Yearly Archives: 2010

Tiana's 29th

Also featuring Bobby Hurricane.

Sky Watcher

Tonight, I saw the moon in my telescope. If it was a full moon, it would have filled the eyepiece. I could study the craters, the landmarks, and the patterns of dust on the surface. I grabbed my camera with a modestly long 100mm lens, mounted it on my new tripod, and took a picture. Unless I get a lens with a longer focal length, it’s the best I’ll ever get in capturing the moon with a sensor¹.

It was a great night for observing, the forecast said, with no cloud cover, good transparency², good seeing³, and decent darkness. I had my warmest clothes on, as I was warned that comfort and motivation are some of the most important things in observational astronomy.

I used a crater on the moon to calibrate my red-dot finderscope. Then I used the finderscope to follow the arm of the big dipper to Arcturus, the curve of which led me to Saturn, just under Denebola and in the constellation Virgo this year.

With the naked eye, Saturn looks like another bright star, but at 100x magnification, Saturn becomes a small and sharp sphere. The rings were clean but indistinguishable from each other, with the gas giant casting a dramatic shadow across them.

I looked 68 minutes into the past⁴, until Saturn slowly drifted out of view.

I have no plans on getting into prime focus astrophotography — in which the telescope is used as a lens — because the astronomy equipment required is much more expensive. [↩]
Calculated from the amount of water vapour in the air. [↩]
Estimated from turbulence and temperature differences in the atmosphere. [↩]
Saturn was 8.505AU or 1,272,330,990km away, which takes about 4080 seconds for the light to hit our eyes from there. [↩]

I can hear the june bugs approaching

(Thanks to Kasi for this one.)

I recently discovered that guitar chords are the same as ukulele chords, which opens up the repertoire of available songs considerably. It’s a shame that most online sheet music is in the form of guitar tabs, which don’t translate to the ukulele. Still, I have enough songs to practice that I can switch to another when I get bored with one. I find it interesting that since the ukulele requires two hands doing different things, I run into a bottleneck in hand dexterity; I can pluck or strum well enough with my right hand, but I can’t get the chords with my left hand fast enough, or vice versa depending on the song. I have to practice each hand individually, which is so unlike any other instrument I’ve played before.

I have a telescope now. My instructor was able to get a great package deal for students in his astrophotography course for a 114mm reflector, along with a tracking motor¹ and illuminated reticule². I put it together today, and it was really exciting to be assembling all these precision parts to make my first telescope, a moment I dreamed about since I was a kid. Astronomy is much more complicated than I expected. Much of it is similar to photography in terms of the equipment used (although the terms and controls are different), but now you also have to know your subject, your orientation, and your weather conditions, not to mention being at the right place.

I’m feeling better about things. Maybe it’s the promise of warmer weather. I’m waiting for the day I can drive my car with the windows down and sandals on. Those are the days of house parties, camping, drinks on patios, and first kisses. Soon, it will be the time of stargazing, barbecues, and who knows.

A few people have suggested my depression may have been due to a chemical imbalance, which I never ruled out. Even though it was one e‑mail on that Thursday morning that triggered all those bad thoughts, I normally would have been able to handle it better. There wasn’t an immediate impact. Just a gradual sagging that got worse and worse throughout the day until I was completely dejected at night. After that, I got a blister on my neck from standing in the shower for too long with water that was too hot. Now that I think about it, I completely understand why I felt that way, but it seems kind of silly.

Joe Lencioni also recommended to me a free program called Flux — appropriately headlined as “Software to make your life better” — that gradually changes the colour temperature and brightness of your monitors to mimic the setting sun. It’s also localized, so it knows when the sun sets for your area and changes automatically. I’m pretty sure it’s made it easier for me to fall asleep at night.

I’m in such a strange phase right now. I don’t know where I am. When I look back on this time in my life, I wonder whether I’ll look back with nostalgia, pity, or regret.

To move the telescope at the same rotation of the earth to prevent blur in astrophotography. [↩]
To keep track of a guide star in calibrating the tracking motor. [↩]

Aaron and Ryan: Portrait Test

Aaron came over with Ryan for breakfast one morning, and it gave me a chance to use them as models to try some of the techniques I learned from Sid when I was in New Hampshire. I still had to do some work in Photoshop to keep the midpoint where I wanted, but it was still quite minimal compared to my work with colour lately. This type of portraiture is very different from what I normally do, where instead of using an out-of-focus background to make the subject stand out, I’m using the contrast of light.

I turned on Chicken Run to keep Ryan occupied while we ate, and Aaron kept getting distracted by it as much as he did. For a moment, I couldn’t tell if it was the son who took after the father, or vice versa.