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December 30, 2008
More cookie crumbles It's been a bad year for cookies. Following up on my “Mother's Cookies are gone” post of Nov. 24: Every year, it's been one of the Christmas traditions of myself and a few expat Chicago friends to seek out and buy an old childhood favorite, Maurice Lenell cookies. We've found these in such far-flung locales as Southern California and Colorado. Local drug store chains carry them in a one-pound “holiday tub.” This year, I had to go to half a dozen different drug stores before I found a chain that carries them. I've gone through two and a half tubs already, with one and a half to go. Now word comes from Jeff Duntemann that Maurice Lenell is closing its Chicago bakery and outlet store; it was one of his childhood memories too.
Returning from shopping safaris with her friends, my mom used to bring back cookies from that place. The Chicago Tribune carried the story. Well, it doesn't sound like they're going bankrupt (not again; did that already), and there is some hope they will be back, selling cookies online and in new Chicago factory-owned stores. WGN story. With video. Says they went bankrupt a year ago, and the new owners are moving operations to Indiana with a possible retail location in Chicago. Who do we blame? Wait! I know! Bring out the Usual Suspects! Let's blame... Bank of America. Who pulled the rug from under the cookies, as it were. Funny, they seem to be happy to line up at the public trough to pig out when it's their bacon on the line, but are less eager to do what it is that banks are supposed to do – lend money (presumably to good risks, and not to bad risks which is how they got in this fix in the first place). BofA is one of the major recipients of Federal bailout money under that asinine “Troubled Asset Relief Program” – $15 billion, about the same as the annual NASA budget. But the idiots who rushed through this “emergency bailout” didn't say that the money was supposed to be used to prime the money pump that hands out loans (which, it seems to me, was the whole point of the exercise). BofA got their bailout just days after they bought up failed Merrill Lynch at a fire-sale price. And then they used their new free cash to invest... in China. Swine. Just... swine. Folks, if you bank with BofA, it's partly your fault. Take your money elsewhere. That's what I did with my Washington Mutual accounts (September 30 entry) – not because they screwed anybody or any company I knew, but because they were fundamentally incompetent. Adam Smith's Invisible Hand of the free market needs a little help to do its stuff. As individuals, it is in our long-term self interest, and our civic duty, to take an active role and consciously punish corrupt and incompetent businesses by taking our money and our business elsewhere. To do otherwise only provides positive reinforcement for bad behavior. It's times like this that I can see the rationale of the French Revolution. Only, instead of the guillotine in a public square, I propose... auctioning off slots on the firing squad to the highest bidders on Ebay. TV rights could go to ESPN, CNN, or Court TV, for example. Meanwhile, I will eat cake. And cookies. This means I have to go by the local Rite-Aid and stock up. And if they are going away forever, then that last tub will have the same sad memories as that last bag of Mother's Cookies. (Which I'm still hoarding – does this mean that when a second cookie company folds, it's a signal that it's time to finish off the last of the previous folded cookie company's wares?)
December 29, 2008 Work in progress: Thor's Helmet Current astro imaging project: Thor's Helmet (aka the Duck Nebula), NGC 2359 in Canis Major, near the brightest star in our skies, Sirius. This is a stack of 38 four-minute exposures through an Astronomik Oxygen III filter, Meade DSI II Pro on Vixen ED80Sf, automatically tracked by a 12” Meade LX200GPS. Next set: same thing through Hydrogen alpha filter.
December 27, 2008 Remembering other Christmases – the Illinois Science Christmas Lectures Back in the 1970s, I attended a few of the “Illinois Science Lecture Association” Christmas lectures at the Chicago (on the Gold Coast) campus of Northwestern University. As near as I can tell, the annual Chrismas Lecture was the ISLA's sole reason for existence. But they (better said she – the affairs were organized by one Miss Letitia Lestina) always offered a top-notch scientist, in a different field each year, talking about their work. There's very little to be found on the web anymore, but here is one page by a fellow who also went through the Astro-Science Workshop at the Adler Planetarium, several years ahead of me. (He says he was in sixth grade, which was exceptional; I only knew high school kids when I was in it).
So that's how it started. I had no idea.
Yes. Add Herman Bondi to that list. I remember the lecture by Philip Morrison, year uncertain; 1973? '74? '75? Anybody could attend the lectures, and in the question-and-answer session after the lecture, a well-known Chicago crank (technical term) named Arthur J. Johnson stood up and asked some rambling question about Velikovsky's bumper-car theory of Solar System evolution. Morrison handled it deftly, something along the lines of “Well, that's an alternative theory that we don't have time to get into right now. Next question!” Johnson, as a visitor, used to cruise the corridors of the Adler Planetarium and try to snare anybody and everybody into listening to his out-of-plumb theories of the Universe. Here's an example. Drs. Philip and Phylis Morrison authored a 1987 PBS series and book titled The Ring of Truth, basically on how we know what we know; imagine that, prime-time epistemology! Maybe not all TV is a wasteland after all! (On second thought, whenever the local PBS station has a pledge drive built around 1950s doo-wop groups, it only confirms Minow's Vast Wasteland Model of Broadcast Content). For many years, the Morrisons wrote the book reviews section of Scientific American. Alas, like the “Amateur Scientist” column (anybody remember the flap about well-known tech writer Forrest Mims, and his firing for being a “creationist”? Which had absolutely nothing to do with his ability to do his job; the story is in that link), “Mathematical Recreations” (which ran its natural course until Martin Gardner's retirement, replaced by “Metamagical Games”), and James Burke's “Connections” page, the Morrisons, too, fell victim to the magazine's “redesign” and intellectual mutilation. With many magazines, “redesign” and “restructuring” basically means hiring (at best) undergrad kids out of college, for cheap, to generate the verbiage to pad out the blank pages between the ads. (The real-world version of the infinite number of monkeys on the infinite number of typewriters). Many people have noted and lamented the dumbing down of Scientific American. Here's an example. The magazine often forgets the first word of its title. Example:
They've always been a bit preachy but that goes over the line. Such an article has as little business in a science magazine as the teaching of creationism in a biology class – or, vice versa, teaching evolution in Sunday School. Anyway, on cold, rainy or snowy winter days like we've had this past week, I think back to that time, the way things were then, and that warm academic atmosphere – was it Abbott Hall? – of the ISLA Christmas Lectures.
December 24, 2008 Remembering a Christmas past Forty years ago this Christmas eve, three humans for the first time left the gravity well of planet Earth and circled an unfamiliar celestial body – the Moon. Eight months later, Americans would set foot on that world.
The crew's names – Borman, Lovell, and Anders – are engraved in my memory as indelibly as those of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. (And except for the tragic crew of Apollo 1, I can't immediately recall any of the other Apollo crews). While circling the Moon on Christmas Eve, 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 took turns reading from the first chapter of Genesis. (I wonder if that would still fly, given the current obsession with political correctness and a total phobia on the part of any government entity about anything that might even remotely be construed as “religious.”) For me, it remains one of the most moving memories I have of the space program. That, and a few other moments, bring tears to my eyes whenever I see them on TV – partly because we can't do those things anymore. I looked up what the crew of 8 are doing today. They're
all alive, hopefully well, and enjoy some eclectic interests. Frank
Borman has a couple of interesting hobbies.
Looking up SAM,
they build old-time, classic flying model airplanes. Yesterday, NPR played an interview [click “listen now” for the complete audio interview] with Frank Borman, talking about that flight and the iconic color photo of Earthrise over the lunar horizon. Borman said that his other favorite photograph is of him flying his restored WW2 Mustang in formation with an F-15, F-16, and F-22. Bill
Anders founded an airplane
museum and flies some of its collection in air shows, and has
flown in the Reno Air Races. Photo there shows him taxiing a Mustang. Jim Lovell has a display (“Shoot for the Moon”) at Chicago's Adler Planetarium. Wikipedia says
If I were there now, I'd stop by for a meal. It gets
good reviews. I have to remember to stop by if / when I'm ever in the
Chicago area again. All exceptional people. Good night, sirs and ladies. And Merry Christmas.
December 21, 2008 Rat Poster Other folks have noticed the serendipitous superposition of Blagwhatever and the rat poison poster. One of my European readers (Jan T.) pointed me at the caption contest in the Huffington Post. Excellent. Just... excellent! Ya know, Blaggo may put Chicago back on the map, even more so than Barack Obama. Why, with a different rat-a-tat-tat, he could displace Al Capone as Chicago's best known historical figure!
December 19, 2008 The Other Blag The other Blag, Da Soon-to-be-ex-Guv Rod
Blaggowhatever's brother, Rob (geez, people, I've heard all the stories
about being poor immigrants, but don't try to save money when naming
your kids...), the one who graduated from Lane Tech in my class, may be
involved after all. More at the Chicago
Sun-Times. Meanwhile, yet another photo
of Da S.T.B.X.G. appeared with that rat poison poster (see Dec. 11
entry).
Is this Photoshop? Or just really bad planning on Da
Soon To Be Ex Gov's part? Can't he get the city to post these in more
appropriate spots? Like, where he won't appear in the frame when he
comes out of his back door? Looking at the image on my Dec. 11 posting,
it looks like it's real – same phone pole, dry this time; similar brick
wall, one with ivy, one without. Possibly taken at a completely
different time of year. That's really, really dumb on his part then.
Doesn't he have handlers? Doesn't he have a media advisor? Doesn't he
have a flunky who, after the first photo of this type appeared, could
simply tear that poster down? It's not like anybody but the press
photogs would miss it. Just more evidence that we're dealing with one really
stupid politico and his really stupid machine.
December 11, 2008 This photographer gets the prize for composition Anybody ever notice how news photographers like to compose their images to show politicians, priests, and the like with “halos” projected behind their heads? The New York Times ran a beautifully juxtaposed photo by one Carlos Javier Ortiz of Da (soon to be ex) Guv of Illinois returning from his appointment with a Federal judge. Here's an enlarged view.
What's that poster on the telephone pole say? Warning, something rats. What? It's this poster. Warning: Target: Rats. It's an announcement of when rat poison was placed in that area. Some graphic design types love the artwork. You have to love the small print: “We need your help to eliminate the rat problem in this area.” Consider it done. Some bloggers have been commenting on how he got off with only a $4500 bond. They figured Da (soon to be ex) Guv had probably given the judgeship to the highest bidder. Uh.... doesn't work like that. Illinois governor can't appoint a Federal judge. And, for that matter, he'll be doing his time in a Federal institution. Illinois has at least three. But no need to build a Governor's Wing for the Joliet State Prison.
December 10, 2008 Google puts old magazines online The Internet never ceases to amaze. About 8 years ago, I spent a lot of time scouring local libraries, most notably the Santa Ana public library, Cal Poly Pomona, and Cal State Fullerton, for back issues of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science Magazines. Specifically, I was looking for articles covering the small home-shop-size horizonal milling machines and metal shapers made by the Atlas Press Co. of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Many of these articles were written by one Sam Brown, who also wrote and I think illustrated many books on optics for Edmund Scientific. I'll bet there's a great story there for anybody who will do some digging, to compare with other technical writers and illustrators of that era, including Russell W. Porter (Palomar Telescope and the whole telescope making hobby) and Roger Hayward (The Amateur Scientist illustrations in Scientific American, the illustrations in John Strong's classic Procedures in Experimental Physics). I spent a lot of time tracking down those articles, digging through the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and then hunting down individual copies, in libraries and on ebay. Anyway, Google has now put tons of classic magazines up for all to see. It's under Google Books. Here's the link for all old Popular Mechanics. Here's the link for all old Popular Science. Years ago I made a web page with an index of all the mill and shaper related articles. I've updated that to link directly to the Google magazine pages for each article. (The “Atlas Mills and Shapers” button in the left column also takes you there). These articles are simply wonderful. In just a few pages, they cover as much ground as many much larger textbooks. There are also hints and tricks to enable home shop machinists to solve problems that bigger shops would do differently – at much higher cost.
December 9, 2008 The Governor and I This morning, the Feds busted Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Now, in Illinois, that alone is nothing unusual. If we throw the “presumption of innocence” out the window to see how high it bounces, then we can include ol’ Rod as a done deal, and so of the past eight governors, fully half have been convicted and have done time (Ryan is still in, Kerner was let out in time to die, and Dan Walker was caught up in the ‘87 S&L meltdown). The Illinois prison system should just open up a Governor's Wing. If Chicago's sports teams had a winning average to compare with their governors' conviction rate, the town would be a lot happier. Meanwhile, Illinois and Louisiana could have a runoff to compete for who's got the most thoroughly rotten state government. Anyway, it turns out that I have a personal connection with Da (soon to be ex) Guv. (Am I supposed to mention this? I don't care. In my career I have had to work with everything from criminally irresponsible “engineers” to sociopathic magazine editors to homicidal photographers – that one is serving life without parole for killing a “model.” So, why not toss in a crooked governor as well?) The connection? Da (soon to be ex) Guv and I were classmates at Lane Tech in Chicago. Yup, I just pulled out my freshman yearbook, there he is, on the same page as my mob-scene class photo, but two “home rooms” down the page. We were probably in some classes together (maybe “Gym” or even “Lunch”), but I don't remember him. Or, as they say in the Governor Business, “Not that I recall.” After a year or two at Lane, it looks like he transferred to Foreman High School, from which he graduated. I know Foreman as well. It's only about a mile and a half from where I grew up, and I took some extra courses there in summer school. Now, I don't know why he bailed out of Lane, but maybe he couldn't hack it. Lane was always a tough school. The neighborhood high schools like Foreman would let you skate your way to a diploma. Here's his yearbook photo.
I know two of the other people in that photo. One is a computer engineer at Google, the other is a doctor specializing in pediatric oncology in the San Diego area. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but the likes of Blagojevich don't have the chops to carry the lunch bags of people like that – especially the oncologist. Think about it – he works with kids dying of cancer, while his former classmate tries to find ways to extort money – and from Children's Hospital of Chicago no less. How's that for irony?) Their names have been withheld for their protection (and pending arrival of their generous contributions to my charitable fund – K. and R., you know who you are... Hey, maybe I could be a Famous Politician too! This is easy!) And then... he must have followed me to Northwestern University (again after spending time at what is apparently another flunkout refuge, University of Tampa, a former community college, probably to get high grades from a joint with low standards to leverage his way back into a place that wouldn't have taken his high school record on a bet). But by that time I probably wouldn't have recognized him. Apparently he got a law degree from the “prestigious” Pepperdine University here in southern California, while majoring in surfing, but that cuts no ice with me – I don't for a minute believe it takes much in the way of brains to become a lawyer, seeing as you can get those degrees from night school and correspondence diploma mills, and probably packed inside some cereal boxes. Here's another Goobernator Blag quote:
Update: Added Dec. 12. This guy is actually proud of being stupid. He brags about getting a D in Algebra – and that would have been at Lane Tech, before he flunked or transferred out. (How did he even get in to Lane? Or did his old man just buy him a seat?)
Great. Inspire the kids to be just like you. Do you know what this means? The nation is governed by morons. (As if there was ever any doubt). Occasionally, as in this case, one of the Ruling Class gets exposed as a practicing Moron. But mostly they get re-elected.
November 24, 2008 Mother's Cookies – another thing you can't have anymore – and impending death of a telescope manufacturer Mother's Cookies went bankrupt. These days, that sort of news shouldn't come as a surprise anymore. Still, it's more than a little annoying. And since not every cookie company is going bankrupt (people gotta eat, after all, and they're not all going to eat bean sprouts and tofu), it seems to me that the likely cause of the bankruptcy isn't something endemic to the cookie industry, but rather to the management of this particular example. After all, the Detroit carmakers are in trouble – all of them – not because people don't like cars, or don't want cars, but because they don't like their cars, and they can't scam a loan to buy anybody's cars even if they did. People still drive cars. People still like cookies.
It looks like the company was indeed run by clueless beancounters/corporate raider-plunderers. What's left of their own web site claims “Pardon our crumbs... we are only half baked.” Boy, I'll say. Mother's Cookies were well liked on the West Coast; somebody even came up with a commemorative T-shirt. They were owned by the same buyout artists who acquired Archway Cookies (now also gone); that's a brand I remember from my own childhood in the Midwest. Addendum, December 10, 2008 – not only did they take down Archway, but also Salerno Cookies. I remember Salerno Cookies, too, from growing up in Chicago. It appears that these scumbags broke Federal law by throwing its employees out without warning, and in an overnight cloak-and-dagger action, moved the equipment to Canada. Swine. There ought to be special justice for people who export our manufacturing – any of our manufacturing, including cookies – to foreign countries – and then expect us to buy the resulting imported products. They claim that “significant increases in raw material costs and the record high fuel costs across the country” are to blame. So, it's cheaper in Canada? And this just in – fuel prices are at a 5-year low. So that excuse won't wash anymore. When I heard, I stocked up at the local supermarket – I've already finished off the macaroons and a couple of packages of chocolate chip cookies. I have a couple remaining. How sad it's going to feel when I finish the bag of circus animals and the last of the chocolate chips, knowing there will never be any more...
We're going to see a lot more of this – corporate death by mismanagement. I predict that the maker of my telescope, Meade Instruments, has a 50/50 chance of not making it through what little remains of this year; the stock has lost nearly 95% of its value in the past 12 months, it's trading down around 8 to 12 cents a share, the stock valuation is around $2 to $3 million, and they will be delisted from the stock exchange before the end of February anyway.* They, too, have moved production to Mexico. They sold off their profitable riflescope and sport optics brands in April and June just to raise operating cash (at which point the stock price immediately fell off a cliff, never to recover). Meanwhile they've announced a new product, but I suspect it will remain vaporware. They're bleeding cash faster than they can bring it in through sales, people don't have money to buy this kind of toy this year, and besides, it won't be shown until the Consumer Electronics Show in January; production would start well after that. Too late... *Correction added Nov. 29: because the stock market is in the toilet anyway, NASDAQ has suspended enforcement of its minimum price rule for three months, giving Meade a reprieve until May 11. Makes no difference, there is no way they are going to get the stock price above $1 for ten consecutive days anyway.
November 8 – 9, 2008 M1 in color New – Added superimposed pulsar location and superimposed Hubble/Chandra image
Shot through Meade red, green, and blue filters, 2 minute exposures, R = 56 minutes total, G and B = 68 minutes each. Processed in AIP4WIN and Photoshop CS. At the center of the nebula is the burnt-out core of the star that exploded to cause this. It's a pulsar – a rotating neutron star. If you (in effect; it's not that simple) point a radio telescope at a pulsar and feed the output to speakers, you can “hear” the star. This site has audio files of several pulsars. PSR B0329+54 sounds like footsteps in a Hitchcock movie; PSR B0833-45, the Vela, has a good beat; sounds like an idling motorboat. PSR B0531+21, the pulsar in this nebula, sounds like some kind of machinery; and the last two have even higher frequencies. Here are some other pulsar audio files. Which star is the pulsar? Mouse over the image. If moving the cursor doesn't do anything, click this to show you the pulsar. (Original, unaligned, negative image here). By combining images from two orbiting observatories – Hubble and Chandra – we can see more structure around the pulsar. Click on the image above or click here to see the Hubble/Chandra image superimposed on my image. This is one of those situations where you say “Oh, now I see it.” With Hubble to show the way, we can make out, kinda sorta maybe, some of the fine structure right around the pulsar – including the “equatorial wisps” (a couple of ring segments, the brightest non-stellar objects in the image, above and to the right of the pulsar), part of the halo described here, and hints of the polar jets coming out of the pulsar. The wisps show visible changes over a time frame of just a few months.
November 6, 2008 Next work in progress: M1, the Crab Nebula We now return to our regularly scheduled universe. Next project: M1, the Crab Nebula in Taurus. This morning I shot 160 minutes worth of 1-minute exposures. The best 117 were stacked to form this image. Equipment: same setup as NGC 891, Oct. 30-31. The Crab Nebula is a supernova remnant – what's left of a star that exploded, and was observed by various (non-European) skywatchers in the year 1054. It's been expanding ever since, is now about 11 light years across. The expansion of the remnant is apparent over timeframes as short as a few years. If you'd like to try working out the numbers for the expansion yourself from photos, here's a neat little “laboratory exercise” used to teach undergrad astronomy at the U of Michigan. The images in that were taken 27 years apart.
Next on the schedule: red, green, and blue images of same.
November 2, 2008 Change we can believe in You want change? Yeah, I gotcher change right here.
(Along with a preposition at the end of a sentence, up with which I should not put).
November 1, 2008 Leibniz and Newton, together again for the first time Well, I just couldn't resist. And now... presenting... Leibniz and Newton as you've never seen them before!
So, while some may say this sort of humor is derivative, I feel that it doesn't go beyond the limits. For those who have never been exposed to “the Calculus,” it was invented almost simultaneously by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Isaac Newton. Newton didn't think much of it, it was just a tool to him, and didn't publish; Leibniz did. There followed years of petty academic squabbling, aided and abetted by the Royal Society of London. The Leibniz cookies (“biscuits” in this case being a Britishism) are named for the renown mathematician and philosopher because both come from Hannover. The packaging even proclaims
By amazing coincidence, Fig Newtons got their start in that very same year. I mean, what are the odds? However, these Newtons were apparently not named for Isaac, but for the town in Massachusetts. (“Newetown,” founded 1630, predates Isaac by 13 years). Advantage, Leibniz. But, it's likely Herr Bahlsen swiped the idea from the French. In its chocolate-coated form, the Leibniz cookies have the distinct advantage of being semi-prefab S'mores. Especially since I'm not a big fan of Graham crackers. (To the everlasting credit of both the Leibniz and Newton cookies, neither claims to suppress one's carnal urges). But go easy on those Fig Newtons, there, pilgrim, or you'll get fluxions.
October 31, 2008 ... and here's the color version.
140 minutes luminance (70 x 2 min); 240 minutes red (60 x 4 min), 200 min green (50 x 4 min), 148 min. blue (37 x 4 min).
October 30, 2008 NGC 891 — a work in progress I'm still fooling with many hours' worth of images of the edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 891. I have probably 12 hours' total of luminance, red, green, and blue channels. I've done some quickie color images but I'm not really happy with the results, I'll have to take more time and work through these more carefully. Meanwhile, here's a first shot at it, the luminance channel only. This is a total of 65 four-minute exposures, totaling more than four hours. Fortunately, I'm asleep while most of these are being taken. The real work comes in processing the data. Same equipment as the previous three images.
This is a galaxy like our own Milky Way, seen edge-on. Dust in the central plane and the central bulge are apparent. Like our own galaxy, this is a system of several hundred billion suns. What a concept – if They were giving away solar systems, there's enough suns, enough planetary systems, in there for every person on Earth to have several dozen.
October 20, 2008 M57, M27, Stephan's Quintet The following images were shot on the night of October 18-19. Meade DSI II Pro, no filter (“white light”) and “too short” 0.63x focal reducer on 12” Meade LX200GPS; off-axis guided with Meade DSI 1 color. Processed in AIP4WIN, final tweaking in Photoshop CS.
Stack of 50 30-second exposures. Depending on your monitor settings, you may just barely be able to see the faint, face-on barred spiral galaxy IC 1296 at upper right. I've done this before, in color, with a DSI 1 color camera.
Stack of 36 30-second exposures. Streak at left edge is from bright star outside the frame. I've done this before, in color; see September 2 & 10, 2007.
Stack of 46 2-minute exposures. Stephan's quintet is a compact cluster of five galaxies, with a sixth (NGC 7320C) at upper left edge of frame. At one time this group was used as an example to promote the argument that red shift is not an accurate measure of distance, because the lower-left member, NGC 7320, is apparently interacting with the others but shows a much lower red shift. It turns out NGC 7320 is a foreground galaxy. That leaves four other galaxies forming a diagonal line in the center of the frame, from upper left to lower right. The two central ones look like eyes... Here's how Hubble sees it.
More better Veil Nebula, Horsehead Nebula, and Beethoven's Ninth Did some more imaging of the Veil Nebula (see Sept. 29 entry). This time, longer exposures – 4 minutes. This is a stack of 36 four-minute exposures.
And here's the iconic Horsehead Nebula, Barnard 33, a dark nebula silhouetted against the red-glowing hydrogen of IC 434 in Orion. This is a stack of 20 four-minute exposures.
I remember as a kid I had a black and white postcard of this object, produced by the Mt. Wilson and Palomar Observatories and bought at the Adler Planetarium. It must still be around, somewhere... It seems to me now that this image, shot with a 80mm scope and consumer-grade electronic camera, is every bit as sharp as that image. Who would have thought, 40 or more years ago, that one day amateurs would be able to afford the equipment to replicate what professional observatories were doing in mid-century? (Later) Hah. Found that postcard. I thought I knew where I had filed it, and there it was. It was produced for the Adler Planetarium.
OK, so Palomar does have much better resolution and shows fainter stars. But mine is all mine... The text on the back of the postcard says it was shot with the 200 inch telescope on Mt. Palomar. In elementary school, one of my favoriate movies was the Frank Capra science film “The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays,” done for Bell Telephone Co. The finale of the science documentary has still photos of various astronomical objects – including the Horsehead – set to the final chorus of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. It left quite an impression on me, and I still get goosebumps when I see that sequence and hear that music. Glad, as His suns fly In your mind, as the final chorus slowly starts and gains momentum, you can just hear the celestial clockwork coming up to speed as “suns fly” on their appointed tracks through a “designed” heaven. The official translation leaves a bit to be desired – I changed “your race” to “in your orbits.” Which I think is what Beethoven intended by his use of “Bahn” – track, or orbit, not footrace. That would be consistent with the Enlightenment view of a Newtonian, mechanistic universe.
Annoying words and phrases The news media is particularly fond of buzzwords. Once a catchy buzzword has been coined, it spreads like a virus – in part, because news is a virus and media are basically incapable of original thought so they just pull a news item from any of the Usual Suspects. That handful of organizations that actually generate the words, directly determine what news we shall see, and how that news is expressed. The media “front end” just parrots it back, catch phrases and all. The current “financial crisis” (what crisis? all I see is a bunch of gamblers who want Welfare to make good on their bad decisions) highlights some of the annoying turns of phrase that have suddenly become popular. At one time, we had (and, unfortunately, some are still with us)
Now we have
Somebody has already created a “Dilbert mission statement generator.” There's a game called Buzzword Bingo. There's even a buzzword generator to create random meaningless pretentious-sounding phrases, for salting your term paper or whatever. Now, what somebody needs to do is, to create a re-contextualized needs-based paradigm for a pro-active response ability using implemented bi-directional software to create multi-tiered, obfuscated topical news reports. – in other words, something that will take a boring news story and turn it into something that will make people in newsrooms, boardrooms, and restrooms all over America stand up and pay attention! (See how easy it is?) Update: There's even a German mission statement generator, and it speaks, no less. If you enjoy reading the English language as it is murdered by posturing business school droids, you'll love hearing it murdered by non-native speakers who don't fully grasp the concepts anyway. I just used it to put together, more or less at random, a sort-of-German mission statement using as many inappropriate Anglicisms as possible: “Wir upgraden unsere State of the Art Human Resources, um die Best Practise [sic] der outsourcing-orientierten Upgradings zu globalisieren.” Translation: We are upgrading our state-of-the-art human resources in order to globalize the best practices of our outsourcing-oriented upgrades.” (No, it doesn't make any more sense in German – if you can call that German).
September 30, 2008 Bad News Monday, and how good is your bank? The news media are in a tizzy about something or other that happened yesterday. Why, what could it be? Oh. It must be this. So the Hubble repair mission is delayed until the Changing of the Gored in Washington. Which means, it may never happen. Somebody on the news said something about banks. Michael Covington mentioned one bank rating site on his web journal, and I found another. and The ratings are expressed differently. For Bankrate.com, you want a “Safe and Sound CAEL rating” of 1, and five stars. For Bauer Financial, you want five stars, again. If your bank is around one or two stars and a CAEL rating of 5, run like hell... It pays to check how your bank is doing, but even that is no guarantee; I checked some smaller banks that failed and these web sites didn't even give them terribly bad ratings. A few weeks ago, when the rumors about Washington Mutual started, I looked at their ratings (appalling) and found a local, small, old-fashioned thrift that has some of the highest ratings in the country. I didn't want to be in a situation like the depositors of IndyMac Bank in Pasadena a couple of months ago, who were lining up in the middle of the night to find out how much they had left. Two weeks ago I took most of my cash out of Washington Mutual – and so became a part of their problem. See here, which says
And I had a hand in it. But I see it this way: if they can bring in some hotshot CEO who does forkall for three weeks, then the bank is taken over by the Feds and is married off to some other outfit at the point of a shotgun (while said CEO, absolutely blindsided by all this, is sitting on his thumb somewhere up in an airliner), and that CEO still walks out the door, a broken man with seventeen million dollars more than he had 3 weeks earlier, then I figure the least I can do to show my displeasure is to take my money out. Sure, it would still be insured, and I would have lost nothing, but I see no reason to let greedy, incompetent management get rich while playing with my money, lending it out to losers in a massive pyramid scheme. And, sooner or later, given enough bank failures, the FDIC might just say “Sorry, we're broke too, we can't cover those losses anymore.” Don't think it could happen? Nobody thought yesterday could happen either. These days, we have to be prepared for anything. There's even a possibility that Canada may invade the USA in order to get access to warmer beaches. (Remote, but it's a strange world now). Be prepared for anything.
September 29, 2008 Veil Nebula (West) Last night, before clouds rolled in, I managed to image the elusive (or, so I had always thought) Veil Nebula in Cygnus. I shot the “western” part, NGC 6960. The bright star is 52 Cygni, which is easily visible to the unaided eye in dark skies. (But not in mine).
Details: back to the Vixen ED80Sf because this is a big object. Meade DSI II camera and Astronomik 6 nm H α filter on Vixen ED80Sf, piggybacked on Meade 12” LX200GPS. Guiding with 12” scope using Meade DSI 1 color camera and autoguiding through Meade Envisage software. Stack of 57 2-minute exposures. Dark subtracted and stacked in AIP4WIN. Final levels and curves adjustment, and very slight use of sharpen filter, in Photoshop CS.
September 27, 2008 NGC 7048 Target for last night: NGC 7048, a smallish planetary nebula in Cygnus.
Setup: Meade DSI II Pro with Astronomik 6 nm H α filter. This object is very small, so I had to use a longer focal length scope than the Vixen ED80Sf. The Meade 12” LX200GPS was fitted with an off-axis guider that dates back to my college days, and the same “short” Meade 0.63x focal reducer used for the Blue Flash nebula (Sept. 19 entry). Guiding with Meade DSI Color. Stack of 60 images, 2 minute exposures, dark subtracted, selected, and stacked in AIP4WIN, final processing including removing gradient in Photoshop CS. A better, color photo of NGC 7048 may be found here. I would certainly hope it's better; it was shot with Steward Observatory's 61-inch reflector. It never ceases to amaze me how some planetary nebulae look like those high-speed photos of early nuclear bomb blasts. There is just incredible structure visible in those. Examples:
These are called Rapatronic images and they were made by Dr. Harold Edgerton of MIT, a pioneer in the field of high-speed photography. These were quite an accomplishment; to get extremely short exposure times (on the order of 10 nanoseconds – that's a hundred thousand times faster than the 1/1000 setting on an ordinary camera), Edgerton devised a shutter based on polarizing elements and a Kerr cell rather than mechanical moving parts. The camera focal length was on the order of ten feet. The last photo shows a phenomenon known as the “rope trick.” The light from the blast is so intense that it vaporizes the steel guy wires holding the tower. In a way, these images remind me of Henry Moore's sculpture at the University of Chicago, Nuclear Energy.
The previous image (Sept. 25), the Bubble Nebula, was of a planetary nebula that isn't – it's really a star at the beginning of its life. Planetary nebulae are formed by average-mass stars near the end of their lives. Although planetary nebulae look a little bit like these fireballs, they're formed by a different process. It's not really a star “exploding” like a nuclear bomb (or supernova). It's actually what happens when a red giant star, near the end of its life (our Sun will probably do this too), puffs off its outer layers.
September 25, 2008 The Bubble Nebula Last night's work: NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula in Casseiopeia. 4 hour expsure (120 2-minute subexposures) in H α (see Sept. 20 for equipment details). Isn't this just the most amazing thing? I've been watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos on DVD. In one episode, actors re-enact Milton Humason taking a ten-hour spectrogram on the Mt. Wilson 100-inch telescope – while guiding manually. There were giants in those days... Now, I just turn the telescope loose, set up the autoguider, and every now and then check the progress by looking in on the “telescope computer” screen via the local virtual private network, to make sure the guide star is still tracking and clouds haven't rolled in. Every now and then I grab another batch of images, move them to the main computer, and do a quickie processing run (dark subtraction, image selection, stacking in AIP4WIN) to see what's coming out. This is often classified as a planetary nebula, but it isn't, really. The bubble really is a bubble, cleared out when the central star lit off and blew the gas of its birth nebula outward. This is one big bubble; it is so large that you could fit our Sun and the nearest star, 4 light years away, into it.
So, where the heck do I find these lists of nebulae? Well, I could go back through old issues of Sky and Telescope. Or go here or Paul and Liz Downing's list of nebulae or Atlas of the Universe list of planetary nebulae or the always trusty Wikipedia, Wikipedia list of planetary nebulae Note added Oct. 3,
2009: Hello, this is the blind astrometry solver.
Your results are:
September 23, 2008 Einstein's Telescope A friend sent me a link to a news story that “Einstein's Telescope” had been found. At first I thought that perhaps this was related to the “Einstein Observatory” in Potsdam, outside Berlin, Germany. Maybe it was put away during the war or something? Wasn't that thing heavily damaged in the war? Yes, and no. Turns out this is a small telescope which Einstein got as a gift in his last year of life, and subsequently donated to Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It was found in a storage shed at the university. The story says the scope is a six-inch reflector; it looks like the usual 6” f/8 or f/10 Newtonian that was popular in the homebuilt telescope hobby, which was active from the 1920s until the 1980s or so. (Like many of my geeky friends, I built my first scope, a 6” f/8, at the age of 13). But what about that observatory in Potsdam? Turns out it's alive and well – and it's a spectacular building. It houses a solar telescope, and is located in a public parklike setting. Officially it's the “Einstein Tower” of “Telegraph Hill Observatory,” part of the “Potsdam Science Park.” (It's part of an entire complex of observatory buildings, worth looking up in Google Earth; just type in Einsteinturm).
It was indeed severely damaged in the war; see photos here. Winding up in the Russian Zone and East Germany, it looks like it remained a ruin until about 1999. But it's spectacular now. It was designed by Erich Mendelsohn, one of the most influential architects of the early 20th Century. Looking around on Google Earth, there's a building named for A.A. Michelson, one of the key figures in modern physics. Michelson had quite a career; born in what was then Prussia, now Poland, raised in California, graduate of the US Naval Academy, served actively at sea, he did postdoc work at Berlin under Helmholtz, and was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. This is a solar telescope; to keep the optics at a steady temperature, they're buried underground, and are fed sunlight by flat mirrors in the dome that send the light down the tower to the actual telescope. It is still a useful research tool today, with a high-resolution spectrograph that can do polarization and magnetic field studies of sunspots. Basically the same idea as the (much bigger) solar tower telescopes built by George Ellery Hale atop Mt. Wilson, California. Here's more spectacular photos. And a simulated video tour of the building, including the telescope and spectrograph optics. Cocoon Nebula I shot the Cocoon Nebula, IC 5146, Caldwell 19, on two nights, Sept. 21 and 22. This is the result of 73 combined 2-minute exposures, same setup as the Crescent Nebula on Sept. 20.
Note added Oct. 3,
2009: Hello, this is the blind astrometry solver.
Your results are:
September 22, 2008 Testing Tunatic I decided to give Tunatic a tough test to start out. I figured I'd give it a tune that I know hasn't been released for sale. It's the music for a commercial for Norfolk Southern Railway, featuring a familiy of itinerant gasoline cans (I'm not making this up). Here's the commercial, titled “Lonely Gallon.” The tune is titled “You Don't Need Me” and it was written just for this commercial. Sounds very much like the “Gin Blossoms,” but it's not them. I tried some more tests on Tunatic. Rather than waste a lot of space here, the results of some randomly sampled tunes are here.
September 21, 2008 Watchers of the Night My friend Donn Mukensnable's son, Alex, has made what I think is a stunning time-lapse video of one night atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii, lit by moonlight. Look for the laser beam coming out of one telescope dome, the Pleiades and part of Orion rising, at least one meteor, and the wedge of zodiacal light in the morning just before sunrise.
Ya know, I think the kid could make a living at this... The background music bugged me. Now where have I heard that before? It sounds like background music from the original Star Trek TV series, either yet another Cap'n Kirk tryst with some alien woman or Scotty hitting the Saurian brandy. And I was thinking in the direction of Vaughn Williams or Gustav Holst, both of whom liked English folk song themes, but that direction kept being overridden by Holst's “Sea Songs” and all the Vaughan Williamses like “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” and even some Percy Grainger (“Rufford Park Poachers” and the like). Then I found this — Tunatic, a free program that listens to music over your computer's microphone and tells you what it is. It claims not to work on classical but obviously it does. Here's the how-to file. I had this thing running in about one minute. Finally, the cure for earworms. So, what's that tune? Ralph Vaughan Williams, “My Bonny Boy,” Sir Neville Marriner conducting the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. And yes I have that on CD but not conducted by Marriner. If you can't be smart, it helps to be clever.
September 20, 2008 The Cresecnt Nebula in Hydrogen Alpha Last night I imaged NGC 6888, Caldwell 27, the Crescent Nebula.
Details: Meade DSI II camera and Astronomik 6 nm H α filter on Vixen ED80Sf, piggybacked on Meade 12” LX200GPS. Guiding with 12” scope using Meade DSI 1 color camera and autoguiding through Meade Envisage software. 3 hour exposure (90 2-minute subs). Dark subtracted and stacked in AIP4WIN. Final levels and curves adjustment, and sharpen filter, in Photoshop CS. Checking the field of NGC 6888 at sky-map.org, I see that I'm getting down to mag. 17.5 or so. The object is about 2/3 the apparent size of the full Moon.
September 19, 2008 There! Up in the sky!!!
It's... it's... the Blue Flash Nebula! (Actually it's the planetary nebula NGC 6905 in the tiny constellation Delphinus which is high in the south these evenings).
Details: Sept. 14, 2008, 12” Meade LX200GPS, “short” (the infamous allegedly “defective”) Meade 0.63x focal reducer, no guiding (just periodic error correction), Meade DSI 1 color camera, stack of 34 (out of 68) FITS exposures each 15 seconds, selected, registered, and combined (with auto color tool) in AIP4WIN. The “focal length shorter than the others, it must be defective” reducer works just fine when set up with the correct spacing, appropriate for its actual focal length. Somehow, the rumor spread in the amateur astro community that these were “defective” or mistakenly produced with the wrong focal length and that Meade never admitted to the “mistake.” As is obvious from the photo above, the “too short” 0.63x reducer works just fine – when set up with shorter spacings appropriate for its shorter focal length. Note added Oct. 3,
2009: Hello, this is the blind astrometry solver.
Your results are:
September 2, 2008 Fooling with filters I bought a new filter from my favorite astronomy store, Oceanside Photo & Telescope, for use with the astro cameras. It's an Astronomik hydrogen alpha (H α) filter with a 6 nanometer (60 Ångstroms, for you old codgers) bandpass. What does that mean? It means it lets through only a narrow range of colors, centered on the 656.3 nm wavelength line of hydrogen (which is in the deep red). Since hydrogen is the most common element in the universe (second most common: stupidity, but never mind that now), it just so happens that most gaseous nebulae glow with the red light of hydrogen atoms, among other things. So what this filter does, it cuts out everything beyond that narrow band. That means, most light pollution doesn't get through – only the light of the nebula, and starlight in that narrow range. I'm told that people are even imaging faint nebulae in full moonlight. Sure, some of that reflected sunlight has the light of H α in it – but the filter cuts moonlight way down, but since the light from many nebulae is all or mostly H α, it doesn't cut that down at all. Magic. Some people do “false color” imaging using H α, Oxygen III, and Sulfur II filters. When processing, red, green, and blue are “assigned” to these three bands to produce color images. A classic example is the Hubble Space Telescope image of the “Pillars of Creation”. (Read that link, and you'll learn how it was the iconic M16 / Eagle Nebula / Pillars of Creation image that actually launched the Hubble Heritage Project, without which we would not have the colorful images that the public now associates with Hubble). The Hubble color map uses red for S II, green for H α, and blue for O III (even though the individual colors are not actually red, green, and blue respectively). Here's another way to look at it. So last night, I shot a few images through the new filter. I used my Meade 12” LX200GPS with a Meade DSI 1 color camera for autoguiding; imaging was through a piggybacked Vixen ED80Sf and a Meade DSI II Pro monochrome camera. These are stacks of two-minute individual exposures, stacked in AIP4WIN and tweaked in Photoshop. Again the iconic M16 / NGC 6611, “Eagle Nebula,” with the “Pillars of Creation.” This is a stack of about an hour's worth of 2-minute images. I've shot M16 before, but not in H α. Here's an earlier color image shot with the DSI 1 color.
And the Helix Nebula, NGC 7293. About 90 minutes. Helix is a lot fainter than M16. That was also shot before, barely...
I'm still fooling with the processing software, but for a first shot, I'm impressed... Note added Oct. 3,
2009: Hello, this is the blind astrometry solver.
Your results are:
September 1, 2008 Souls in Silicon I grew up reading the classics of science fiction: Wells, Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke. Later I discovered Larry Niven and Keith Laumer and Stanley G. Weinbaum and many more. But lately, it's been hard to find any decent SF – and to me, that means hard SF. No elves, vampires, witches riding dragons, and such for me, thank you very much. (Whose idea was it to lump “fantasy” and “science fiction” into a single category, anyway? That's like a supermarket that has a frozen dinners and motor oil section.) So it was with considerable pleasure that I received a copy of my friend Jeff Duntemann's latest volume of hard SF, Souls in Silicon, a compendium of some of his earlier short stories, with an overarching theme of artificial intelligence – “machines that think.” This is “what if” fiction at its finest.
The book is available in traditional paper book format from lulu.com, or, for those of you who are ahead of the curve, as a zip file with all the popular e-book formats.
August 24, 2008 Supernova 2008ax Enough with the carpet scammers already. While it's been fun (like pulling the wings off flies), it's done. So today I went through some folders on my “telescope computer,” cleaning out stuff, and came across some images I shot on March 18 of a supernova, SN2008ax in the galaxy NGC 4490. Along with NGC 4485 (the dimmer blob near the top edge of the image below), the two are an interacting galaxy pair listed as Arp 269 in the Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. Here's my image, shot with a Meade DSI II Pro on my 12” LX200GPS. I used an 0.63x focal reducer (the “long” version) and 15 second exposures. This is a stack of 24 images. The supernova is the brightest star in the image, just left of the core of the galaxy.
For comparison, here's a lot more images, including the discovery image. The supernova was found on March 3 by the Lick Observatory Supernova Search (LOSS), an automatic supernova hunting program that uses a robotic telescope atop Mt. Hamilton, near San Jose, California. Addendum – how bright is it in that image? Well, according to this light curve, it was about mag. 13.5 on the date in question. That was just about its peak magnitude. Here's a handy dandy Julian date converter, courtesy of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Mag. 13.5 means it's barely visible by eye in a 6-inch telescope, or about as bright as the planet Pluto. (Yes, I still call it a planet. So sue me). Where do you find out about supernovae? Well, the professionals subscribe to the notification service of the Central Bureau of Astronomical Telegraphs, and I'm sure there are networks on the Internet that report these, but one easy, free way to get reasonably up-to-date news of these is at calsky.com.
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