Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Well, it did a heck of a job of rutting up this steep down-hill sort road in front of our house, that's for sure! Fortunately the Village sent out a grader to smooth it out and repair a big pothole at the bottom corner.

Our fire danger, according to the sign at the bottom of the mountain, was Extreme, #5 on the scale, as of Wednesday when I headed home. Thursday afternoon, Russet forwarded me an email, from her boss, from the Nat'l Forest Service, that the forest was reopening! And when I went home yesterday evening, it was down to #2!

Major woots!

Today driving in to work, all of the barricades blocking forest access had been removed, I guess forest workers were busy yesterday afternoon, last night and this morning!

This is a major relief because we've had a lot of major fires here in New Mexico, I'm guessing the rains have helped a lot.

Now we just have to contend with getting the telescope's mirror re-aluminized. Kitt Peak in Tucson, Arizona just got singed: three buildings destroyed - a dormitory, cafeteria, and residence. Road damaged, power lines damaged. So they're going to be seriously degraded for a significant amount of time. They were the normal site to get Apache Point's 3.5 meter mirror re-aluminized, but they've been putting Apache Point off for some time, to the point that yet again the 3.5 is not going to get serviced this year! This will now be 3-4 years PAST the point that it should have been done! The mirror is now looking quite disgusting. I think the current coating will be 7-9 years old before it gets redone! The next closest mirror lab is FLAGSTAFF, Arizona, and there are some serious logistics to getting there. And you'll love this - the next closest lab may be HAWAII.

That's just unimaginable if they had to ship the mirror to Hawaii. That would be probably three months the telescope would be out of action! And then if something happened to the ship and it were lost at sea?! Catastrophe! The telescope would be out of action for a few YEARS! The entire crew would be lost to other opportunities! All that institutional knowledge lost! Total chaos, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... MASS HYSTERIA!

Never pass up the opportunity to use a good Ghostbusters line, even if it is nigh unto 40 years old. :-)


Oh, another amusing thing happened at the observatory this week. They received an instrument from [CENSORED]. It was mounted on the telescope, and the controller issued some unexpected low-level commands to the telescope controllers and they effing BROKE THE TELESCOPE! They caused mirror actuators on the secondary and tertiary mirrors to throw fits and seize up and they couldn't recover them, and one point they thought they might have to disassemble the tertiary mirror! Eventually they were able to get both mirrors to behave, but it was a close-run thing.

Fortunately the weather was so wretched that they haven't been able to open for over a week and [CENSORED] lost all their time on the sky! Serves the bat rastards right for screwing up the telescope!

OH! Another story about these yoinks! This one is great!

So the telescope enclosure is built on three levels. The ground story is sort of an equipment shop. Air compressors, electrical panels and conduits, network cabling (fiber optics) enter at this point. Stairs go up to the intermediate level. Concrete pylon rises through the middle which is the telescope's resting post.

Intermediate level is where the top level is suspended from. All sorts of electronics here for the telescope's instruments, cryogenic cooling systems, atomic clock, GPS systems, motor for moving the dome and the round railroad tie that the dome sits on, the telescope collar that it actually rotates on, etc.

Now here's the important thing. A telescope rotates on its axis, right? The azimuth. It points up and down in altitude, rotates on its azimuth. Called alt/az. But you have a tonne of cables feeding up through the azimuth up to the top. You can't unlimited spin the telescope around, or you'd rip up all the electronic equipment! You're limited to approx 500 degrees of movement before the telescope has to un-spin and release the tension on all the cables.

Makes sense, right?

On the intermediate level, there's two parts to the room. And this is VERY important. You see, the roof is part of the upper level: IT MOVES. THE FLOOR DOES NOT MOVE.

This bears repeating.

THE CEILING MOVES. THE FLOOR DOES NOT MOVE.

Because of this, electronics related to the telescope level are suspended by the ceiling because their wiring are fed up through the roof. Also, there is a guard rail around the room keeping people casually away from the boxes around the side of the room. It's easy enough to get around them if you need to work on them, and there are telescope motor lockout buttons if you work there to prevent the telescope/dome motors from moving when you're working on equipment.

So. To review. Electric/electronic cabling goes up through the telescope pedestal, equipment is suspended from the floor of the telescope, making it the ceiling of the intermediate level, and the telescope can rotate on its azimuth no more than about a full turn and a half or so before it has to counter-rotate to de-spool.

Remember the group from [CENSORED]?

My wife worked with them on-site Monday, Tuesday, and most of Wednesday. With her was a part-time grad student from NMSU. He comes into the control room and tells Russet that you need to come upstairs and see something.

That's never a good sign!

The yahoos from [CENSORED], on the intermediate level, UNBEKNOWNST to Russet, had installed some electronic equipment on the intermediate level. And run conduit up to the ceiling pass-through, apparently stringing cable to their instrument on the telescope level.

Their equipment was sitting on the floor.

And the telescope had been merrily turning back and forth all night long!

Cabling was stretched and draped all over the place.

Fortunately nothing was damaged, though it was close to pulling on some switches which could have had some Consequences. It hadn't even pulled out of [CENSORED]'s boxes! Apparently they'd had A LOT of slack sitting there! They got really lucky!

*sigh*

All they had to do was put it in a cabinet that was already suspended. There's several cabinets that have open space, ready to be used. All they had to do was talk to the day staff engineers. But no, they had to be sneaky bastards and do things without talking to the people on-site. And make a mess, and potentially damage very expensive things.

Ysabette and I were discussing everyday superpowers, AKA extreme cleverness, and I mentioned the Boxing Glove Telescope, then set about trying to find a photo.

And lo....



Perhaps slightly oversaturated? Taken in 2004 with a Canon Digital Rebel (350D), 6 megapixel camera.

Anyway, this is the Pluto Discovery Telescope at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. This is a plate telescope, not an optical telescope. The tube beneath the large diameter cylinder is a guiding telescope to ensure the telescope is pointing in the right direction, then you load a glass plate coated in a dried liquid emulsion in the plate holder of the upper cylinder. Open the dome, pop the cover off the telescope (if there was one, I don't remember, start the clock drive, remove the slide on the plate holder, and you're off to the races.

I'm going to be posting more photos of Lowell Observatory later, I thought I'd lost them: turned out I was looking in the wrong year! The important part is the boxing glove - when the telescope was at a high angle, astronomers were constantly bashing their head on that long rod, so someone grabbed a boxing glove and taped it to the arm.

Problem solved.

When I said 'clock drive' three paragraphs ago, I meant clock drive. It looks a lot like a cuckoo or grandfather/mother clock with a weight suspended from a chain. You would wind it up, flip a switch, and it would move the telescope along its right ascension/declination track, keeping it pointing at the same patch of sky for the duration of the plate exposure. When the time was up, or presumably just before, the astronomer would come back to the dome, put the dark slide back in to the plate holder, and replace that particular glass plate with another. When the evening's exposures were done, they'd go into a dark room and spend some time developing the plates, then spend MANY hours staring into a blink comparator, seeing if they could discover something.

I'll have pix of that later!

I just wanted to show the boxing glove.

Actually, there was one other clever thing that I wanted to show off: a 2004 pic of my wife pouring liquid nitrogen into a fruit juice bottle with the bottom cut off to refill an instrument. And yes, she has accidentally splashed the nitrogen and gotten it in her mouth. NOT recommended.



Think of using a magnifying glass to focus our sun on a piece of paper. Paper bursts into flame. Now use a 3.5 meter mirror to focus a sun on to a chip or detector. It has to be cooled. That requires either liquid nitrogen (LN) or an electronic cryogenic cooling system. That's what she's doing here. The LN systems generally have about a 14 hour hold time, so they can be refilled at the beginning and end of shift and they're OK, during the winter the day staff will fill them before they leave. The cryogenic systems are a brand name called Cryotigers and run through the instrument umbilical cords down to the dome's intermediate levels as they generate too much heat to keep them on the telescope level.

I went to the observatory so I knew exactly where the moon would be in the sky. First, two result photos. As always, click to embiggen.







Both photos are full-frame, uncropped. The only Photoshop work was to use levels to darken the midtones a bit and curves to darken the contrast a little. No sharpening. And, of course, convert to JPEG which does all sorts of little twitchy things by itself. Maybe I should have converted them to PNGs.

There is a visible size difference of the moon between the two images. The first is taken with my Canon Eos SL1 with a 75-300 image stabilized zoom at 300mm. it's an 18 megapixel camera. With the SL1's APS-C sensor, it multiplies the focal length by 1.6, turning the 300mm into an effective 480mm. The second image is taken with my Lumix ZS-70 at an effective optical lens focal length of 780mm, no digital zoom.

There's a few problems. First, the autofocus of the Lumix in conditions like this is is terrible compared to the Canon's. And the manual focus in low light absolutely SUUUUUCKS. That being said, it did OK. The Lumix was set on a tripod, and that's a problem because the moon is always moving and there's no way I'm going to be able to track it on a tripod - it's just not possible. If I had a telescope with motorized tracking, that would be different. But I don't. I'm tempted to set up one camera on a tripod in the dome of the 3.5 meter, and I might, I'm undecided on that.

And that introduces a second problem - exposure. As I mentioned in the preceding paragraph, the Lumix was on a tripod. The Canon - handheld. The moon - and this is a supermoon and is thus closer and brighter - is surprisingly bright. Believe it or not, these shots were taken at an ISO of 400 with a 1/2000th of a second shutter speed! I can hand-hold most exposures, but when the moon is in or near totality, it will be a problem as the moon will be darker and will require more exposure, I'll probably have to revert to the tripod.

Problem 2A - The height of the moon over the horizon. The moon is going to be awfully bloody high! My tripod cannot directly tilt that high. I have to employ two tricks to make it work so, tricks that I do not recommend to the casual photographer - I've been doing this for decades and I'm uncomfortable doing it myself! I have a right-angle eyepiece adapter that works with my 6D, I'm not certain it has adapters that'll work with my SL1.

Problem 2B - Can I find an exposure mode that'll work with a camera that I set up on the telescope level that will adapt when the moon enters/exits totality? Look at those two images. The moon occupies very little of the frame. Any auto-exposure mode won't cope well under those conditions, but will it if I dial in 3 or 4 f-stops of under-exposure? I'm not sure, I should have tested it tonight.

Problem 3 - It's going to be awfully effing cold! Doing these test shots, I couldn't wear gloves and operate the controls on the Lumix. The buttons are small, and the tripod was tilted waaay back to point upwards. Even with the LCD touchscreen tilted back, I had to take my gloves off to try to use it, which was an exercise in futility.

I might be able to wear a medium thickness glove on my left hand and a light glove on my right with the SL1. But the temperature was just below freezing, and when I went into the control room, the wind was giving me an effective wind chill of 17-20f. My clothing was good enough, but my hands were freezing!

Now, this is my first rodeo - I've never photographed a lunar eclipse before. I knew that I didn't really have the right equipment for it: I need a much longer telephoto. Sigma now has a 60-600 zoom: that would fit my needs, and assuming it's good - and Sigma does make good glass - I could see investing $2,000 in something like that - eventually. But I also need a telescope with tracking. That's several hundred dollars. And I need to rig up an external power supply for whichever camera I'm going to use, which is a hundred or so for an external battery grip, then modifying it so that I can run a cable to external rechargeable batteries. And I might have to create a heating system: most cameras don't like to operate in below freezing temperatures, I know the display in my Lumix goes nuts when the air temperature gets into the 20s.


I will get photos of the eclipse. I won't get an awesome photo series, but it will be a learning experience. Hopefully I won't get frostbite or pneumonia. ;-) And eventually I'll get a paying job, get some money saved up and some equipment purchased. The good thing is that I've been planning to get the battery grips and external batteries to pursue my star streak photography experiments, which illness prevented me from doing anything with last summer.

That's the nice thing about camera equipment: yes, some of the pieces are expensive, but it's rare that after getting it that you only use it for one thing. It's a pretty solid long-term investment, and the lenses last a long time and can be used (usually!) with future generations of the same family of camera bodies.


(Except there's this one thing that I REALLY want to do. It's slightly silly, and it would cost about $300, and I don't know if it'd be worth it, but I REALLY want to do it! You see, digital cameras are VERY sensitive to infrared. So sensitive, in fact, that they have a high-pass filter to block the IR and pass the higher, optical frequencies that we see to the imaging chip. I gave my dad my first DSLR, an original Canon Digital Rebel, 6 megapixels, that's kind of worthless as it's grossly superseded in performance, and he isn't using it, so I'm planning on taking it back. There's this camera shop that, for about $300, they'll take the camera apart, remove the high-pass filter, and re-focus and put it back together, making it a strictly IR camera. The results are very interesting! Here's two communities on LJ devoted to it, the former mostly Russian and fairly active, the latter hasn't had a post since 2013.)

This is 972 photographs, taken in aperture-priority mode at f4.5, ISO 1600 with an interval timer firing every second. The first frame was at 1/90th of a second, the final frames were 6 second exposures. The green light is many quadrillion photons of laser light on the secondary mirror on its way to retroreflectors on the moon.

I am REALLY enjoying my interval timer! Best inexpensive accessory that I've ever bought! Best expensive accessory would be my 17-40 zoom.



https://www.youtube.com/user/WayneWestPhotography

I was doing OK on the photography side, my main problem was not assembling the pile of photos correctly in Photoshop. Now I know how! Now I also know that I REALLY need to get an intervalometer! I shot these using an infrared remote release to trip the camera to do 30 second exposures (Canon 6D, full-frame 20ish megapixel, 17-40 zoom at 17mm, f4.5 at 30 seconds, ISO 800), but was inconsistent with firing at precise 30 second intervals and that's what causes the little 'dot breaks' in the streaks. Theoretically I can use my laptop as an intervalometer, so that's something that I'll experiment with tomorrow and I'll (maybe) come back to the observatory tomorrow night and try again.

This is my wife's telescope, the 3.5 meter. The structure to the right is the 'arcade' that connects the operations/administrative building to the telescope.


The telescope on the left is the Sloan 2.5 meter, in front you again see the 3.5 meter, the two smaller domes are the NMSU 1 meter and the ARCSAT 0.5. The rightmost building is the dome/barn for the Sloan 2.5: it's on railroad ties and is moved away from the telescope when the telescope is opened.


Getting Polaris almost centered in that shot was sheerest luck.

Another view of the Sloan 2.5.


Unfortunately for the last set I only got 7 images for 3.5 minutes duration before they had to temporarily shut the telescope down for a cartridge swap. The slight blur was because they were slewing the telescope to point to where I was, prior to pointing the telescope straight up for the cartridge change. But all telescopes are always constantly moving, albeit ever so slowly, so getting a perfectly crisp shot of one probably means that it's not tracking and it's a totally staged shot.

Since this was just a test-run, I wanted to go inside and do the post-processing to see how things worked out.

And I was pleased.

How about from the telescope level of a 3.5 meter telescope. Yeah, it works in my book.

Half of my wife's job is as the senior observing specialist of said telescope at Apache Point Observatory. The other half is bouncing a 1.21 jigowatt laser off of five retroreflectors on the moon, three left behind by Apollo astronauts and two attached to Russian robotic probes.

Right now it's below 30f with the wind gusting at 30 MPH, and the eclipse is in totality. I've seen eclipses before, but this is much cooler. By being at an observatory, a real one that does science, you're guaranteed to be away from most light pollution, so the viewing quality is much higher. And tonight's a full moon with the eclipse, and the change in the visible star field as the eclipse has progressed and the reflected light level has dropped has been really interesting. All of the high magnitude stars begin to pop out almost like it were a new moon.

I'm working with two other spotters, we watch for aircraft that might fly in to the beam while it's lasing. The beam won't damage the aircraft or the pilot's eyes, but it might cause a loss of night vision. Since we have three, we're up for 40 minutes then we rotate one person and they're down for 20 minutes. It's still pretty brutal cold.

Aside from seeing all the stars come out for totality, the thing that I'm finding most interesting is that as the eclipse progressed towards totality, the shadow moved from about 7:00 to 1:00 relative motion across the moon, and as it comes out of totality, it's moving from about 11:00 to 5:00. I know it's because of the motions of the earth and moon, the moon was rising early on and is now setting, etc., but it's still cool.

This eclipse is rather special in that it's happening on the solstice, which coincides every 400 years or so. And because it's an eclipse, it also is a unique photographic opportunity, which I'll talk about in another post as it's 4am, the eclipse is over, and I'M GOING TO GO HOME SOON! Spotting for six hours is rough!