Mexico in the sky

This is the "Mexico" region of the North America Nebula (NGC 7000). We've had an unprecedented five clear nights in a row (after a very cloudy summer), and I've continued with the same setup as before (Celestron 8 EdgeHD at f/7, Altair 26C camera). This is a stack of 112 30-second exposures.

This is a cloud of hydrogen gas in which stars are actively forming. The reason for the relatively sharp edge at the left is not clear. The "Gulf of Mexico" here is a dark cloud in front, which hides the star that illuminates the whole nebula — it is "off the east coast of Florida" so to speak, outside this picture. For the whole nebula, see my picture last month.

But in this picture, at the upper right, you do see a very interesting star shrouded in compact bright nebulosity; it is V2493 Cygni (HBC 722), a newly formed star (FU Orionis type). In 2010 it flared up to magnitude 13 (from 18, a hundredfold increase in brightness), illuminating the nebula around it, and has been stable since. See this among many papers (I haven't researched it very fully).

Older pictures of the North America Nebula do not show it. Compare for instance this picture, which I took in 2009, or this, from 2007; or look at the Digitized Sky Survey from Palomar Observatory.

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Sharpless 2-101

Here is Sharpless 2-101, not to be confused with Sharpless 2-106 described recently (below). It is another compact emission nebula in the great Cygnus star cloud. Stack of 112 30-second exposures on August 26.

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NGC 6823 and 6820

Here NGC 6823 is a star cluster, with some diffuse nebulosity to the left of it, and NGC 6820 is a star with compact nebulosity around it (what V2493 Cygni is turning into). I photographed this field two years ago, with a camera that had a similar sensor but uncooled, with a longer exposure and under darker skies, and may have done better. This is a stack of 104 30-second exposures.

Melody's back

The title is a double-entendre because Melody is back home from surgery on her spine; she actually came home yesterday (the 24th). Previously, for four straight days it was "probably tomorrow," and I spent my time working remotely for FormFree, sometimes from a table in the hospital's snack area.

Athens Regional Medical Center has undergone major, and in my opinion incomplete, remodeling. The oldest part of the building (click here to see it) has been replaced by a courtyard. There is a huge new structure on the front of the old buildings, along both Prince Avenue and Talmadge Drive, and a new main entrance, but also some blocked-off entrances and doors that are never unlocked. It looks unfinished.

To celebrate, we'll have an exposition of astrophotos, since I've had several clear nights lately.

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Sharpless 2-106

For my first picture with the new camera on my big telescope, I decided to photograph something that isn't photographed often — the compact hydrogen nebula Sharpless 2-106 (Sh 2-106) in Cygnus.

Celestron 8 EdgeHD, f/7 reducer, Altair Astro 26C camera, gain 100 (HCG Ultra), Losmandy GM811G mount, iOptron iGuider, NINA, PHD2. This is a stack of 107 30-second exposures, selected from a total of 120.

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Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888)

This is the Crescent Nebula, a somewhat unusual object in Cygnus. Compare my wider-field picture of it below, which I've reprocessed.

Same setup as above, stack of 98 30-second exposures (one had a guiding problem and one had a satellite trail).

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M29

This is not the Pleiades — it's the much more compact star cluster M29 in Cygnus. The upper part of the picture has a reddish background due to hydrogen gas clouds there.

I took 100 frames, and each one was perfectly guided, so I stacked them all. Same setup as the two pictures above. Stars are visible down to at least magnitude 17.5.

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The eastern Veil Nebula
Ad astra per aspera

Enjoy this big picture of the eastern Veil Nebula, which is the edge of a bubble-shaped supernova remnant. Scroll down. To see it all at once, right-click and open the image by itself.

Mending a broken back

News update: The past ten days or so have been a bit out of the ordinary.

Last Monday (Aug. 12), Melody hurt her back, but her doctor advised her by phone to just rest it and take pain medication as needed. It didn't get better in a couple of days as we expected.

Meanwhile, on Thursday she went to a routine recheck of her anticoagulant level (needed for the artificial heart valve), and they found it so far out of range that they sent her to the lab, then to the emergency room.

There, she asked the doctors also to investigate the backache, and there turned out to be a compression fracture of a vertebra.

They admitted her, and finally, this morning, she had an operation (kyphoplasty) to inject cement into the vertebra and strengthen it. That went well, giving some immediate relief, and she'll be home in a day or two. We think she'll even be about a centimeter taller.

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Unwarranted assumptions about artificial intelligence

Unwarranted assumptions about AI:

(1) That if a computer does something humanlike, it will do it with superhuman speed and accuracy.

(2) That all technologies will get better with further development. (Cars still don't go 500 mph. ChatGPT may never have a better training set than it has now; where's it going to come from?)

(3) That neural networks do what the human brain does. (If so, most of neuroscience and psychology are bunk.)

(4) That the brain is inherently simple, and can be emulated by a computer that is simple but big and fast. (Generalization of previous point.)

What if artificial general intelligence (a humanlike information-handling tool, not a conscious computer) is achieved, but has an IQ of 70, with no prospect of raising it?

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Don't stay too focused on news and current events

Here's an example of why not to devote your whole attention to news and current events.

The most life-changing event of the 1970s was probably the invention of the microprocessor (1971-74).

(If that doesn't sound right, think about how much of the cultural change that we attribute to the 1970s actually happened around 1967-69. So I stand by what I said.)

Now then. The microprocessor was not invented by people sitting around worrying about Watergate.

I rest my case.

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NGC 6888 (Crescent Nebula)

Reprocessed August 25

Because of bad weather (including a hurricane), nearly a month elapsed until I was again able to use my Altair 26C astrocamera. Last night was my second imaging session with it — at home, with rather hazy skies and the crescent moon low in the west.

Since this is for familiarization and testing, not pushing the limits, I am photographing familiar objects to compare with earlier results.

Here you see NGC 6888, a stack of thirty 2-minute exposures. AT65EDQ 6.5-cm f/6.5 refractor, Altair 26C camera, controlled with N.I.N.A. and PHD2 on a 14-inch ThinkPad laptop, then processed with PixInsight (Weighted Batch Preprocessing, Spectrophotometric Color Calibration, BlurXTerminator in "correct only" mode, TGVdenoise, among the other usual steps), downsampled to fit this screen.

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Field of Gamma Cygni: Comparing exposures

One of the practical questions I face is whether to make 30-second exposures, 2-minute exposures, or something in between. With the AT65EDQ, which, like my usual Celestron setup, is about f/7, I decided to take two equivalent series of the same object and see if it made a difference. I chose field of Sadr (Gamma Cygni). Here's a picture with a map superimposed, to show what we're going to be looking at:

Now then. Here are the two pictures. Each is big, and I hope you enjoy scrolling through it. Both were taken with the same equipment and processing as the picture of NGC 6888 above.

First, a stack of 15 2-minute exposures, totaling 30 minutes:

Sunspots

We are having another spectacular display of sunspots; I was easily able to see some of these without a telescope while I was inspecting my sun filter (you could do the same with eclipse glasses).

My technique for photographing the sun is getting better. My Celestron 5 was allowed to acclimate for more than an hour in the carport before I set it up, to reduce image-distorting air currents that would result from sharp temperature differences. I then put it on my pier, with my Thousand Oaks sun filter and Canon 60Da camera, focused on sunspots (not the limb), and snapped away (1/500 second, ISO 100, Live View Shooting to reduce vibration). Sunspots are good for short observing sessions — I took 10 images within one minute, then stacked the best 7 of them with PIPP and AutoStakkert. These pictures are 2 crops of the same image.

What happened to my new Altair astrocamera? Cloudy weather! But it may be clear at night soon...

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Friend requests from fake accounts
Impersonation on Facebook
(UPDATED)

What do you do if you get a Facebook friend request from someone who is already on your friends list? Or a friend complains that someone is sending out fake requests in their name?

These are friend requests with the correct name and face picture, but they connect to a page that has very little on it. A few pictures may be copied from the victim's real page, but not much.

So what do you do? Even if this hasn't happened to you, I'm going to tell you how to prevent it.

I know this seems long, but safety isn't optional, and you can't rely on someone else to do these things for you. It's part of knowing how to drive on the Information Superhighway. So here goes...

First, make sure it really happened (if it did). I say this because there was at one time a scam that involved telling people someone was sending out fake friend requests in their name, when this wasn't actually happening. But I haven't seen that scam lately.

Second, understand how it's done. If someone is sending out fake friend requests with your name and picture on them, they haven't broken into your account, and changing your password won't fix it.

Facebook allows anyone to set up an account with any name. The Internet makes it easy to copy any picture that you see. So the scammer can go to your page (much of which isn't visible to strangers), copy one or two pictures, and then open up a new Facebook account with the same name and use those pictures on it. Facebook doesn't confirm that people are who they say they are.

In my opinion, Facebook should detect this situation — same name and same picture as an existing person — and block it unless they can confirm that it's really the same person setting up a new account. But right now they don't. That is why this problem has become so bothersome.

Third, understand why they do it and how to prevent it. They are wanting to get in contact with your friends (to carry on some further scam). So they only do this if they can find out who your friends are, in order to send false requests to them and see how many they can hook.

In what follows I'm going to tell you how to hide your friends list from public view so people will have no incentive to do this.

But first, if it has happened, what do you do next?

(0) Think before you announce. If you immediately post, "I've been hacked, don't accept friend requests from me," at least make it visible to friends only, not to the public. You don't want to tell the whole world your account is vulnerable before you've tightened up security.

(0.5) Don't pay for "recovery services." The moment people find out you've been impersonated or hacked, strangers will pop up saying you can pay them to recover your account.

Three points.

— Does your account need recovering? You're using it now, aren't you? You don't need someone to break into your account to regain access for you. Maybe an impersonator needs to be gotten rid of, but that's not "recovery."

— These "recovery services" and "professional hackers" are scammers who will not fix your account, but they'll get your payment information and misuse it. Don't give your credit card number to a total stranger!

— These people are suspects. It's quite possible one of them did the impersonation himself, to get you to pay him to fix it. That is the federal crime of extortion and I wish the FBI would take an interest in it. Maybe they will.

Now back to what you should actually do:

(1) Go to the Facebook page of the fake account. There are two ways to get there. You can click on the face picture in the fake friend request. (Or, if you accepted the fake friend request, click on your new friend.)

Or you can search by name. In this case, click on the name itself and not any specific people who show up with face pictures. Some fake accounts may not be findable this way.

This will take you to a menu of people who use that name. If the impersonating account is visible, you will see 2 accounts with the same picture: your real friend and the faker. The faker is the one with fewer friends, often almost none. From there, click on the faker.

(2) On the faker's Facebook page, click on the 3 dots. Follow the menus and report the account as fake.

In the past, I found that Facebook would usually take down a fake account within minutes, making all friend requests from it disappear. Lately, they are not reacting as quickly, and I'm not sure why.

NOTE: You will often get a message from Facebook that the impersonator "was not violating community standards," and yet Facebook will take down the impersonating account shortly afterward, especially if it was reported more than once. Getting several friends to report the problem at the same time helps.

(3) One last bit of clean-up: If you have accepted a friend request from a faker, unfriend them.

How to keep people from impersonating you
and make Facebook safer for yourself and all your friends

Here's how to prevent impersonation. But see also three more tips at the end.

The reason people impersonate you is that they can see your friends list. So can people who get you to share bogus postings so they can get your Facebook contact information. Here is how to protect yourself.

(1) If you have accepted a fake friend request, unfriend them. They have access to all your other friends until you do!

(2) Even if you've never had any problems, make your friends list private as follows, so it won't attract impersonators or other people wanting access to it.

You are doing your friends a favor when you do this! You are protecting them from getting scams and spams from people who would have found them through you.

(a) Click on your own picture at the upper right of your Facebook screen. (Here I'm showing you mine.) Choose "Settings & privacy."

(b) In the next menu, choose Privacy Checkup.

(c) Choose Who Can See What You Share and click Continue.

(d) Scroll through all the settings and think about them, but especially, scroll down to the last two, and set them to "Only Me."

There! You're considerably safer from impersonators now.

NOTE: Facebook will eventually make changes to these menus. What you see in a few months or years may not match these pictures exactly. Don't give up; everything is still there, even if rearranged.

Three more important tips:

— To keep your password from being cracked, enable two-factor authentication. Click here to find out how. When that is done, even if someone gets your password, they won't be able to use it unless they also have your smartphone.

— Download a backup copy of everything you have on Facebook. That way, if the worst happens, and you have to close your whole account, you will have all the material to post on your new account. Click here to see Facebook's help page about how to do this. The resulting file may be very large, but you can burn it to a DVD or put it on a jump drive so it doesn't occupy space on your hard disk or SSD.

— If you are well known, consider joining the Verified By Meta program. It costs $12 a month, which strikes me as high, but I'm considering it myself. What I would get is extra protection against impersonation, access to Facebook support, and a blue checkmark that shows people my account is genuine. This used to be offered free of charge to public figures, and maybe it still is. If it were $12 a year, it would sell like hotcakes. Click here for more information (and also here).

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