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Another J. Allen Hynek sighting
It occurred to me that there was another sighting of Dr. J. Allen Hynek in popular media – if only in parody. The 1980 low-budget comedy short Closet Cases of the Nerd Kind attributes the classification of UFOs to one Dr. J. Alien Hollyhocks. And the parody professor in the movie has at least a passing resemblance.
The film appeared on a triple bill with Hardware Wars and Pork Lips Now.
Somehow, I don't think Dr. H. would have minded.
December 25, 2006
MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!
Remembering Dr. Hynek, Northwestern University, and Lindheimer Observatory
I've been phoning friends I haven't talked to in years, people I've known at university and such.
In a fit of nostalgia, I was thinking about one of the people I respected in my youth, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, chairman of the Astronomy Department at Northwestern University. Dr. Hynek also directed something called the Astro-Science Workshop, a college-level astronomy course for high school seniors (I see it's now for sophomores and juniors) held at Chicago's Adler Planetarium. As a result, I applied to Northwestern University, and for a while thought I'd major in astronomy. I didn't, but that's another story.
I recently bought up several years' worth of Sky & Telescope magazine on ebay, to fill holes in my collection. I ran across Dr. Hynek's image on an old issue of S&T, the October 1955 issue. He's on the cover, as an attendee of that year's Stellafane convention. He was with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at the time, and was discussing the “Moonwatch” program for amateur satellite tracking; remember, this was two years before Sputnik. That's a young(er than I remember) Dr. Hynek on the right.
Dr. Hynek later achieved some notoriety for his involvement with UFOs; he worked on the U.S. Air Force's Project Bluebook, coined the phrase “Close Encounters of the (x) Kind,” and was an advisor to (and had a cameo role in) the Spielberg film of that name. By the mid-1970s, he enjoyed greater fame as a “UFOlogist” on the lecture and talk show circuit, than as an astronomer. He never actually said there were little green men out there, only that there was a hard residual of observations and sightings that could not be explained, and deserved further research. If I remember correctly, he and Carl Sagan appeared on one or more episodes of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, or if not, then Chicago's local Kup's Show hosted by Irv Kupcinet. Here's a video of him in local garb, discussing UFO sightings in Hessdalen, Norway, in the mid-1980s. (Click on the thumbnail to play).
At Northwestern University in the 1960s and 70s, he was the chairman and driving force behind the astronomy department. His fundraising efforts resulted in the construction of Lindheimer Observatory (actually Lindheimer Astronomical Research Center – LARC) in 1967. That, too, made the cover of S&T:
Alas, after Dr. Hynek retired, the astronomy department was merged with Physics, withered, and died. The university didn't hire any professors with an interest in observational astronomy. The observatory was neglected and disused. Eventually, excuses were found to get rid of it – it has asbestos, it would cost too much to clean that, the skies aren't dark enough anymore, etc. All convenient half-truths; the site was on the shore of Lake Michigan, it was and remains pretty dark out that way, and for spectroscopy, light pollution is less of a consideration. The 40-inch telescope in the right-side dome generated its share of Ph.D. papers, even from within the Chicago light dome of the 1970s. I frequently used the 16-inch in the left dome, and experienced a few “photometric nights” when the air was steady enough to do quality photometry of eclipsing binary stars.
The university dynamited the facility in the early 1990s. It didn't go down without a fight. The video may be seen by clicking on the thumbnail below. The observer's insane cackling at the end pretty much puts the finishing touch on this travesty.
I still refer to Lindheimer Observatory when the university alumni call to beg for money. I ask them if they know about the observatory (invariably, they're too young to know about it), then I tell them the story in brief, then I tell them I won't contribute to Northwestern because I've seen what they do with free money. If and when I donate to institutions of higher learning, I give it to schools that don't spend money on their professional sports teams (“collegiate” football, basketball). That's schools like MIT, Caltech, and University of Chicago.
December 20, 2006
Birthday gift to self, from my parents, indirectly
My parents are both passed away now, but in a way, this year, they still gave me a Christmas/birthday present. For years, at a loss for what to buy their allegedly grown-up kid who already had most of the stuff he needed, they simply gave me a card with money in it. I was always sentimental about those cards, and kept them in my desk with the money inside, never spent it. This year I added it all up and it made a sizeable sum. So I decided to buy something memorable with it. What to get? Well, I could buy a new Meade DSI Pro II astrocamera. But, being electronic, and sort of on the cutting edge of technology, I figured it would break eventually, or get old/obsolete really quickly. Although my old, 1960s-70s era all-mechanical Zeiss Icarex cameras and even my semi-electronified Nikon F3 are still in fine working order, modern electronic cameras come and go. I wanted something lasting as my folks' final gift to me. So I decided to get a Vixen ED80Sf telescope, from Oceanside Photo & Telescope.
There's nothing electronic in it. No smoke to leak out of wires. The only significant moving part is the Crayford-style focuser. The scope should last a lifetime. It comes with a clamshell mounting bracket, which will save me a lot of work making something to hang it on the bigger scope, a flip-mirror box and T-threaded adapters. I compared the Vixen to the similar Orion and Meade offerings (all are apparently made by the same factory, in China like everything else today, but the parent company Vixen is Japanese with a reputation for outstanding quality control), and the Vixen is unique with its accessories and substantial aluminum carrying case.
One limitation of a large telescope like my 12" Meade LX200GPS is that many objects are just too big to fit on the small detector of the CCD cameras I can afford, such as my current Meade DSI I color. I'd like a much bigger detector such as an SBIG ST8whatever, but that's not in the budget right now.
Besides, with the subpixel guiding ability now available with programs like Meade's Envisage or K3CCDTools 3, I should be able to use my existing Meade DSI on the short Vixen scope as an electroic guidescope for the bigger LX200, and, for now, hang a conventional 35mm film camera, if needed with an f/6.3 focal reducer on the big scope, which will get a fairly huge field of view. In the "Astrophotos" link at left, the image of the Orion nebula shows what can still be done with old-style film. The Meade DSI would only cover a tiny fraction of that field.
December 16, 2006
Remembering Christmas past
Borrowed a DVD of the TV movie “The Homecoming” from the Newport Beach library. It was the pilot for “The Waltons” TV series of the mid-1970s. “Homecoming” aired in 1971. On the IMDB web site, one user says it aired Thanksgiving night, 1971. That can't be right. I thought it was just before Christmas. I remember watching it while my parents were out shopping. They would not have been shopping on Thanksgiving night. No, another site says it aired Dec. 19, 1971. That makes sense. Gee. A day before my 16th birthday. It would have been a Sunday night. Yes, my folks were probably out buying Christmas/birthday presents.
In the old house in Chicago on Altgeld, 1971, I would have been a junior in high school. Strugging with Mr. Mellinger’s physics class, and Mr. Dogadalski’s Algebra 3.
I had forgotten most of the details of the story. It was good to see it again, 35(!) years later. The film still looks fresh. Thirty-five years; the film is set in 1933, so to us, today, in 2006, 1971 is nearly as far in the past as 1933 was to us, then.
So much has happened. My parents are gone now. I’ve gone from Lane Tech to Northwestern University, I’ve worked in Chicago and Germany and California. My parents moved from Altgeld Ave. to Mt. Prospect to Oceanside.
But this film is like opening a time capsule; it brings back so many of the old feelings, and recalls, for me at least, that past time. It helps me to anchor the present, in the framework built from the past.
What else was happening in 1971? People I would later come to know as friends were already well into middle age, serving in Vietnam. I’m thinking particularly of Jim Brunson, a colonel even then, who would soon command a famous fighter squadron. Later he would be one of the many memorable people who made up the Porsche Club of America / Germany Region.
I went to the local Ace Hardware to buy some small item, and remember a little hardware store on Fullerton Ave. in Chicago, Ofiara Hardware. Wonder if he’s still there. No, not according to the phone book or the True Value site. But the Ace Hardware on Cicero south of Fullerton is still there. And it appears the Walgreens has moved across the street. So many memories… these are the things that fill our childhood, more than their equivalents do today. I remember for example a hot rod shop on Fullerton. Now, I had no interest in hot rods or anything automotive, but they had some neat stuff for telescope making: black wrinkle finish paint. I used it profusely on my telescope mount. And I still haven’t mastered getting it to wrinkle well and evently.
November 10, 2006
An unusual convergence
If you watch the sky a lot, you see the darndest things. Captured with a webcam at 1/5000th of a second:
That's about one quadrant of the Sun's disk, the tiny black disk of Mercury tracking across, a large sunspot near the eastern limb, and... a Piper Cherokee-class light plane (fixed gear), bookin' along. There were three frames total, and you could see the one visible propeller blade change position slightly between frames. Some quick photogrammetry: Piper Cherokee, take wingspan as 35 ft. This image shows the wingspan as about 37% (measuring with ruler) of half of the Sun's disk diameter, which makes it about 0.092 degrees. Doing the trig, that makes the plane's range about 4 miles.
November 9, 2006
Long-haul carpetbagger
I normally try to avoid any political rants on this blawg, but this one I can't pass up.
It seems that just one day after the election that returned the Democrats to sort-of-but-not-quite power on Capitol Hill, the first official hopeful has popped up in that quadrennial game of whack-a-mole known as the Presidential elections.
It's Iowa governor Tom Wilsack. (Who?)
Uh-oh. This means trouble. I don't know a thing about him, but already I don't like him. Why? Simple. Iowa = agribiz lobby. If he gets in, you can bet he's going to ram some sort of biofuels BS down our filler necks. He's going to make us put that corn ethanol swill in our cars.
Some simple digging on Google:
And according to the state's Democratic governor, Tom Vilsack, ethanol "is a lifeline, and it is a real ray of hope to family farmers that creates not only economic opportunity but preserves a way of life that's important to preserve."
and
Drunk on Ethanol
Some Corn Belt politicians are refreshingly candid about why the wasteful, obsolete oxygenate requirement needs to stay in place. "I once asked Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa at a news conference why Californians and northeasterners should be forced to put ethanol in their gasoline when the science clearly shows it has no environmental benefits," recalls Paul Rogers of the San Jose Mercury News. "Because it helps farmers from my state expand their markets, he explained. 'So I guess you'd support a new federal law to require everybody in Des Moines to buy a computer, to help people in Silicon Valley expand their markets?' I asked. He didn't concur."
In addition to showing that there are "no environmental benefits" to ethanol, science clearly shows that there are enormous environmental costs. For example, the general use of ethanol significantly increases air pollution. Ethanol evaporates faster than gasoline. So while gasoline reformulated with ethanol may release less carbon monoxide, it releases more volatile organic compounds, hydrocarbons, and nitrogen oxides.
"Reformulated gasoline" is one of the biggest swindles perpetrated on the American motorist since the chrome-and-fins automotive marketing of the 1950s. "Oxygenates" such as the (now banned) MTBE and ethanol added to fuel do not reduce emissions; they can't. Not in any modern car with a three-way catalytic converter (every gasoline-powered car sold in the United States for at least two decades). It had benefits on older cars that used carburetors or two-way catalysts; the extra oxygen would combine with carbon monoxide to form less harmful carbon dioxide. But that's no longer the situation; modern cars use catalysts to reduce carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and oxides of nitrogen (hence, the "three way" part) to trace levels compared to what they were two and three decades ago. And those cars from the 1970s and early 1980s just plain aren't on the road anymore (it can be argued that there is no reason for any car built between 1974 and 1980 to still be in service). To avoid instant and expensive death, catalytic converters need to run with a near-chemically-ideal ("stoichiometric") air-fuel ratio. They use one or more oxygen sensors in the exhaust stream to monitor oxygen content in the exhaust, and twiddle the fuel injection accordingly to keep it within very narrow (and low) limits. Those limits have to be maintained whether oxygen is in the fuel or not; or else, the catalytic converter will be ruined and then the car will pollute like it's 1969. When oxygenated fuel is put in the tank, the fuel is "watered down" by replacing hydrocarbon fuel with a substance that carries excess oxygen into the combustion process. The fuel contains something (ethanol, MTBE, or other likely suspects) that add oxygen which would normally come from the surrounding air. And, coincidentally, reduce the energy content per gallon of fuel. So what does the oxygen sensor do? It says "Hey! I'm seeing too much oxygen here! Not enough fuel! Gotta dump more fuel in!" So the engine management brain it cranks the fuel injection rate higher. The net result is that the engine has to burn more fuel to do the same job (wallet translation: fuel economy in miles per gallon goes down, on the order of 10 percent) and that fuel is more expensive (because of the oxygenates). No, ethanol is not a cheaper substitute for imported oil. Not when demand spikes because we're ordered to buy it. So we get hit twice -- once by being forced to buy low-energy fuel, needing to burn more of it to do the work, then being charged extra for it. It's like going into a bar and being sold watered-down drinks, and paying extra because of the expensive imported fizzy water they use. You can still get drunk, but you'll have to buy more, and more expensive, drinks.
California's air quality regulators, and Gov. Schwarzenegger, have pleaded with the Federal government to relax the oxygenated fuel mandate because it makes absolutely no engineering sense. The Feds said no. Obviously, it's not about making sense. It's about redistributing the wealth.
Basically, ethanol fuels are a boondoggle to subsidize agribusiness, from Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill down to the guy driving his combine. The good presidential candidate says that "preserves a way of life that's important to preserve." Sounds like the beginnings of a good circular argument there. But if the aim is to give a handout to that segment of our economy, wouldn't it just make more sense to leave the gasoline alone, crank up the motor fuel tax, and just give the proceeds to farmers to do absolutely nothing? (We already do something like that). The net result would be the same, except we wouldn't fill up our gas tanks quite as often and could go farther on a tankful.
November 8, 2006
Transit of Mercury
Today, Mercury passed in front of the sun. This isn't an extremely rare event, but it is unusual. It won't happen again until 2016.
So I fired up the telescope, hung the Baader Astro Solar Film full-aperture filter on it, hung a Philips ToUcam on the back, and got almost the entire event. Late afternoon, low clouds rolled in so I was only barely able to see the end, and by that time the sun was so low that the image quality was poor. I haven't had time to process all the images yet (filled up an entire hard drive partition), but here's a sample, taken just a few minutes into the event. There's a sunspot at upper left, and Mercury is the little black BB at the bottom. For reference, Mercury is about 40% the diameter of Earth. So that sunspot is bigger than our entire planet.
November 1, 2006
More fun with numbers – waste vegetable oil as a fuel source
Today’s news says that McDonald’s of Australia will be changing the type of oil it uses in its alleged “restaurants.”
Hamburger giant McDonald's will change the cooking oil used in its 740 Australian outlets
McDonald's will ditch its liquid canola oil blend introduced in 2004 in favour of a canola and sunflower bend with 85 per cent less trans fat. The new oil blend contains less than 1 per cent trans fat.
According to the multinational chain, this will remove more than 415 tonnes of trans fats from the Australian food supply.
OK. I presume that means 415 metric tons per year removed from the food supply. (It’s unlikely their restaurants go through half a ton of oil per day).
Doing some math. Since the new oil has 85% less trans fat at “less than” 1% total, that means (let’s assume 1%) that 1% trans fat accounts for (100% - 85%) = 15% of the fat content of the old oil. Or, the old oil contained (0.01/0.15) = 6.67% trans fat. Check: what’s 85% of 0.0667? It’s 0.0567. So 0.0667 – 0.0567 = 0.01, or 1%. Checks out.
Now that we know that 415 metric tons of oil represent 6 2/3% of the oil used by McDonalds of Australia, we can find out how much total oil they use.
(415 metric tonnes/year) x (1000 kg/tonne) x (1/0.0667) x (1 lb/.454 kg) x (1 year / 365 days) = 37,546 lbs/day.
That’s for 740 outlets. Or, 37546/740 = 51 pounds per outlet per day.
How much oil is that in gallons? The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics says canola oil has 0.918 to 0.926 g/cc (call it specific gravity = 0.922).
Water (with specific gravity 1.00) is 8.34 lbs/gallon. So 51 pounds of canola oil are (51 lbs) x (1 gal/8.34 lbs) x (1/.922) = 6.63 gallons. How about that. Not quite 7 gallons of oil per “restaurant” per day.
Now then. Since a typical automobile fuel tank can take, say, 20 gallons, that means a single [Australian] McDonalds restaurant’s waste oil can fill up – let’s be generous – one waste vegetable oil powered car every third day.
Recycling waste deep-frying oil through your diesel Beetle is going to make an absolutely imperceptible dent in oil imports.
October 27, 2006
In the Days of the Comet
(When I was a kid, I read everything by H.G. Wells that I could lay hands on. Infuriated my pseudo-Irish-intellectual English Lit teacher, Joe Carroll. That title was a classic. And, let's face it, James Joyce's Ulysses is drivel).
We have a real comet in the sky right now, Comet C/2006 M4 (SWAN). It's visible fairly high in the east-northeast just after sunset. I shot the following this evening while still officially in twilight, before the comet went behind a tree. This is a stack of ten 20-second exposures with a Meade DSI I color, coupled to a Nikon 500mm f/8 reflex lens and piggybacked on the big telescope. There's a faint trace of a tail extending toward the upper left. The comet could be seen to move between exposures, even with this short a lens.
More (better) comet images at Spaceweather.com and at this gallery. Also at APOD.
October 23, 2006
Can't get this spot out
The Sun has been featureless for most of the past few weeks, but on Sunday, Oct 22, a small spot group was visible. This time I shot it with my Meade DSI I Color. The following was stacked in the free program Registax, using the best 57 images of some 680 (quality level set at "90%") shot in the course of about 8 minutes. This is a small, short-lived group numbered 10917. There is a processing artifact at the right edge of the Sun because of drift; not all of the images selected for stacking covered that section.
October 8, 2006
Here comes the Sun
I bought a full-aperture white-light solar filter for my telescope yesterday, from Oceanside Photo and Telescope. I've spent the afternoon fooling with it, using my Philips ToUcam 740K, driven by K3CCDTools Version 3. (The reason I use the Philips webcam instead of the Meade DSI is, the webcam has a much higher frame rate — and the name of the game is take lots of images, select and combine the best, and throw most of them away).
With a lot of twiddling and tweaking in K3, Registax and Photoshop, this is the best I could get:
The black spot at right center is sunspot number 10913; the tiny one at top is 10914. These are about to rotate off the visible face of the Sun's disk. Also apparent are white solar plages, and the general granulation of the surface. This image used the best 5% of 2400 images, from a four-minute AVI shot at 10 frames per second. 12" Meade LX200 GPS with Meade f/6.3 focal reducer, 15mm spacer, Baader UV/IR block filter and my own webcam to T-thread adapter on camera. Exposure time nominally 1/1000 sec. (although the ToUcam may play fast and loose with claimed times).
NOAA has these images of 913, as its friends call it. (The first, “continuum” image is the one that most closely matches the conditions for my own image).
Spaceweather.com has this image of the entire disk:
So, what's so interesting about the Sun? At the moment, not much. Sometimes, there's a lot more sunspots visible, but we're just three weeks past the bottom of the 11-year sunspot cycle right now. Even so, ol' 913 did manage to cough up a moderate coronal mass ejection on Oct. 3, giving us a “moderate” geomagnetic storm. There was no auroral activity, apparently.
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