Lunar eclipse 2022

The last lunar eclipse I had clear skies for came back in 2014. I did a bit of astrophotography for that one, and managed to put together a crude animation of the event. It didn't turn out great, because I had no plan going in, but was a neat proof of concept. For the 2022 eclipse, which May 15, I planned to do better.

Except that I forgot about it completely, until Lisa stuck her head into my office and asked if I was interested in watching the eclipse, which had already begun. Argh! There wasn't time to set up my telescope (762mm focal length!) and calibrate its equitorial tracking, which meant I would not be repeating the animation trick this time around. So instead I settled for using my Canon FD 500mm f/8 reflex lens (converted to EOS mount by yours truly) on my tripod-mounted 7D. The results of this setup were... okay. Adjusting the camera on the tripod was a real pain. You forget just how convenient an equatorial mount is for making tiny observational adjustments until you don't have it. The 500mm lens I used is, in fact, a small telescope. Emphasis on small. Still, it performed as well as can be expected and respectably documented the event. Next time, though, I'm going to plan better...

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Proof of concept

After more than a year of working on the photography studio and other new homeowner tasks (read: chopping back those monstrous mountains of Carolina jasmine and Lady Banks roses, not to mention septic work and other stuffs) I've been re-bitten by the astronomy bug. Mostly this amounts to my having more time and less exhaustion, directly attributable to turning in the Chicken Ranch book manuscript. The new house had significant appeal for me because--while not close to being a true dark sky site--it was much darker than our old neighborhood. Last Thursday, I hauled out the new(ish) Atlas mount and set up the telescope for the first time ever at the new place. Here's how it went:

Tonight I set up my telescope for the first time at the new house. I'd only intended to do a polar alignment and mark the tripod's position for quick set-up in the future, but crescent moon was so tempting that I went in and brought out the scope. Bug and Fairy Girl came out and oohed and aahed. Seeing was excellent tonight, with crisp views and little turbulence in the upper atmosphere. I used 20mm and 9mm plossl eyepieces, then barlowed the 9mm. The mountains and craters around Mare Crisium were super sharp, and there was lots of contrasty detail along the terminator. Then I swung the scope around and took a quick look at the Orion nebula. It was very clearly visible as ghostly white wings (the color one sees in photos comes from long duration exposures). Even the Trapezium was crisp and distinct, very easy to pick out.

The new place is so much better to observe from than the light-polluted old neighborhood. It's not anywhere near being a dark sky site, but there is much less local light pollution. Even so, there's one floodlight on a neighbor's garden shed that shines directly onto my observing area and really messes up night vision. I'm going to have to construct some sort of light block above the fence there. All in all, though, once I get it set up the way I want, this is going to make a nice backyard observatory.

That was prelude. I've long been fascinated by astrophotography, and in fact took my first (very bad) astrophotos when I was 13 using a Canon AE-1 with a telescope adapter. Last year, The Wife gifted me with a Canon Rebel T3i modified by Hap Griffin to be more sensitive to the Hydrogen-Alpha light that dominates many emission nebula in the night sky. I've not had a chance to use it until Saturday, when I set up the whole shebang in the back yard and made a test run.

One big astronomical target that's long held my interest is Barnard's Loop. It's the crescent remnant of an ancient supernova explosion in the constellation Orion that's invisible to the naked eye. The modified camera should be able to pick it up, though. The evening started off quite nicely, as I ran the Atlas mount through a three-star alignment and it went swimmingly. I mean, it nailed alignment without the tears and cursing I usually suffer. I set up the T3i on the telescope using a homemade piggyback mount, my Canon 50mm 1.8 mark I lens (a favorite for infrared photography) and a new Kenko fog filter I recently acquired. I didn't have an intervalometer compatible with the T3i, so I was limited to 30 second exposures, but I hoped that would be enough--eternal optimist, that's what I am. Here's the result:

Now, I'm the first to admit this is nothing to write home about. The white balance is way off, there's coma all around the edges and all sorts of little technical issues that are wrong with it. I messed up shooting my dark frames and didn't bother with flats. The waxing crescent moon also contributed to the light gradient in the image, which is why moonless nights are best for astrophotography. But dang, look at what's right--the elusive loop is clearly visible, a faint crimson crescent stretching from Bellatrix in Orion's shoulder to Rigel in his foot. M42, the famed Orion nebula, is so bright it's blown out in the sword. And look at the belt--there's the Flame and Horsehead nebulas right there off the leftmost star. And this is all captured via a basic, standard 50mm camera lens. I have not attempted prime focus photography yet, which entails using the telescope as one big 762mm lens. Tracking held steady, so I'm confident I could go for exposures of five minutes or more with no significant star movement at this scale. I've got a guide scope, however, and just need to get a dual mount so I can run them through a computer and enjoy the rock-steady tracking for deep-space objects such a setup enables. Am I looking forward to that? You bet.

I might just get the hang of this astrophotography thing yet.

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Lunar eclipse!

The morning of Tuesday, April 15 saw the first of four lunar eclipses slated to occur over the next two years. That's celestial mechanics for you--like a Venusian transit of the sun, these things come in groupings. Unlike Venus passing in front of the sun (which happens at century-long intervals), lunar eclipses are comparatively common. But not that common. The last lunar eclipse visible from North America, in 2010, didn't turn out so well for me. Because of the chance of clouds at any time, I was determined to take advantage of the opportunity this time around.

Several things are different now than they were back in 2010. For one, I have a different mirror in my telescope, which I'm still sad about. The second is that I've figured out why there was so much diffusion in my 2010 photographs--the plossl eyepieces I use for visual observing introduce field curvature, which causes the edges of the image to be out of focus. If I'm ever to get serious about eyepiece projection astrophotography, I'll need to invest in flat-field orthoscopic eyepieces. I've also got a better camera--the Canon 7D--and have learned I can use a telextender to double the telescope's focal length, thus making the moon fill the frame of my camera. Finally, I've got a rock-steady Orion Atlas equatorial mount for my telescope, a significant upgrade from the 1970s era pier GEM mount that came with the scope.

Unfortunately, I wasn't feeling all that well, and wasn't up to doing much preparation. And I'm still not entirely familiar with the Atlas mount, so wasn't able to get it to track the moon very accurately (although the electronic controls worked very nicely and allowed me to position the image precisely). I moved the mirror up in the tube so I could shoot at prime focus with the camera. Ideally, when I did this, I should've collimated the scope to make sure the mirrors were in good alignment to ensure the best possible image. But I was tired and sickish so I didn't.

As for the weather, this time around I was not plagued by clouds. The sky was crystal clear, in fact, and it got pretty darn cold for Texas in April--down to the lower 40s. Brr. Which should've meant great views, but it didn't. There was a good bit of wind on the ground, and a lot of turbulence up high in the atmosphere, making the moon's edges waver and forcing me to adjust focus regularly simply because the "boiling" effect of the atmosphere made it impossible to be certain I ever nailed focus. None of my photos turned out as sharp as I'd have liked because of that, but overall it wasn't a bad effort. The 6" Meade 645 f/5 Newtonian has a focal length of 762mm, and for most of the night I used a Vivitar 2x telextender, which essentially turned the scope into a 1524mm f/10.6 lens. I had to remove the telextender during total eclipse, though, because the moon was too dim to shoot without those two extra stops of light--and even then I cranked the ISO up to 3200 (which introduced significant noise to the image). The good news is that I'm progressing with my competence in astrophotography. The bad news is that I clearly have a long way to go. I combined 30-something images into the animated gif above. You can see a progression of the original still images below. Hopefully, by the time the next lunar eclipse comes around, I'll have mastered the Atlas' tracking and be able to shoot totality using much lower ISO and longer shutter speeds.

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365 / 23

Whew! Shooting a wedding makes it quite a challenge to get in a 365 photo project shot. You just get all photographed out. "But wait," you might say. "If you were shooing a wedding, can't you just use one of those photos?" Ah, but the whole point of the 365 challenge was to start taking photos that weren't work-related. In the rules Lisa laid down on Day One, neither of us can use images from a paid photo session. Which mean no weddings (although, technically, I could probably use the shots I took since Lisa's pretty chintzy when it comes to paying me--don't tell her I said that, okay?).

In any event, I was feeling pretty uninspired. Some hay bale-by-moonlighet shots I tried didn't come out at all, and a few other options I rushed and wasn't satisfied with. We'll try those again at a later date. Tonight, boring though it may be, my 365 image is the view down my Newtonian telescope's optical tube. I'll try to do better tomorrow. Promise.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Tamron 28-75mm 2.8

Lisa On Location Photography

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365 / 13: Primary mirror!

To pretty much everyone reading this, my photo today is going to be exceedingly boring. For me, however, it is a thing of beauty. What you are looking at is a 6" f/5 parabolic primary mirror for a Newtonian telescope. My telescope. I've been without since March, when I sent my original primary mirror off to be resurfaced. It came back badly chipped and unusable. I've finally gotten a replacement, and this makes me happy. As soon as I post this, I'm installing it in my telescope. Naturally, it's cloudy tonight so I won't be able to test it out. Such is life.

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon EF 50mm 1.8 mark I

Lisa On Location Photography

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My luck is EPIC!

Unfortunately, that epic luck is all bad, at least where it comes to astronomy. The rest of my life, I figure I'm at worst break even, if not somewhat ahead overall. But when it comes to astronomy? Forget it. I'm like Charlie Brown trying to kick that football.

A telescope mirror was delivered by FedEx today, a replacement for my old 6" f/5 mirror that was badly chipped and rendered useless back in April. I've gone the whole summer observing season without a working telescope, a painful ordeal I will expand on more fully in a future post. But today I was getting a replacement, perhaps not as good as the mirror I lost, but one that will allow me to resume backyard astronomy. Yay!

Except said package was not on the front porch as had been indicated. The Wife looked all around the front of our house where it might've been left. Nothing. Then she checked the neighbors'. Again, nothing. Seriously verging on a personal meltdown over the senseless unfairness of the universe, I called in a missing package report to FedEx.

FedEx wanted me to check again. Particularly around the car washing supplies, because the delivery driver made sure to leave it with the car washing supplies.

Which is very interesting, because we have no car-washing supplies at our house, outside, inside or otherwise. If you've seen my car, you would understand this.

So, The Wife set out into the neighborhood again, looking for homes with car washing supplies out front. And she found one, down the street. The house didn't look like ours. The address wasn't similar to ours. Yet this is the house the driver decided to leave the package at. The Wife retrieved it, and I let FedEx know we've located their lost delivery.

The Wife hasn't opened it, though. The last time I opened a shipping container with a telescope mirror in it, little broken pieces of shattered glass came out. At this point, I'm conditioned to expect the worst. Will find out this evening when I get home if my (bad) luck holds.

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One obsession down...

I watched the presidential debates tonight, and have to say the entire experience was not a good one. Moderator Jim Lehrer lost control fast than a junior high substitute teacher, and is a good reason why we need someone other than tired, old, white, male journalists running these things. So I'm not gonna talk about the debates.

Instead, I'm going to tell you about the observatory I discovered--or rather, re-discovered--because of the Chicken Ranch. Crazy, huh?

A year or two ago--I forget how long exactly--I was in the Alkek Library at Texas State, going through the mind-numbing and nausea-inducing ritual of searching microfilm of old newspapers for information on the closure of the Chicken Ranch. Or maybe it was hunting down a rare, pre-Marvin Zindler news report of the brothel. Either way, in either the Houston Chronicle or Houston Post I came across a wild art photo (that is, a random photo not accompanying a particular story). In this case, it was a photo of an old, worn-down, domed observatory outside of Schulenburg, Texas. The image triggered one of those long-lost memories that surprise you when they resurface because you'd so thoroughly forgotten them. I'd seen that observatory before. Clearly, I had, although I was probably too young at the time to realize what it was, and only the odd shapes of the building registered. This isn't that particular photo, but it gives a good idea of what I remembered:

Photo courtesy Eclipse Tours

Over the past year or so, when driving through Schulenburg on the way to visit family in Columbus, I always made it a point to try and see if it was still where I kind of though it used to be. It wasn't. This discouraged me, since what's more depressing than a bulldozed observatory and telescope? But lo and behold, Gary McKee, a historian from Schulenburg with whom I'd corresponded with regarding the Chicken Ranch, told me that it'd been moved when I mentioned my half-hearted search to him. Moved where? To the Blinn College campus in Schulenburg, the site of the former Bishop Forest High School (which, to my surprise, closed in 1989--being Catholic, I got plenty of encouragement to go to Bishop Forest from the local parish. Sorry, but a parochial education--particularly two towns over in Schulenburg--didn't appeal much to me). So today, driving back home from a quick visit to Columbus, I made a quick detour to Schulenburg. And there it was, in better shape than my memory, but the same observatory, plain as day:

The Schaefer Observatory, I've learned, was built by H.P. Schaefer and his sons in the 1940s to observe the moon (and presumably planets and other objects). One site says he hand-ground a 10" mirror for his hand-built telescope, which would have been a pretty darn impressive Newtonian telescope for the day. The dome was metal, and near as I can tell, the cylindrical section was wood. It's been restored and hosts star parties these days, with a great, open southern exposure (if you ignore the power lines running across the field). It makes me happy to know that this piece of history has been preserved for future generations.

I've been fixated on telescopes again lately, mainly because mine still remains mirrorless. I hope to remedy that soon. And some day, I will acquire a much larger telescope with state-of-the-art go-to capability along with an excellent, stable mount for astrophotography. And one we get some property out of town with dark skies, I shall build my very own observatory with a dome and everything. That's been one of my long-time dreams since I first bought my 6" Meade back when I was 13, and I look forward to following in Mr. Schaefer's footsteps.

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The moon in my sights

With the weather cooling off, the astronomy bug has bitten me again, as it tends to do every year at this time. Driving hone this past week I've been treated to some exceptionally clear skies, so I decided to take out my telescope and play around a bit. I had it out last week, but most of that time was spent struggling with collimation--which is the technical term for making sure all the mirrors line up in my Newtonian reflector telescope. If they don't, then distortion degrades the image of whatever you happen to be looking at. So I used a compass to get a passably accurate polar alignment, then monkeyed with the mirror settings for half an hour before I finally was satisfied that the scope was as collimated as good as I was going to get it. Collimation is a very basic task for owners of Newtonian telescopes, but man, I struggle with it.

With collimation more or less achieved and a pretty half-moon beckoning in the sky above, I was inspired to break out my Canon 7D and see how it handled for astrophotography. The 7D has live view, which my XTi does not, which should make accurate focusing much easier--at least in theory. The moon is an easy target, so I gave it a shot. There are two way to take astrophotos through a telescope--using the scope itself as the lens, which is called "prime photography," or using an eyepiece between the telescope and camera for increased magnification, which is called "eyepiece projection photography." Of the two, eyepiece projection is the more challenging, but I tend to do it most often because I like to mix my astrophotography with visual observing. With prime focus, although the image is brighter and sharper, the rear mirror must be moved inside the telescope tube which renders it unsuitable for visual observing. Plus, it would have to be re-collimated, and you know where I stand on that.

The image above shows the southeast of the moon. In the center of the image, the overlapping craters are, from lower left to upper right, are Janssen, Fabricus and Metius. Just to the right of them is a shallow, diagonal gash that is the Rheita Valley. Pretty cool, huh? I shot this image, and the one below, using a 12mm GSO Plössl eyepiece. The image at the top of the page of the entire moon was taken using a 20mm Plössl for a lower magnification and a wider field of view.

The image above shows the moon from the lunar equator southward. The smooth, grayis areas are the Sea of Fertility (right) and the Sea of Nectar (left). The Sea of Tranquility joins them at the top of the image, with the Apollo 11 landing site in the upper left-hand corner. The prominent crater with the central peak on the western edge of the Sea of Nectar is Theophilus. Notice the loss of sharp definition in the lower left of the image--I'll back to that shortly.

With the 12mm Plössl images turning out so nicely, I thought I'd push my telescope's capabilities to the max, and traded the 12mm for a 4mm Plössl, which is the highest magnification eyepiece I own. Turns out the 4mm is a bust for astrophotography--I could not bring it to focus with my camera. There simply wasn't enough inward focus on the telescope's focuser, and the image stayed blurry. So I tried my next highest magnification eyepiece, a 6mm Plössl. This one did work, as evidenced by the image above. The crater Theophilus and the Sea of Nectar are visible upper right hand corner. The view was certainly much closer, but it was also much dimmer. Not only that, but turbulence in the atmosphere was more obvious, distorting and degrading the view. Despite my best efforts at focusing precisely, the rather soft image above is the clearest I could manage. For practical purporses, 9mm is probably the highest magnification eyepiece I can use under normal sky conditions for astrophotography.

In case you were wondering, the image above shows how the eyepieces connect with the camera in the telescope adapter. Different eyepieces are swapped out for narrower or wider fields of view. What suprised me the most was the poor imaging results I got from my wider eyepieces, such as the 20mm Plössl. The full view of the moon at the top of this post was taken with the 20mm, as was the image below. Notice the halation and distortion that becomes more apparent the farther away from the center you get. I'm really not sure what this is--I'd have thought a lower-power eyepiece would minimize distortion, but the opposite appears to be the case. Because the higher magnification eyepieces restrict the field of view to a very narrow portion of the telescope's mirror reflection, I suspect the distortion is the result of either the natural "coma" distortion inherent in the Newtonian mirrored telescope design, or errors from poor collimation. I'm not at all confident my collimation is good, but that's an awful lot of distortion. The same goes for coma. I'll be asking people more knowledgeable than myself in the future to try and figure this one out.

As I was wrapping up my photo session, three middle school kids who'd been walking up and down the block all evening stopped and asked "can you see the moon through that?" I removed the camera and re-balanced the mount, then invited them to look. There were gasps of of amazement and much marveling all around. Then I showed them Jupiter and its four Galilean satellites. One exclaimed "I like science now," which gave me a chuckle. They thanked me then headed home, and as they were walking away, I heard one say, "No wonder Monkey Girl is so smart!" Monkey Girl being my eldest daughter. That made me smile--two compliments for the price of one.

I'm going to try and set up my telescope in the front yard more often during these mild autumn evenings. Even though light pollution keeps me from viewing any deep space object--galaxies and nebulas and clusters--the moon and planets are still gorgeous and more than impressive for a bit of astronomical outreach among the neighbors. I just wish I could figure out how to control that fuzzy distortion in my images...

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Not content with destroying biology, Religious Right attacks astronomy

From the Bad Astronomy blog, I've learned that the Biblical lunatics on the Texas State Board of Education (all appointed by Governor Rick "I'm a Bigger Panderer to Religious Nutcases The You" Perry) have decided that destroying biology standards in Texas classrooms is not enough. No, undermining the scientific fact of natural selection is simply unsatisfying when you have a cowardly governor up for re-election backing you up and encouraging any an all activities that will appeal to the wing-nut fringe during the upcoming primary.

So they're now assaulting astronomy. The universe isn't 14 billion years old, opines creationist Barbara Cargill. Scientific evidence to the contrary, it can only be 4-6,000 years old, because that's what a strict reading of the Bible says. I can only assume "Deluge Geology" is next on the docket. Ugh.



I never thought I'd do this, but I'm voting in the upcoming Republican primary for Kay Bailey Hutchison. I'm no fan of hers, but in the absence of any credible Democratic candidate, she's the only hope to save Texas from the machiavellian machinations of Gov. Perry. Honesty, how does this buffoon continue to be re-elected?

Oh, and I'm ordering the DVD of Inherit the Wind to watch with my kids immediately. As history, it's as inaccurate as any of these so-called "science standards" the creationists are shoehorning into science textbooks, but it contains more Truth than their narrow minded view of reality.

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