including the full un-cropped mosaic, on my astrobin site here.
It looks like Amazon might have reported some positive earnings after the market closed last night and the stock is up $77 today or about 16%. I am trying to decide if there is a message I should be paying attention to here. Amazon, of course, is one of the major disruptors in the publishing world. Many independent bookstores went under during the recession as Amazon hit its stride selling books for below cost right while Apple came out with the smart phone and readers responded enthusiastically. But the recession is mostly over, surviving bookstores have stabilized, and Torrey House is waving a white flag and planning on converting to a nonprofit. But I still wonder if I am paying full attention. If(!) we had invested the money we poured into Torrey House into Amazon instead not only would publishing not have eaten my checkbook and my airplane, we could now have a shiny fleet of planes. Here is the AMZN monster of a five year chart:
Stock up over 7X since we started THP.
What to make of that? Is Jeff Bezos a million times smarter than we are? Are we continually rushing the wrong way down a dead end street? Are publishers on the wrong side of history, particularly small presses? Should we quit now before we fall even deeper and further behind? Well. on the one hand Amazon does carry all of our titles. They don’t do anything to help sell them besides list them and they take a bruising discount, more than any other, even slightly more than the wholesalers. But they do not return books (and man oh man do the wholesalers ever make returns). On the other hand disruption hurts in multiple ways. Amazon helps readers see what everyone else is reading and drives the herd into a few best selling titles. They publish all comers via CreateSpace creating a blizzard of white noise with millions of new titles. There is more disruption to come. AMZN is not going away, at least not soon. Given how Wall Street continues to finance them with virtually unlimited free money, much to my everlasting dismay, we have just begun to see what changes Amazon will bring. Jeff Bezos is the king of the hill of corporate competitors. We cannot beat him. Yet joining him is just another form of losing.
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Of course the world is ever changing and it appears that even though there is a growing winner take all phenomenon in the world of competition, there is a growing compensating factor in a robust nonprofit world. Three of our most admired publishing peers are in the Minneapolis area, Gray Wolf, Milkweed, and Coffee House. All three are nonprofit. And even though they presumably compete in their own backyard for funding, they are all raising a $million or two a year in contributions. Their titles are of the same high literary quality as ours and like us their experience is that book sales only cover about sixty percent of their costs. And yet they are getting award winning titles out that would never exist via Amazon alone. Donors are teaming up on the side of quality and diversity and nonprofit corporations are making the most of it.
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Maybe even some nouveau rich AMZN investor will want to share his spoils and make a contribution.
It is a cloudy night in July on the Colorado Plateau as it has been for most of the 10 days and nights I have been in Torrey. Yesterday it rained 1.3 inches, an impressive amount in a place that averages under ten inches per year. The clouds make for a good time to post the object I acquired last month around the time of the new moon.
SV80ST set up with ring mounts holding the guide scope and guide camera on top. Telrad star finder on far side.
As I posted earlier, this past March Kirsten and I drove to California to meet with our new author Sasha Paulsen in Napa. On the way back I pulled over in Auburn to grab a cup of coffee and casually mentioned over lattes that there was a small telescope manufacturer in town called Stellarvue. Kirsten whipped out her smart phone, looked them up, called the owner Vic Maris and told him we would be over shortly. What is a guy to do but to buy a new telescope? The Stellarvue SV80ST-25SV is a refracter scope (my (Dad’s) C8 is a reflector) with an 80 mm front aperture and a 480 mm focal length making it an f-6 speed. The fully multi-coated 3 element objective lens are why it is called a triplet. The three lenses and the coatings make it apochromatic, thus APO, and low light dispersion. In some of my recent captures I used my 80mm guide scope as the camera lens and the C8 as the guide scope. I was getting bloated stars with noticeable blue halos. See my Rosette Nebula for an example. It made for a pretty but sloppy picture by current amateur standards. I liked the wide field to fit the larger nebulae and star groups into the frame but was getting tired of the compromised results. The Stellarvue seriously cleans all that up.
We ordered the telescope, a field flattener and some mounting hardware and headed for Salt Lake. A week or two later one of Vic’s techs called me to say the telescope was done and ready to ship and that it had come out with nearly perfect scores on their bench test. So much more cool than ordering a China made scope from Amazon.
Lagoon and Trifid Nebula in Sag, six hour exposure, June 18-19. 2015
The first night out with the new scope I tried to find the Elephant Trunk nebula (IC1396) but it was not an object I could see with the finder scope and I couldn’t even tell on the first photographs if I was getting it. I think I did, but it was very vague and I decided to go for something easy, a nebula viewable with the naked eye on a dark night, the Lagoon nebula and its neighbor nebula to the north, the Trifid. The nebulae are both in the constellation Sagittarius a bit above the teapot’s spout. Both are thought to be four to six thousand light years away. The Lagoon and the lower red part of the Trifid are both star forming regions. The Trifid, the upper nebula in this image, is a combination of an open cluster, an emission nebula — the red portion like the Lagoon — and a reflection nebula, the blue portion. An emission nebula is caused by ionized gasses that emit light and a reflection nebula are clouds of interstellar dust reflecting the light of the bright, young, nearby stars.
I captured this image over two nights for a total of six hours of exposure. I am a little disappointed what little difference the second night’s three hours added to the first night’s. But I remain happily dismayed by the power of the free software I use to stack the separate frames all together in one image. In this case the the software not only has to combine all the sub-frames but also has to line up the slightly different framing of the images from the first night to the second. No problem.
Sky plot from Astrobin.
I borrowed the star chart on the left from another free website called Astrobin.com. You can see the first nights capture posted on Astrobin here. The amazing magic of that site is that it takes the posted image, identifies where it is located on a star chart and names the objects contained in the image.
Technicals
The six hour exposure is made up of the first night of 60 three minute sub-frames with an ISO of 1600 and the second night of 90 two minute sub-frames at 800 ISO. The table below again borrowed from Astrobin (first night data only):
On the same night I experimented with a new very wide angle 14mm lens (generous wife again) to capture a Milky Way panorama over the house. That post next time.
That’s funny, when we went to bed last night there were four boats.
It is not an adventure until something you would rather not happen happens. And you always want a good adventure. So it was good of two of our boat owners to oblige.
On a Thursday in mid June Kirsten and I drove from Torrey to the Sand Island campground in Bluff to meet up with a gang of pals from Durango. We arrived in the evening before the others and happily found plenty of camp sites available. Kirsten had her usual picnic feast ready and we sat at a table by the river noticing above all else a lot of water. Everything was damp and the river was swollen above its banks. We have had a wet May and June in the Southwest and the San Juan Mountains still had a lot of snow. Add the recent unseasonal rains and the river that in mid May had been running at 1800 cubic feet per second was now at 8,000 cfs. In fact we had experienced two separate pulses of moisture from tropical storms already by mid June, an unprecedented event for so early in the year. Global weirding.
Ronni and Mark
Not wanting to take any chances I brought our camp stove and coffee pot for the first morning even though it was planned that a grab and go breakfast would be ready. The grab and go food was great but our coffee pot was mysteriously popular. I went with Ronni, our venerable boat captain, down to her camper to get her crew sized coffee pot but we seemed a tad slow in getting coffee going in it. We never did.
With the river high it was also fast. We only floated five miles the first day but stopped often to visit several terrific petroglyph panels including Butler Wash and another massive wall near our camp site. During the day the two adult sons, Sean and Casey, joked with their dad Mark about his paranoia about losing his boat. The next morning on the river Sean woke us up early saying we needed to get going. Their dad’s boat had disappeared during the night, “no joke.” Minus one.
Breezy camp dinner.
Rose and Sean
We hustled to get going but still lined up eagerly for coffee at the well stocked camp kitchen. Tristen offered Kirsten some tea. Kirsten said no thanks, I’ll have coffee. Without missing a beat Tristen said, “The coffee went down the river. Would you like some tea?” Ah, missing a boat is no problem, kinda fun in fact, assuming we find it. But no coffee? Minus two. .
Casey, a young man born for action and endurance was already headed downstream on a paddle-board by 6:30AM when we got up. We were on the river by nine and floated the remaining 22 miles to our planned takeout for the next day at Mexican Hat. It was a fast and beautiful trip. When we got to Mexican Hat Casey was there waiting for us. Besides one oar tangled in the flooded brush there had been no sign of the boat. We pulled all but one of the boats out while Mark and Casey took that boat on down the next 55 miles to the next and last takeout before the river runs a waterfall and meets its doom at Lake Powell.
Jeff and Tristen
Back in Torrey we learned they found the boat tied up another seven miles down the river. We had Ronni, who coincidentally has recently moved to Teasdale, over for dinner in Torrey. We only found out then from Ronni that the chief menu planner, who’s name I omit to protect the guilty, had forgotten to pack the coffee. Totally minus two. Adventure indeed. A regular bullet past the head. Was the lost boat a mere ruse to cover up? Be careful what you wish for. Good times. Thanks to all who made it happen.
Admiring the empty beach.
Tegan
The Caineville Wash west of Hanksville on the way back to Torrey, normally dry. More signs of weird weather.
I was inspired to shoot this object with about twice the usual exposure by Scott Rosen of Astronomers Do It In the Dark.com. You can see his award winning image of the same object here. Scott primarily uses the same Celestron C8 Schmidt–Cassegrain reflector telescope that I use and he seems to be well known in the amateur astro-photography world. So much for excuses. He has the same general equipment but also obviously possesses some processing skills and software I don’t have. But one other factor I noticed is that he gets in a lot of exposure time, usually two to four times as much as I have been getting. On this shot I got about six hours and tried for nine but, as Joni Mitchell might say, clouds got in the way.
I realized another technology step to make shooting life a little easier. Rather than traipsing back out during the shoot to see if all the tech goodies are properly functioning I started using TeamViewer on an iPad to stay on the couch and check on the PC running the show out in the driveway. Better to prolong a nap until shooting is completed.
The Sombrero Galaxy is a spiral galaxy with an unusual central bulge and a prominent dark dust lane, thus the sombrero moniker, and is known to have a super massive black hole at its center. The light that reached my little camera sensor is about 28 million years old. M104 is located in the constellation Virgo.
My M104 Sombrero image is a six hour and three minute exposure made up of 121 three minute subs. I used 20 flat, dark and bias frames.
• Lens: Celestron Orange Tube C8 Schmidt-Cassegrain, 8″ diameter, focal length 80.0″ (2032mm), f/10 with f/6.3 reducer
• 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: 1600
• Location: Torrey, UT
• Date: 4/18-20/2015
• Guiding software: BackyardEOS, PHD Guiding
• Calibration: Deep Sky Stacker
• Processing: Photoshop CS5, Picasa
Note to self – get out more. I have never gone out less than since we started an environment oriented publishing company. We did manage to get out this week for a short hike. These shots are up Big Cottonwood Canyon in the Wasatch Mountains in early June. The trail moves quickly into the Mt. Olympus Wilderness Area, one of Utah’s first wilderness areas. Signs remind you that logging and grazing have been eliminated for 100 years and the place is riotous with spring life and growth. There is nothing like this in the southern Utah national forests where logging and grazing still run rampant.
Darlene Avery hiked with us. She was in town from Colorado Springs to prep for Kirsten’s daughter’s wedding. I will have to formulate my thoughts to express more but we spent some good time talking about loss, being, becoming, and beauty. Some of the time was with a camera. These are shots with my brother’s point and shoot.
I hope to go back up and shoot more of the abundance and compare with the forests in southern Utah.
This weekend is a three day river trip on the San Juan River.
Kirsten and drove the A6 to Truckee and then on to Napa and Pt. Reyes leaving Saturday March 28 and back to Salt Lake the next Friday. Kirsten was meeting with our latest author, Sasha Paulsen for an editing session on Dancing on the Spider’s Web. Now back in SLC I notice that I did not take many photos and did not take any notes. Thinking about it I decided to combine this blog with my previous entries from THP Green Adventures and change the site title here to Notes and Shots. I will use it both as a travel and conservation journal in the blog and a place to keep my best photos in the galleries. That way I can feel more free to take notes and shots without thinking they need to be interesting and good enough for National Geographic. Even though I will make the site available to the public I think of the audience as my kids, Kristen and Nick, my uncle, Ted Kehl, and maybe my grand-kids some day. Hi guys.
View of tidal Napa River from our room
Truckee was conspicuous with the absence of snow. No shots, but resorts that look like they should be closed with mostly dirt showing still have skiers working their way down presumably man made snow ribbons. California’s Gov. Brown ordered mandatory water use reductions for the first time in the state’s history while we were there. Residents are required to cut back, but big farms, which use 80% of the water, are only required to write reports — but that may be another blog.
In Napa we continued with my suggestion that Kirsten find us nice places to stay and not tell me what they cost. Works in the short run, time will tell about the finances. We had dinner that night with Sasha and her adult daughter Ariel at an equally elegant place nearby. The food in Marin county is nonstop amazing. I was thinking that I would throttle back while away from the fridge, but not-so-much.
On Monday we met up in Petaluma with Lise Soloman, our Torrey House Consortium sales rep with Karel/Dutton Group, and drove up to Sebastopol to have lunch with Sheryl Cotleur, the adult book buyer for Copperfield’s Books. Both women are a forces in books sales. Lise is credited by author Paul Harding as the impetus behind his winning a Pulitzer for his debut novel Tinkers. Tinkers was published by a sister publisher at Consortium, Bellevue Literary Press. Kirsten and I always say the best thing about publishing is the people and with women like these two out there we will keep saying it. At one point during lunch I told Sheryl about how our author Mary Sojourner feels no hope about the West and conservation. Mary gave that response when asked about Stegner’s phrase, “The geography of hope.” I told Sheryl how Mary thinks writing about nature and the West is dead and wondered if she agreed. Sheryl sat back and said she “100 percent” did not agree. She encouraged us to keep going and started telling us we needed to meet Steve Costa and Kate Levinson, owners of Pt. Reyes Books and asked if we had ever been there. In fact, that is where we were going next anyway.
Our B&B in Pt. Reyes
Kirsten had already made another excellent arrangement at a B&B in the small town of Inverness in Pt. Reyes. We poked our heads in the bookstore but Steve and Kate were out. Fabulously, Sheryl and Lise had forewarned them we were heading their way. Kirsten left a card at the bookstore and Steve and Kate got back to her asking us to please come by. When we showed up the next day they interrupted some poor sales rep’s pitch to say hello, suggested that we should have dinner together, and even insisted that we should do so at their home and stay with them. There goes those great publishing people again. The Bailey in me was appalled at the imposition, but of course it all turned out great. I hope somehow we can return the favor with a stay in Torrey.
At dinner with Kate and Steve we asked them a lot of questions about their biannual conference. It seemed natural that Terry Tempest Williams had been involved in the area for some time including with the conference. The most recent called The 2015 Geography of Hope Conference after Wallace Stegner’s phrase in his Wilderness Letter — major sections of which were read at Kirsten’s and my wedding. Kate and Steve were our kind of nice, smart people but way, way ahead of us in the world of connections and conferences. Kate encouraged us to stay regional if we try a conference and perhaps to consider starting with just the LDS enviro authors we are interested in supporting.
K’s smart phone shot of Shell Beach
Point Reyes was astonishing. On the last morning, April 2, a day before my brother’s would be birthday, at sunrise on Shell Beach near Steven and Kate’s place I was overwhelmed by the beauty and the loss of Mike. Mike, the world is beautiful, it is worth protecting, and I wish you were here to help.
The Horsehead Nebula is part of the vast Orion Nebula complex. Just below the first star in Orion’s belt the head itself is actually a dust cloud obscuring the bright red nebula behind it. This dark molecular cloud is about 1500 light years away.
It was pretty much a perfect night for viewing in Torrey. 35 degrees and wind mostly calm. Later there seemed to be some high thin clouds but for most of the time I was out the sky was black, the Milky Way was prominent, the stars were so bright that even with no moon I could see my shadow, and Orion ruled. It was the kind of night where there are so many stars it is hard to pick out the constellations. 35 degrees is not quite cold enough that I wear insulated pants, but I do have on thick hiking boots, a puffy down parka I bought in maybe 1976 with the hood up over a ski hat, a headlamp set to red light, and finger-less fishing gloves. I still get a little chilly.
I usually set up to the east of my home in Torrey in the driveway in order to stay out of the prevailing westerly winds. The house is 2 stories high there and is an effective wind break but also gets in the way of viewing. I didn’t quite have 2 hours left to shoot after I set up before the belt wheeled behind the roof.
The Horsehead image is a one hour and 45 minute exposure made up of 21 five minute subs. I used 8 flat and dark frames and forgot to get the bias shots.
This is my first deep sky object capture in a while and the first after modifying my camera to accept more red in the Ha wavelength. This cosmic rose is about 5,000 light years away near Orion in Monoceros. The red is nebula matter (hydrogen?) that is heated up by the hot stars in the center of the Rosette which formed from the same matter. I love the feedback loop here, sort of like we mortals becoming conscious. The stars form from the cosmic matter and then shine back on it, making it beautiful. The stardust that is we humans becomes conscious and looks out on the heavens, becoming the cosmos aware of itself, and is beautiful.
I tried to get this picture Sunday night but got blanked out by a strange, stuck cloud. A rare failure in the forecast by the amazing Mr. A. Danko at ClearDarkSky.com. As part of the weird weather we are having (very weird, exactly as predicted by the global warming models), the jet stream is distorted and was blasting down with much turbulence in the upper atmosphere out of due north and created a standing lenticular cloud exactly in the way of where I needed to observe. Monday night was much better although it did not clear up until after dusk. Good of it. In fact, Monday night was great, clear and calm, but a surprisingly cold 24 degrees. For the first time the laptop PC I was using to run the exposures quit on me at the end of the session, apparently from cold, and would not start back up. I took it inside for half an hour, fired it up, and was able to go back out and get the rest of the compensating sub frames (darks, flats and bias).
This exposure is what the hobbyists call “first light.” I recently sent my Canon Rebel T1i off to Gary Honis for his full spectrum modification which replaces the internal stock infrared filter with a special clear glass filter. Many nebula have a red wavelength called hydrogen-alpha that is filtered out by the stock camera filter. I chose the Rosette as my first object to gather some of that red I was missing. In fact, in an attempt years ago to acquire the Rosette with my stock Canon 10D, I either missed the thing altogether, something that is entirely possible, or all the red was filtered out.
I shot through the guide-scope and guided with the normal telescope, the reverse of what is normal. The guide-scope is a relatively simple and inexpensive telescope that is not meant for astrophotography. The stars are much fatter and distorted than they would be and the little blue circles around the stars are from the various color wavelengths not converging all in the same place. Still, as long as you aren’t experienced at such efforts, the end result is purty.
This exposure is 2 hours and 32 minutes comprised of 4 minute subs and using 8 each of darks, flats and bias frames.
