The McWetlog

As I mentioned two years ago, we get a lot of animals visiting us, and the bird feeder, which Jennifer has reinstated, still doesn’t hurt. So far this spring, we’ve seen a lot of birds, including grackles, woodpeckers and chickadees; and there’s also a groundhog who seems to have made a home between two front porches in our building.

I’ve created a Flickr photoset to document our visitors. For the most part, these photos were taken through our living room window, with my 55-200mm lens, and with pretty good results, considering.

I used to play the oboe. For reasons that will soon be made clear, I recently took a look around to see what a decent intermediate oboe — i.e., a low-end professional instrument or high-end student instrument with all the keys — would cost. The last time I heard a quote was in the mid-1980s; things have gotten much more expensive since. A plastic oboe fulfilling these criteria runs about $4,000. A top-end instrument — grenadilla wood bore, silver keys — runs $5,000 to $7,000. About four times what I thought.

It’ll be a while before I oboe up, I think. Meanwhile, some links.

Oboe manufacturers: Covey; Fox (they also do bassoons and English horns); F. Lorée (they also do weird oboes, i.e., oboes d’amore, piccolo oboes and bass oboes).

God help me, an oboe blog, with plenty of others in the sidebar to look at later.

An NPR story from 2006 about the New York Philharmonic’s new oboist, and what he goes through to make their own reeds. Yes: oboe pros make their own. It’s spooky to think that he spends as much time making reeds as he does practicing.

It’s been raining today, but last night it was clear — also, I didn’t have to go to work today — so we spent it at the telescope. It was our first chance to observe from the field this spring; it’s a much better observing site than our parking lot. A few changes to our routine: we brought camp chairs and a table, and set up the telescope with its tripod legs collapsed. This made for a much more comfortable, relaxed and leisurely observing session, though we had our hands full on our walk to the field.

We set up before sunset and waited for the heavenly bodies to appear. The Moon was first, appearing in the blue sky as a young crescent so thin your in-laws will never come back; it was day and a half after New Moon. In the telescope it was ethereal: we were using our new f/6.3 focal reducer; using the 16mm Nagler Type 5 eyepiece, which produced 49× and a 1.6-degree field of view with the focal reducer, we could see the entire disc of the Moon. We also finally saw Mercury for the first time ever: it was nearby, and resolved as a disc in the scope. It would have made a hell of a picture, with trees in the foreground, but I left my camera behind deliberately — I wanted to observe, not fiddle with gear.

We spent a lot of time on Saturn, which was crisper than it had ever been for us — probably because we’d been out long enough for the scope’s optics to stabilize. Lots of little moons. We swapped between our two Tele Vue eyepieces, adding the Barlow lens as required, getting 49×, 79×, 98× or 158× depending on the combination. The Barlow worked well (at last), though adding it required serious refocusing.

The sky didn’t get truly dark for deep-sky observations; the Messier objects I tried for — galaxies in Leo, Hydra and Coma Berenices — were awfully dim, but perceivable. A bit of a jumble since we were poking around galaxy clusters, and I was losing track of which galaxy I was looking at. We’d probably have done better had we stuck around, but it was getting cold as well as late.

All in all, a good dry run with the new equipment. We may get another chance this week, if the weather holds, which will be quite nice. I wonder what we’ll look at next.

When people find out we have both cats and snakes, they ask whether the two kinds of animals get along. If the snakes ever got out — and I haven’t had an escape in almost six years — the cats would almost certainly make quick work of them. But through the glass, it’s a little different.

Kittens are extremely interested in snakes, and will examine them at close range. Goober, when young, sat on a lot of cage lids, which required us to upgrade them to something stronger (he broke the 50-gallon tank lid, which is now held together with fishing line; fortunately, the box turtle it now houses is not much of an escape risk). And snakes that have never once bitten a human being, such as Trouser (our male anerythristic Corn Snake) and the Baird’s Rat Snake, were striking at him as he watched. After a while, though, he grew out of it; adult cats (at least the ones we’ve had) aren’t as interested.

But now it’s Doofus’s turn to harass and bother the snakes, who are now freaking out at him …

Of course I’m not going to stop at just one telescope. The NexStar 5 SE I bought last fall is a fine scope, but it has its limitations. For one thing, 125 mm isn’t a lot of aperture. It’s also limited to a maximum 1.2-degree field of view (some astronomical targets are wider than that). And while it’s luggable at 12.5 kilograms, there are times when something even more portable — the vaunted “quick-look” category — would be more desirable. Especially when the NexStar’s electronics require additional setup time.

These desires — more portability and more aperture — can be addressed relatively inexpensively. (I said relatively. Let’s not talk about astrophotography rigs for the time being.)

One category of telescope I’m looking at is the small apochromatic refractor. A short-focal-length scope with an aperture of 66 mm or so, using low-dispersion glass to minimize chromatic aberration, can give wide-field views while weighing only a couple of pounds. Which means I can mount one on my camera tripod; it’d also make an inexpensive telephoto lens when connected to my Nikon. I’m leaning toward William Optics’s Zenithstar 66 SD, a 66mm f/5.9 scope that has received some pretty good reviews; it runs for about $400 with a diagonal and case. Its focuser is the same diameter as a Schmidt-Cassegrain’s, so there would be accessory compatibility. Sky-Watcher’s Equinox 66 is another option, but it’s slightly longer, heavier, and more expensive.

As for more aperture, I’m also thinking about Dobsonians again; they were my first choice until I realized that the field from which we do our observing is too far away to haul a Dob of reasonable aperture. They’re just too heavy. But Sky-Watcher has a new line of Dobs coming out that might tip the scales, so to speak, back in their direction. Most Dobs are either solid metal tubes or use a truss design; the new FlexTube Dobs use a collapsible design that doesn’t come apart. Early reports (Cloudy Nights, Stargazers’ Lounge) suggest that these scopes stay in collimation much better than truss Dobs, which have to be collimated every time they’re put together. The FlexTubes are more portable in that they’re collapsible and therefore smaller; it will remain to be seen whether they’re also light enough to be luggable; I haven’t seen any weight information yet. Even a truss Dob can weigh a bit, unless you want to shell out for one of these. I’m looking longingly at the 12-inch FlexTube, which should cost less than $1,000 in Canada, and hoping it will be light enough for us to use. We’ll see when they’re in stock.

Meanwhile, I expect to grab a small apo soon.

(Fortunately, telescopes last forever, and don’t require regular feeding.)

Since we last talked, our reptile collection has shrunk by 20 percent.

A few weeks ago, Jennifer and I bundled up seven snakes and delivered them to their new homes. Jeff and Jenny took our pair of Great Basin Gopher Snakes, the female Western Hognose Snake, Snuggles the Boa Constrictor, the Rosy Boa, and Sam the Ball Python; Stewart got one of our Red Milk Snakes (which promptly turned into a biting machine). With Piss-Boy’s death last month, that brings us down to 32 snakes; further downsizing and expected mortality (I have some old snakes) will take that number down even more in the coming months.

We decided to do this after a lot of careful soul-searching on my part after the embarrassing town council meeting. While we were never ordered to give up any animals, much less the boas and python, it forced me to think a lot harder about what we were keeping, and why. This is what I came up with:

1. While still important and non-negotiable, reptile keeping is much less fundamental than it was a few years ago. If I’d known about the Shawville by-law when it first came out in 2005, I’d have put up a much bigger fight.
2. While the town councillors assured us we wouldn’t have much to worry about unless someone filed a complaint, my policy in terms of reptile-keeping has always been to be completely above-board. I want to be able to withstand a raid by animal control or wildlife officers.
3. While I suspect that the by-law’s ban on boas and pythons isn’t enforceable under provincial law, I don’t feel like testing that in court. (There are people who fight on even when they can’t win; I’ve been known to walk away from fights I can win, simply on a cost-benefit basis, principle be hanged.)
4. We acquired certain animals (the boa constrictor, the python) for the purpose of doing educational shows. It’s since become abundantly clear that there is no way we have the time to do those shows.
5. We acquired other animals for breeding. Years later, we have the male hognose dead, the two red milks turning out to be both female, and the Great Basin gophers not having produced an egg in five years. We haven’t had anything hatch successfully in three years. Breeding’s not as important as it used to be.
6. The experience of other keepers suggested that the fewer animals we kept, the more we’d be able to enjoy them.

We still have one or two other snakes to find homes for (though I’m not going to put an ad up for them until I’m certain, and there are people with a right of first refusal), but getting rid of so many at once eases the urgency to do so. (At the very least, we’ve given away our boas and python, so we can endure any raid or inspection by government agents.)

Will this mean we will have more time to enjoy the remaining 32 snakes? Probably. But there are some other side benefits. For one thing, we’ll save something like $25 a month in frozen rodents. And for another, we’ve managed to retire enough cages that more room has opened up in the snake room. How much room? This much:

Enough cages were removed, once snakes were moved around, that one of the two shelves could be dismantled. This gave us just enough room to put in a bookshelf (for all our reptile books) and — more importantly — Jennifer’s desk. This means that, for the first time, she has a dedicated workspace; she’d previously had a corner of the master bedroom, which was frequently problematic, especially when she had online tutoring in the evenings (when I was frequently dead tired). We also found enough room for her papers and her art supplies; it’s now her office, and the snake room only secondarily.

So, not only does she have enough room to start working on her art projects again (I hope), she’ll also be in there often enough that she’ll be able to observe, handle and generally have fun with the snakes on a more regular basis. And if you’re not doing that, what’s the point of having them? (It’s true: the fewer you have, the more you can enjoy them.)

The night sky in Shawville is darker than Ottawa’s, but it’s not as dark as I would like; there’s still a bit of ambient light pollution, some from the town itself, some a result of being an hour’s drive from a million-strong metropolis. (For more on light pollution, see this post on The Map Room.)

So it has occurred to me that I could tie my desire to see the stars under some truly dark skies with my often-procrastinated desire to get some camping in. Problem is, most campsites are in wooded areas, presumably because most people aren’t comfortable camping in open, unsheltered spaces. Some investigation, I thought, would be in order: it would be nice, for example, if Bon Echo Provincial Park had campsites with good astronomical sight lines, because according to the maps it’s in a really dark area.

Fortuitously, there was this Ask MetaFilter question about where to travel to observe under dark skies, which I stumbled across the very same day I had been reviewing SkyNews’s list of dark-sky observing sites in Canada. From the former came a link to a brief list of dark sites (PDF) from the International Dark Sky Association; from the latter, a link to Gordon’s Park, a site on Manitoulin Island. Gordon’s Park caters to astronomers, providing a dark-sky campsite and cabin, plus interpretative programs. It’s also the subject of the Arrogant Worms song, “Mounted Animal Nature Trail,” which is a weird coincidence. It’s a seven-hour drive — and, suddenly, on our summer to-do list.

Update, April 6: I should also mention Phil Harrington’s ObservingSites.com, which includes a reference to a site in the nearby La Vérendrye reserve.

I named him “Piss-Boy,” awkwardly, after a character in History of the World, Part I: one day shortly after I got him, I noticed he’d soiled his cage four times in the six hours since I had last cleaned it. It always made it problematic to use him in reptile shows, when kids would ask what his name was.

He was an adult male Red-sided Garter Snake, one of four Jeff brought in for me in early 2000, along with two Wandering Garter Snakes (one of which, Extrovert, I still have) and a Checkered Garter Snake that died later the same year from an internal parasitic infection. May 12, 2000: that’s when I took possession. He was at least three years old at the time; fully grown. I don’t think he’s done any growing since then: his metabolism was geared for activity and reproduction.

Unexpectedly, he became the horniest snake in my collection, which is saying something when you also have Corn Snakes. I introduced him to Big Momma, my then-recently acquired female, in the fall of 2000. Despite the fact that it wasn’t breeding season, he pounced, beginning a three-week period of courtship before finally achieving intromission, and a two-month period during which he hardly ate. He went on to have two litters with her, along with another by another snake, for a total of 92 offspring. It’s quite likely that every Red-sided Garter Snake currently in captivity in southern Ontario is probably descended from him.

Big Momma died in October 2002, a result of a malignant liver tumour and the effects of old age. Since then, Piss-Boy has been by himself — still frisky even last year despite the absence of an available female. I doubted he’d breed again, owing to his age; I still have three of his offspring from 2002, two males and a female, if I ever want to breed Red-sided Garter Snakes again (though not to each other; I don’t believe in inbreeding).

Piss-Boy died some time today. He had, quite suddenly, been declining of late and was looking dangerously thin. But to the end he was always an active snake without being aggressive; I think he nipped me only once in his entire stay of nearly eight years with me. He was at least 11 years old, which is not a bad run for a garter snake. All in all, a damn good snake; a damn rewarding experience to have kept him.

For some reason it seems the passing of an era: he was the first garter snake I acquired since getting back into snake keeping, my first since my childhood garter snakes. And he was my first Red-sided Garter Snake since childhood as well, since that’s what I kept then. I’ll miss him.

You may be surprised to know that a key tool in astrophotography is the lowly USB webcam. In fact, most amateur lunar and planetary photography is done with webcams: the Celestron NexImage Solar System Imager, widely considered the best camera of its class, is from what I’ve read, essentially a Philips ToUCam Pro modified to fit into a 1¼-inch eyepiece barrel. Webcam astrophotography is essentially a low-cost exercise in adaptive optics: the camera shoots 640×480 video, and you use software to select the best frames (shot in rare moments of atmospheric stability), stack them to reduce noise, and apply an unsharp mask to draw out features. The results are surprisingly good, considering. (For more on lunar and planetary imaging with webcams, see these presentation slides (PDF).)

The software is the key link, and of course the fact that I use a Mac complicates things somewhat, because the telescope companies bundle their lunar and planetary webcams with Windows-only software. Doing it on a Mac requires a couple of extra steps.

Stop right now and read Webcam Astrophotography on the Mac, which covers the same ground that I’m about to (and is actually written by someone who knows what he’s talking about).

So if I want to use the Celestron NexImage with a MacBook (which I’m kind of on the verge of buying), the first step is to install a webcam driver. Celestron doesn’t provide one, but two sources of third-party USB webcam drivers for the Mac are available: Macam, which is open source, and IOXWebcam X, which costs money. Neither mention any astronomical cameras, but they both support the Philips ToUCam series on which the Celestron NexImage is based. There are reports that IOXWebCam, at least, works, but there’s a catch: version 1.1 is PowerPC-only and works under Rosetta, but won’t work with Intel apps; version 1.2 does but is in beta.

It does seem like a bit of a hack, but a webcam driver is necessary before going any further: Equinox 6’s webcam support relies on a driver, as does BTV, a video capture program that astronomers use.

For all my searching I can’t find anything better at the entry level. It’s different for other cameras. iCCD controls Starlight Xpress astronomical CCDs, which are top-level and hella-expensive; they’re for long-exposure deep-sky photography, not stacked images of Mars, Jupiter or Saturn. Astro IIDC controls FireWire cameras, which are a few times more expensive than entry-level USB webcams (but far less expensive than an SBIG or a Starlight Xpress).

But once the images can get on the computer, there’s some software available for stacking and processing them. The popular Registax is Windows-only, but AstroStack is a cross-platform Java app; it’s also commercial software as opposed to the freeware Registax. Another one I’ve heard good things about is Keith’s Image Stacker, which is shareware. These apps would also stack images from other sources, such as, say, 30-second exposures from a Nikon D40 plugged into the back of a telescope. For example.