Halloween mask

For Halloween, a bit of humor for astrophotographers:

Still puzzled? Click here.

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Jupiter in detail, with 2 satellites

Last night (Oct. 28), the air above my house and driveway was unusually steady, and after enjoying very good views of Jupiter at magnifications as high as 400× I took this very satisfying picture. This is the best 75% of about 5000 video frames with my Celestron 8 EdgeHD, a ×2 focal extender, and an ASI120MC-S camera, processed with Autostakkert and PixInsight.

The satellite Io is passing in front of Jupiter, just to the left of its shadow. It looks like a bright oval spot but in fact is round — the oval spot is on it. (Io's surface is bright yellow sulfur, with constant volcanic activity.) The satellite Callisto is just below the planet and is processed a little lighter than the planet itself, since its surface is not as bright. A spot on it in the picture is probably a genuine surface feature.

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Why I am not on F.I.R.E.

Today's entry is the best of several conversations on Facebook.

In the popular culture of personal finance, there's a movement called "F.I.R.E." ("Financial Independence, Retire Early"). Because my work now involves personal finance, I'm trying to wrap my head around it.

The idea is that if you live very frugally (like a graduate student) in your 20s and 30s, you can save enough money to retire early. Many years ago I was given a book that advocates this, but I didn't realize its place in the cultural movement at the time.

Well... I'm in favor of frugality and saving within reason, but there are some aspects of it that leave me wary. In fact, looking at the movement so far, I've found a sharp split between:

• People who want to use early frugality to equip themselves to do someting creative, charitable, or philanthropic in later life, especially if they recognize they have unusual wealth or opportunity early in life and want to make the most of it;
• People whose goal is appreciably less noble, just to "retire early;" for some, F.I.R.E. is almost like a get-rich-quick scheme; and these seem to be a large part of the movement.

To the second set, I want to make some points.

(1) Is retirement nirvana? Is work something to escape from? When I was young I was eager to grow up and start productive work, not stop it. These people talk as if working is undesirable and the goal is to resume adolescence.

Is this derived from the Marxist notion of alienation (that working for someone else is inherently exploitative)? They certainly use the phrase "working for somebody else" a lot, as a thing to be shunned.

Maybe the counter-message we need to deliver is that work is supposed to be fulfilling. Get a job that is not miserable now. But part of growing up is realizing that if you have a job, somebody thinks you're making their life better, even if you don't quite see how it works, and that very tedious work can make the world better.

(2) More disconcertingly, there seem to be F.I.R.E. voices that advocate (a) not making a marriage commitment (instead using a "F.I.R.E. dating site" to find a compatible "partner" to live with), and (b) if you're married, depriving your children, raising them at as low a cost as possible.

That's what grated on me about the book I was given many years ago. "No, little girl, you can't have a bicycle, Daddy is saving up to stop working early." Not my way of thinking.

I have nothing against people who successfuly build wealth in their younger years. Probably most of us need to be nudged into the direction of more saving, earlier in life. But I also hear voices that seem to be on the side of avarice (miserliness) and/or sloth (wanting to avoid contributing to society, and just sit back and consume).

And no, I am not against frugality! If you have the opportunity to build large savings early in life, do. But recognize that this may be a way of making the most of your own unusual good fortune, not something that you (or the people who plan jobs and set terms of employment) should demand of everyone.

Nor am I against retirement! We all need to ramp down our labors as we age and lose energy and capability. But I don't view retirement as an entitled position where one becomes a consumer, not producer, of all that is of value to people.

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Designer labels

I shopped for eyeglass frames the other day and ended up with a pair that has no externally visible labeling at all. Along the way, I ran the gauntlet of frames with writing on them that I didn't want to display.

I had decided that a tiny, illegible "Ray-Ban" logo would be tolerable (Ray-Ban is, after all, a good maker of eyeglass frames), but I turned down a pair that suited me fine except that it said "BOSS" in 9-point boldface type on each temple. Not the right impression in the workplace, and I'm advised Mr. Boss, the man behind the fashion brand, was actually a Nazi.

Many years ago I pointedly turned down a pair of eyeglass frames with tiny Playboy bunny logos on the temples. Not the signal I want to send!

I don't like to wear advertising unless it's for something I'm personally involved in. So I'll wear FormFree attire (I work for FormFree) and hats that promote universities I'm part of.

But not "fashion labels," names that some other manufacturer is paying to license, so they don't even indicate who made something, and so can't be a mark of quality.

In between are makers' marks that actually do indicate that something is made well — but even then, I don't want advertising on my person 24/7/365.

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Short notes

May God grant eternal rest to Debbie Adams Sutton, who was in the Action Trav'lers with me around 1972, and has died recently after a long illness. I didn't know her at all well — but when any of my peers passes on, it's sad. "Any[one]'s death diminisheth me."

For a long time, when teaching logic of diagnosis (for AI expert systems, troubleshooting computer programs, etc.) I have cited "Covington's law of diagnosis," which is, "You can perfectly well have more than one thing wrong at the same time." Now I learn that the medical profession knows this as Hickam's Dictum. Dr. Hickam beat me to it by more than 20 years.

We do people a great disservice when we label them as "left-brained" or "right-brained" as if people who are good at one thing can't do other things. I also hear "autism spectrum" and "ADHD" overused. A perfectly healthy person has traits in common with a lot of other people, including those at the ends of the scale. And any healthy brain can be developed to have talents it doesn't presently seem to have.

The notion that artists and poets are defective human beings (who can't do math or business) is particularly pernicious and has held a lot of people back. As far as I can tell it arose from German romanticism. Before that era, talented people tried to be multi-talented, like Leonardo da Vinci and Ben Franklin.

Above all, never assume that high talent in some area is a handicap in real life. I was plagued by that during my childhood as a "boy genius" (i.e., early reader and science enthusiast) in a somewhat anti-intellectual milieu. Some people treated me as if being able to read at age 3 meant I had some kind of developmental disability. "Geniuses don't have common sense." Says who?

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Quarters or semesters?

Should a year of college consist of 3 10-week quarters (trimesters) or 2 15-week semesters?

A friend asked me about this, and here's my considered reply.

Having worked under both systems, I prefer quarters. They've been good enough for Oxford and Cambridge for hundreds of years.

I know many faculty members prefer semesters, as it gives them a little more flexibility in their daily routine. On the semester system, most classes meet on alternating days; on the quarter system, most classes meet daily.

It has been argued, though, that daily classes facilitate learning (especially of things like foreign languages) and help the inexperienced freshmen settle into a good time-management routine (much of the homework is due the very next day). (However, having at least 48 hours for each piece of homework can also be a boon to students; they can plan evening activities without having to accommodate an unforeseen amount of homework, displacing some of it to the next day if necessary. In general, I think homework should only be given on such short notice if it is following a foreseeable sequence.)

Junior colleges should definitely use quarters because it is easier for a person who is navigating financial or family challenges to commit to three months rather than four and a half. It is also easier to take a quarter off than a semester.

Perhaps the biggest appeal of the quarter system, to me, is that it makes it possible to have a summer term that matches the other three. And that's part of my grand plan for re-engineering college, as follows:

(1) We should use the summers. We no longer need to go home every summer to get the crops in, nor are our buildings uninhabitable due to lack of air conditioning. And students needing to take a quarter off to work might do better if they didn't all have to do it at the same time of year. Students taking full loads could finish a 4-year degree in 3 years.

(2) Alongside the full-time workload that students have now (and which, unlike in 1970, is usually too heavy to permit substantial part-time work), we should define a 3/4-time workload that is still considered full-time but explicitly allows working your way through college (in 4 years, not 3). And colleges should coordinate this with employers so that students are efficiently placed in suitable jobs that will cover their expenses.

We do (2) quite well for graduate students now, with assistantships; we should extend it to everybody. It's much better than saddling them with student loan debt.

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An evening in the Solar System

Last night (October 24, 25th in UTC) I photographed the moon and two planets. The technique was to take many video frames and select and stack them as described here except that now I do the processing in AutoStakkert and PixInsight. Crucially, a large number of random blurs, combined, become a Gaussian blur, which can be undone mathematically; that is how the unsteadiness of the air can be removed to yield a much sharper image than the eye could see. I used my 8-inch Celestron EdgeHD, a 2× extender, an ASI120MC camera, and the Losmandy GM811G mount.

The first target was Saturn:

Saturn, 2023 Oct 25, 00:36 UTC, best 75% of 2037 frames

That's better than I expected; the air was rather unsteady.

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Off to the moon

Then I took aim at the gibbous moon. I took these images rather quickly, without giving a lot of thought to the camera orientation. For the first two, I took off the 2× extender and used the telescope at its native focal length.

Sinus Iridum, 2023 Oct 25, 00:45 UTC, best 50% of 3471 frames
South up (approximately).
Processed to bring out some of the subtle coloration of the region.

Vicinity of crater Tycho, 2023 Oct 25, 00:50 UTC, best 50% of 3472 frames
South up (approximately).

Now, with the 2× extender doubling the magnification:

Tycho and Clavius, 2023 Oct 25, 00:55 UTC, best 50% of 1220 frames
South up.

Clavius, 2023 Oct 25, best 50% of 3471 frames
South up.

Clavius is where the moon base was in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I am intrigued by the series of small craters within it, arranged from largest to smallest along a smooth curve; they look to me almost like part of some kind of musical instrument. Did a large meteoroid split apart into pieces that somehow arranged themselves by size before striking Clavius?

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Jupiter

A couple of hours later I took aim at Jupiter, again with the 2× extender in place. The air seemed less steady, but I didn't come away empty-handed:

Jupiter, 2023 Oct 25, 02:46 UTC, best 25% of 7266 frames

Notice how small the Great Red Spot is compared to pictures taken in the 1970s or even mine taken in 2005.

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1962 Texaco Fire Chief toy fireman's hat

Thanks to a friend who asked my help in repairing it, I've briefly had a look at a toy like I had when I was four years old — a toy fireman's hat that advertises Texaco Fire Chief gasoline.

What I didn't remember (and maybe mine was a simpler version that didn't have it) was that there was a built in electronic megaphone, with the speaker in the Texaco star in front, and the microphone clipped in the inside of the hat, but easy to take down and hand-hold in front of your mouth.

This one seemed to need a repair to its battery box. So my first step was to apply power from another source to see if everything else worked. It didn't. When the push-to-talk switch was held down, the circuit drew heavy current and the transistor got hot. That had me stymied for a while, and I tested all the components.

The solution to the mystery was that the nitwits who built it used red for negative, black for positive! I had been applying power backward.

The germanium transistor tested to have hfe = 4, which is very low, and I suspect I may have damaged it with the reverse power, so I put in a new transistor (2N3906, silicon) and, after experimenting, removed the 680-ohm resistor to get slightly better sound. It still sounds pretty bad, and not as loud as the old TV commercials indicated, but I think those are inherent limitations. There may have been some deterioration of the microphone, but temporarily substituting another one didn't make a large difference. Here's the circuit diagram I sketched:

The circuit board (sketched at the left) is not a printed circuit; it is just a piece of phenolic board with eyelets in it, used as solder terminals.

I am not a toy collector and have not traced the history of this kind of hat. (I don't even know why a brand of gasoline was called Fire Chief; sounds scary.) But you can see more about it here and here (and even more here). I note that it wasn't cheap — $3.98 in 1962 was equivalent to $40 in today's money. (And the germanium transistor may have accounted for half of that price; my silicon replacement cost me 6 cents.)

Parents indulged their children in those days! Mine wasn't presented to me as a particularly special or expensive toy, and I was under the impression my father had been given it (which may be true).

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Deep-sky astrophotographers: Let's do some science!

Amateur astrophotographers: A stage of development of our hobby is coming to an end. For 50 years our main goal was just to prove that we could photograph celestial objects. Now we finally have reliable equipment that is fully capable of taking good images. Many of us have turned to competitive "space art," but I think that's a dead end. Instead...

Let's do some science. Let's photograph and study faint nebulae, including integrated flux nebulae (IFN). We can now photograph, with modest equipment from a dark site, nebulae that were well beyond the reach of the Palomar Sky Survey. See my humble attempt here.

I've just had an interesting visit with my colleague Loris Magnani (U. of Georgia), who has made a specialty of finding high-galactic-latitude molecular clouds — that is, discovering nebulae that are outside the plane of the Milky Way. He relies on radio observations, which have low resolution and don't show the structure of the nebulae. Many of them are photographable with amateur equipment. Catalogs exist (MBM for instance). Much more needs to be known. See also this book and my earlier blog entry.

These and other kinds of faint nebulae need to be mapped optically. Your 200-mm telephoto lens reveals much more about the structure of the nebulae than radio observations can. Let's go for it.

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NGC 7822 (wide field)

On a couple of recent evenings I took pictures of Cepheus with a shorter-focal-length lens (Sigma DG EX 105/2.8) at f/4, without a nebula filter. Because there was no filter, I had to limit my exposures to 30 seconds, so I took a very large number of exposures. Here's a wider-field view of NGC 7822:

NGC 7822

At least part of the nebulosity in this picture is known as NGC 7822. I haven't sorted out the designations. This is a little-known star-forming region in Cepheus, and I had forgotten about it, although I did photograph it once, a few years ago.

Field of Delta Cephei

Last night's catch. This is largely the same field I photographed a few days ago but with the camera aimed slightly farther north, to take in LBN 492, which was on the top edge. But now NGC 7380 is on the left edge. Fortunately, now we can see interesting snake-like dark nebulae at the top, especially at the top right.

Squeak in dashboard turned out to be hood hinges
2012 Ford Escape

For three or four years our Ford Escape has been haunted by a chirp-like squeak that seems to come from the dashboard. For a long time I thought it was due to the way I had installed some additional wiring.

It nagged us during the drive to and from Kentucky.

After we got back, I Googled the problem and, following someone's suggestion, I lubricated the hood hinges and hood latch, including the U-shaped part of the hood that engages the latch.

And so far, the squeaker is gone! If it reappears, we'll investigate dashboard panels as the next step.

The squeak would often go away for days at a time, and now we realize that this was probably caused by opening the hood. The lubricant on the hood hinges was old lithium grease, dried out and powdery. Opening the hood probably redistributed it just enough to make the noise go away briefly.

Incidentally, this car achieved maturity during the drive home on Sunday. We no longer have a car that is too young to be trusted.

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Partial eclipse of the sun

Today most of North America saw a partial eclipse of the sun. A narrow strip of the West saw an annular eclipse, which is a special kind of partial eclipse in which the sun appears as a ring around a slightly smaller moon. This happens when the moon is farther away than average in its orbit (the opposite of a "supermoon," and in fact the full moon two weeks earlier or later is a supermoon, or close to it).

That picture was taken with my Celestron 5, a Thousand Oaks full-aperture filter, and my Canon 60Da. It is a stack of ten exposures, combined to minimize noise and atmospheric effects. You can see a sunspot group and, barely, some faculae (light streaks) near the lower left.

I also took a slightly cruder picture with my Askar 200-mm f/4 telephoto lens and its own Thousand Oaks full-aperture filter (more strongly orange colored). This is what I will use for a wide-field view of the corona on April 8, and I wanted to make sure it would be serviceable for the partial phases.

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Nebulae in Cepheus

On the evening of October 9, I took 71 (yes, 71) 2-minute exposures of a region in Cepheus using the Askar 200-mm f/4 astrographic lens, Orion SkyGlow filter, AVX mount (with PEC but without guiding), and Canon 60Da camera at ISO 640. Here is the result:

The Elephant Trunk Nebula, complete with elephant trunk

Here's a proper view of the Elephant Trunk Nebula, and you can even see the part that reminds people of an elephant's trunk. Right in the middle of the nebula is a white star. Directly to the right of it is a hook shape which is the left end of a long, narrow dark area. It reminds some people of an elephant grabbing something with its trunk.

Stack of 40 2-minute exposures, Canon 60Da, ISO 640, Askar 200-mm f/4 lens, Orion SkyGlow filter, and AVX mount with PEC but no guiding corrections, in my driveway in Athens, Georgia.

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Neighborhood of the Elephant Trunk Nebula

The nebula IC 1396 in Cepheus, on the right in this picture, has several dark streaks that have been called elephant trunks. One of them (not clearly visible in this photo) actually curls at the end like an elephant's trunk and probably inspired the name.

The Veil Nebula in moonlight

The Veil Nebula is a supernova remnant in the direction of the constellation Cygnus. It is a tattered ball, like a balloon just starting to pop, but it looks like a tattered circle because of the way we are viewing it. It's made of hydrogen, and parts of it photograph as blue rather than red because of their high temperature.

How to make a safe eclipse projector

Most of the U.S. has a partial eclipse of the sun coming up on Saturday, October 14. You can view it safely with eclipse glasses if you have them — or you can build this gadget. Read on...

I call this an eclipse projector to emphasize that you don't look through it. Teachers will find it especially safe because the children using it are facing away from the sun, obviously not endangering their eyes by peering at it.

You'll need two paper plates, or pieces of paper or cardboard about the same size.

In one of the paper plates, make one or more holes, about 1/16 to 1/8 inch in diameter. One hole is enough. I made two to show that the holes don't need to be perfectly round; two holes of different shapes give the same image. You may want to try several holes of different sizes.

Now hold them so that the shadow of the first one falls on the second one, and you can see a spot of sunlight coming through the hole. Here there are two holes and two spots. (For best results, make slightly smaller holes than we did.)

Photo by Melody Covington

Look closely at the spot or spots. The spots are round because the sun is round. During an eclipse they will be crescent-shaped, and you can watch the progress of the eclipse.

Photo by Melody Covington

Photo by Melody Covington, Oct. 14, 2023

And that's all there is to it!

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