Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

IT SURVIVED ITS THIRD LUNAR NIGHT!

Now, this is a probe/lander that HAS NO HEATERS. It was not expected to survive ONE lunar night, much less two. And now it has survived THREE!

The little enginespace probe that could!

It is degrading, of course. Batteries and sensors are failing. But what do you expect? It is so far beyond its operational lifetime and parameters, this is inevitable. But the fact that it is not totally dead is simply amazing.

Now will we see it come back to life after the fourth night? Time will tell.

I recommend clicking on the comments section, they're quite amusing.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/25/slim_another_lunar_night/

The failure has been discovered: its altimeter failed! That's kind of bad when you're trying to land a rocket.

They tried to coopt a NASA experiment that was on-board, but it was only partially successful. The lander believed that "it was about 100 meters higher relative to the Moon than it actually was. So instead of touching down with a vertical velocity of just 1 meter per second and no lateral movement, Odysseus was coming down three times faster and with a lateral speed of 2 meters per second."

Whoops! The hard hit and the lateral skid caused one of the landing legs to snap, which resulted on its tipping over on its side. Still, as they say when landing aircraft, any landing you can walk away from!

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/02/it-turns-out-that-odysseus-landed-on-the-moon-without-any-altimetry-data/


The other news is that the Japanese lander, SLIM, woke up after a lunar night! Keep in mind that the moon alternates between extremely hot and extremely cold in its day/night cycle. The night is -133c, or -208f! Pretty darn brisk! These probes aren't typically designed to handle that level of cold. The Russian probes that did had radioactive thermal generators and a clamshell covering so they could turtle-up when it got dark and hunker down, then open up again when it warmed up. SLIM? Not so much. Like the Indian probe, it was designed for a short life in the sun, then they expected it to die. The Indian probe did not survive the cold. But apparently SLIM did!

After the night cycle ended, they sent a ping to the probe and it responded! While the rovers it dispersed are probably dead, the lander itself has cameras and sent back some pix. They powered it down to standby as it's pretty hot right now (over 200f!) but the fact that it survived and they will still get some data from it is pretty awesome.

It will be interesting to see how many day/night cycles it will survive. They must have have parts of it built by Timex and Toyota. ;-)

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/26/world/japan-moon-sniper-slim-wakes-up-images-scn/index.html

The fire danger in the forest has gone to extreme - the highest level. I haven't looked at the fuel index, I am assuming it's not good. As far as I know, we're not under 5 minute evacuation orders.

The joy of living in a national forest!

For people new to my blog, my wife is an astronomer, and observatories, for the most part, are located at high altitude in remote places to minimize light and air pollution mucking up observations. Kinda makes sense, neh?

We're in the Lincoln National Forest, the home of Smokey Bear (Smokey The Bear is incorrect usage). The observatory has a sweetheart lease, something on the order of $100 a year from the government since it's a non-profit science operation. Now the forest service is demanding that if a fire breaks out anywhere near the observatory, or possibly ANYWHERE IN the Lincoln National Forest, that the observatory takes responsibility for it! The attorneys for the consortium that owns and operates the observatory are looking into the lease terms and seeing about this. It's pretty ridiculous, as they are very conscientious about how they operate: when the fire danger is high they take extreme precautions, smokers are required to smoke in their private vehicles, etc.

So basically they may shut down ALL observatory operations until monsoon season starts! With the exception of basic maintenance, such as filling instruments with liquid nitrogen, site inspections, etc.

Member institutions pay millions of dollars for access (sky time is roughly $1,000 an hour), and they're going to be losing a lot of time on sky because of this. They're not going to be happy, and there's going to be no way to pay them back. When time on sky is lost due to an instrument being broken, or the telescope breaks (motor controller, or who knows what), sometimes a member gets time paid back from engineering or other time holdbacks. But this could be a several week shutdown! Since all members will be affected more or less equally, paybacks just won't be possible and lots of science programs will be hit.

What's worse is it's likely some pre-empts like gamma ray bursts or possibly a new nova or supernova may be missed! This is when something new, unexepected and exciting happens and a proverbial shout goes out across the observatory community saying "Point your telescopes over THERE and gather as much data as you can because we don't know what the hell just happened!" Granted, novas are multi-year events, but GRBs can be very brief and need to have as much information gathered as fast as possible. Or targets like Venus: they can only be studied at certain times of the year! There's lots of objects like that.

Major suckage.

Summary: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single human in possession of a good space telescope, must be in search of a space vampire. Here, we showcase our search for transit signatures of tidally locked space vampires, trapped in the gravitational pull of late M-dwarfs. We generate forward models representing two potential space vampire populations - those in bat shape and those in humanoid shape. We search lightcurves from the Transiting Exo-Vampire Survey Satellite (TEvSS) using a template matching algorithm and fit them using our allesfitter software. Adding the information gained from TEvSS data, we greatly decrease the uncertainty for the existence and occurrence rates of space vampires, and constrain eta(space vampire) to a range of 0% to 100% (or more). These precise analyses will be crucial for optimizing future observing schedules for space-vampire characterization with the James Webb Space-Vampire Telescope (JWSvT) and the Extremely-Large-Vampire Telescopes (ELvTs).

You can download the paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.14345

(with my wife's pointing directions) She could pick it out in the twilight sky. I could maybe see it, I'm not 100% sure.






Sadly, these are the first two photos that I've posted this year! Well, in terms of creative photography.

We went to a pullout that should have had a good angle, but it had 8-10 cars, and the first person that I saw - before we got out of my wife's car - was not wearing a mask. So I said 'let's just go to the observatory.'

She relented and we went to the observatory.

We couldn't go inside the control room to visit until after sundown - visitors are no longer allowed except under extraordinary circumstances, and spouses are no longer extraordinary. So we went up on to one of the small telescope catwalks, and the angle was great! Excellent elevation to avoid trees and other obstacles. I took a number of shots, including bracketing to try HDR, but that didn't work: with 5-20 second exposures, there was too much star streak for automated HDR to be viable. I might work with it some more, but I like the results of these.

I tried another angle, trying to get one of the telescope domes into the shot, but it just wasn't viable. Maybe another night. I'd also like to try my 6D and see if I can get some less noisy shots with its better sensor.

They're kind of noisy, they were shot at an ISO of 6400, 10 seconds at f7.1 with a Canon SL1 using a remote control as a trigger. The lens is a Canon 75-300 zoom at 75mm. Minimal Photoshop post-processing.

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.)

We didn't head north to see the eclipse, circumstances and money just didn't work out, thus my wife swapped with a co-worker to cover part of his shift: she is an operator on the Dunn Solar Telescope at Sunspot, the National Solar Observatory, he works on my wife's 3.5 meter. Thus, he is a Vampire and she is a Day Walker. My wife slept through the event, I drove over to Sunspot and participated.

Right off the bat, I didn't do enough prep work. My biggest mistake was not ordering a filter for my camera well in advance of the event! Oh, well. On top of that, I didn't get my photo gear together yesterday, and in getting it together this morning as I was getting ready to leave, I found that my tripod head was missing! My second head has been missing for some time, so my primary tripod was out of commission. Fortunately I also have a travel tripod, so my experiment was able to proceed.

The second mistake that I made was failing to grab a new memory card. When we were in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago, I took my Canon SL1 in to Tempe Camera Repair, a fantastic repair shop that I've used for over 30 years, to get the sensor cleaned. In doing so I removed the strap, tripod head, and memory card. I put all three parts in the camera bag and somehow a black hole formed and only the strap survived. Fortunately I found another 32 gig SD card, unfortunately I left it sitting on the dining table. So I only had my Lumix and my 6D for shooting with.

The experiment was thus, and probably a failure: in a forest area, such as where I live, an eclipse through tree leaves can have the same effect as a pinhole and you can see it that way. Sounded pretty neat to me, so I set up my 6D with the interval timer firing every 15 seconds from when the eclipse began until it ended. I'm later going to suck the images in to iMovie and see what I've got. I just finished unloading and categorizing the photos from the two memory cards, and thought I'd post three photos of the eclipse which are mildly nifty.

These were all taken in a rather unconventional manner: holding the lens of the safety glasses in front of my hand-held Lumix LX7. I was experimenting with exposure and only got one image of the moon eating the sun, so I was content.

One of the awesome features of my Lumix is that you can adjust the aspect ratio of the photographs! I set it to 1:1 for some photos, such as the first. For the second photo, I cropped it in Photoshop to 1:1, otherwise none of the images were adjusted in Photoshop.

The weather was not good. We had lots of thick clouds, and I thought: clouds are diffusers! I can directly shoot the sun through clouds! And thus, the first image, taken at 10:56 MST:


This second shot is the actual moon eating the sun: (11:49:18 MST)


And finally, the dramatic fiery ball shot: (11:49:40 MST)

We had a monsoon storm system parked over the mountain for the last two weeks, and yesterday it finally broke! I was at the observatory until about 1:30am and am very happy with the results.


This first photo contains something interesting: the International Space Station! It was pure luck. I was testing everything before I told it to start shooting 30 second exposures forever (299 was the final image count) and it just so happened to catch the ISS! My wife pulled up a web site that maps your location over what satellites will be overhead on a specific date and time and we matched the time of the exposure and BINGO! I couldn't have caught that if I had tried.



This is a composition of 299 images. The little jag that you see at the beginning or end of a trace is the first two images of the ISS track. They were taken before I told the timer to have at it.

I was pleased to find that Photoshop CS6 had no problem accepting 299 layers in one PSD file, but it didn't like a file size greater than 2 gig. Once I flattened them, the file size dropped to 41 meg or so, well within Photoshop's capacity.



And finally, a video that I composed from the 299 still images. It's fun watching the dome of the 3.5 meter spin like a dervish. I showed it to my wife this afternoon and she said that she knew which slews those were. She was working with a group of on-site Chinese astronomers on a visiting instrument, so she was the one choosing targets for them in an attempt to keep the dome slit out of the wind: their instrument was very sensitive to the slightest breeze.


And I'll tell you, I LOVE MY NEW IMAC! It's not the utmost latest which just came out this week, it's a Late 2015 with a 4 GHz i7, and this thing handled sucking those 299 images and turning them in to a movie or making them in to Photoshop layers or flatening them with absolute zero difficulty.

I shot these about 3 hours ago, got home a little while ago and did a little bit of Photoshop on them. The exposures are 30 seconds at f4: the clouds were moving pretty fast. These were shot with my Canon 6D with the 17-40 zoom at 17mm

The telescope is the Sloan 2.5 meter, not my wife's 3.5.

More telescope photos, and others, at Wayne West Photography.com.