The McWetlog

Rod Mollise worries about the decline of astronomy magazines — namely, Astronomy and Sky and Telescope. Fewer pages on cheaper paper, staff turnover, schizophrenic content — all as a result of rising production costs and robust competition from the Web. It’s the same story I’ve heard elsewhere: magazines are hurting generally, genre and niche magazines especially so; see, for example, previous entries The decline of the science fiction magazine and The incredible shrinking Trains.

How print magazines can stay relevant in an online world is undoubtedly the industry question. I know that they can, otherwise a plugged-in putz like me wouldn’t keep subscribing to them. And print magazines can’t be inevitably doomed, or else The New Yorker wouldn’t have been able to buck the trend and become profitable after decades of losing money. And note that when it comes to books, the opposite is happening: e-books are struggling. Magazines can’t compete with the Internet on timeliness or cost — not when magazine subscription costs are rising and Web sites are free — and people don’t mind reading shorter pieces online. There is a solution or two out there, and Mollise tries to come up with some specific to the astronomy mags: stop trying to compete with the Internet on news, offer more reviews and distinctive content. In other words, be more interesting, more distinctive — more essential. These are not bad ideas.

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.

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.)

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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.

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).

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I just finished reading Timothy Ferris’s Seeing in the Dark, a book about amateur contributions to astronomy. This is something I’ve been struck by the more I get into astronomy: it not only accepts amateur contributions, it relies on them. While professional astronomers compete for limited time on research telescopes, the sheer number of amateurs looking skyward allows them to do things that professionals simply can’t (because there are fewer of them looking through fewer telescopes). Such as long-term observations of single objects (like variable stars), and searching for asteroids, comets and supernovae. (The subsequent PBS documentary did not emphasize this point to the same extent.)

I’m struck by this partly because it’s not the same with herpetology, or at least the wildlife conservation part of it, where amateurs are frequently seen as part of the problem, rather than part of the solution — with the notable and important exception of frog monitoring. (On the other hand, you can’t poach a comet.)

But Ferris points out that amateur astronomy is a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of larger apertures and digital cameras passing into amateur hands; a half-century ago, amateurs were limited to long-focal-length, small-aperture refractors and reflectors, and planetary observations. A lot has happened to empower amateur astronomers since then. In the meantime, amateur herpetologists have been facing increasing regulations and sharp professionalization, both of which restrict the lay enthusiast from doing meaningful work in the wild, and send many of us to our basements to focus on exotics.

Seeing in the Dark by Timothy Ferris

Amazon.ca • Amazon.com

Seeing in the Dark (DVD)

Amazon.ca • Amazon.com

The HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has managed to photograph avalanches in progress on the surface of Mars. Beyond amazing. Wow. Photo credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. Via Bad Astronomy.

Out observing for the first time in two months last night: we finally had a combination of (reasonably) clear skies and (relatively) warm temperatures (i.e., warmer than -10°C); besides, Saturn was at opposition. So Saturn was our primary target.

To avoid getting run over by snowmobiles, we set up our telescope by the back step; planetary observing doesn’t require dark skies. A rough two-star alignment (Regulus and Rigel) proved adequate. Saturn was visible in the 25mm Plössl (50×) as well as the 10mm Radian (125×), as were at least two of its moons — Tethys and Dione. Titan was probably visible as well, but I didn’t identify it. Atmospheric turbulence was not good, so the viewing wasn’t exactly sharp, but Saturn was recognizable as Saturn.

Also tested out the lunar filter on the gibbous Moon, which would normally be excessively bright in the eyepiece; the filter made it quite viewable. We also tried out the narrowband nebula filter on the Orion Nebula, which is bright enough to view from a less-than-dark site. It was visible enough in the non-filtered eyepieces, but adding the filter brought out more expanse and more detail. The Trapezium could be seen in either case; the filter made the stars greenish.

At around -6°C, not so cold that the electronics or battery were impaired; I’m sure I didn’t leave the optics enough time to cool down. In any event, we were going after targets that weren’t very challenging, optically speaking. Though Saturn and the Orion Nebula are impressive enough never to be taken for granted.

The first close-up images from the MESSENGER probe — images of a part of Mercury we’ve never seen before — are beginning to come in. Discussion at Bad Astronomy, the Planetary Society (also here) and Universe Today.

Previously: MESSENGER and Mercury.

(Photo credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington.)

The lawsuit against Meade has been settled. Meade’s “Advanced Ritchey-Chrétien” telescopes — the LX200R and RCX400 series — aren’t actually Ritchey-Chrétiens. A Ritchey-Chrétien telescope is a form of Cassegrain reflector that uses hyperbolic mirrors to eliminate coma; these telescopes are modified Schmidt-Cassegrain catadioptrics that achieve the same effect. Ritchey-Chrétiens are also insanely expensive, so a couple of companies who manufacture them sued Meade for deceptive trade practices — Meade’s scopes are considerably cheaper than the real thing. As part of the settlement, Meade can’t use the RC initials in its products, but can continue to claim “Ritchey-Chrétien-like” benefits, since the scopes in question do eliminate coma, and are by all accounts impressive enough, reliability issues notwithstanding.

Update, Jan. 24: More from Sky and Telescope’s news blog, including new names for the contested telescopes, which will now have an “ACF” (“advanced coma free”) suffix.

The MESSENGER probe makes its first flyby of Mercury on Monday. The first probe to visit Mercury since Mariner 10 in 1974 and 1975, MESSENGER will make two more passes of the innermost planet before settling into orbit in 2011. What makes this probe particularly interesting is that it’ll map the half of Mercury that Mariner 10 missed — 33 years later, and we still don’t know what half the planet looks like. Here’s a good article from the Planetary Society.

Last night we could see some stars, but it also proved that cold nights aren’t much use for stargazing. Too much goes wrong with the telescope: the optics never quite settle down due to the temperature, so nothing stays in focus; the batteries drain rapidly; the LCD on the Celestron controller goes wonky. We had the power die on us during the alignment, forcing us to start over, and we lost tracking while at high power. And meanwhile we’re freezing our extremities trying to control the scope and handle ice-cold metal eyepieces. Mental note for future reference: try not to go out stargazing below, say, –10°C.

Our purpose last night was to test our new acquisitions: a 10-mm Radian eyepiece (125× in our scope) and a 2× Barlow lens, both from that manufacturer of astronomical holy grails, Tele Vue. We were especially hoping to test them on Mars, which is bright and nearing opposition this month. We’re going to have to wait for more favourable conditions.

For future reference, because there are an awful lot of them and because Jennifer will, I think, appreciate having it, here is a list of Wikipedia pages describing the various deep-sky catalogues:

• List of Messier objects
• List of NGC objects
• Index catalogue (no list)
• Herschel 400 catalogue
• Caldwell catalogue
• List of dark nebulae (i.e., Barnard objects)

(For all of Wikipedia’s faults, it does astronomy relatively well, I think.)

See also the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Finest NGC Objects List, an illustrated guide to the Sharpless catalogue, and, of course, Wikipedia’s list of astronomical catalogues.

Last night, I plugged my digital SLR into my telescope (via an adapter), pointed it at Comet Holmes, and tried to take a halfway-decent picture. This was the result:

Not the best photo of Holmes by a long shot, but not bad for a first attempt, with limited equipment.

The most important accessory for a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope — or anything else with glass at the front of a telescope tube, for that matter, including Maksutovs and refractors — is something to prevent dew from accumulating on the glass. There’s nothing more annoying than having your telescope fog up shortly after you start observing. Among the preventative measures are a dew shield, which reduces the glass’s exposure to the outside air, and a dew heater.

The store was fresh out of dew shields of the requisite size, so we decided to improvise one of our own for our first observing session last Friday:

The material in question is a Neoprene back wrap. It came with a hot and cold gel pack, of which, thanks to my little disease, I have several. It has Velcro, so all we had to do was wrap it around the telescope and voilà! Instant dew shield. Serviceable, if a little floppy and funny-looking.

The highlight of last night’s observing session — our first serious use of our new telescope — was Comet Holmes. Even in the 10×50 binoculars (another purchase), it presented a round, fuzzy disc that was nevertheless sharply defined; in the telescope, it was huge. (To see what I mean, Astronomy magazine has a collection of submitted photos.) To the naked eye, it’s just another star, though rather a bright one by now.

Otherwise, we ran both the telescope and the binoculars through their paces. I was able to spot not only the comet, but the Andromeda Galaxy and the Double Cluster well enough through the binocs (and the Pleiades were wonderful); the scope was able to pick out M81 and M82 in the same field of view, plus the usual suspects (M13, the Dumbbell Nebula and the Ring Nebula, which was tiny but its shape apparent).

Atmospherics weren’t great, though it was an ostensibly clear night: Altair, Deneb and Vega had halos around them when I looked at them through binocs. There was more ambient light from the town than I was prepared for, too.

And I don’t think we set up the tripod very well: it shook too much — more than it did in our previous test — and I think the fact that it wasn’t level affected the computer’s accuracy. But we had to walk a couple hundred metres to get to our site, and moving the scope was relatively easy: we didn’t even bother separating it from its tripod.

I won’t know for sure what this telescope’s limitations are until I try a higher-magnification eyepiece (say, a 10-mm Plössl for planetary observation) and do it under better skies. But so far, so good.

We could see stars on Wednesday morning, so we decided, spur-of-the-moment, to do a quick test of the telescope before I left for work. I had twenty minutes or so — plenty of time, right?

The computer wanted latitude and longitude in degrees, minutes and seconds, and I’d written down our coordinates in decimal format, so I had to run back up and pump them through an online converter. Filling in the date, time and location was fiddly, mostly because it was my first attempt and I was rushing.

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In the end, after much deliberation, we chose the Celestron NexStar 5 SE: we decided that it was the most portable option we were considering, and that portability trumped other considerations at this time.

We picked it up this evening, after work, at Focus Scientific, the local telescope store.

Now all we need is some clear, dark skies.

When it comes to buying a telescope, I’m stumped, simply because there is no one single “best” telescope to buy. In The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide, authors Dickinson and Dyer recommend that a first-time scope be portable and simple enough that it will actually be used. I’ve narrowed it down to three candidates, each with their own pros and cons. Trouble is, Dickinson and Dyer recommend all three (or their equivalents) in their book. Picking one is proving difficult as a result: all are probably good choices, but one is probably more suitable for our needs.

The three candidates are Sky-Watcher’s Dobsonian reflector (in either the 8-inch or 10-inch versions), Celestron’s NexStar 5 SE, and Sky-Watcher’s 5-inch Maksutov.

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My interest in astronomy has been lifelong, though varying in intensity over the years, but I only saw the Milky Way for the first time a couple of months ago. It was an epiphanic moment akin to the ending of Isaac Asimov’s classic short story, “Nightfall,” in which a civilization sees the stars for the first time in millenia. Knowing that it’s there in theory is one thing; seeing it for yourself is quite another.

My earliest observation was the 1979 solar eclipse, which I saw from my front porch in Winnipeg, but most of my astronomy, growing up, was theoretical rather than observational. In other words, I read a lot of books. Family finances precluded me from ever owning a telescope (especially in the early 1980s), so all my childhood observations were naked-eye views from my backyard, usually in winter (so that I was awake when it was dark). Because it was a suburban sky, and with considerable light reflected from the snow, I didn’t see much. Nor did I necessarily appreciate how much I wasn’t seeing. Milky Way? Forget about it: sky conditions were so poor that I couldn’t even see the Little Dipper.

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I received a copy of Cosmos on DVD from my brother for Christmas — too late for me to blog about it as part of the Carl Sagan blog-a-thon that took place on December 20, the tenth anniversary of his death, but here it is belatedly.

It’s safe to say that I grew up on Cosmos: portions of the series have persisted in my memory since it was first broadcast (when I was eight); I also had a copy of the companion book which I have since, I guess, lost. It made a big impact on my impressionable mind, but only in its discrete parts; it was only now, when I was able to watch the series, beginning to end, as an adult, that I was able to appreciate the whole.

Sagan was making an argument with this series, and each episode, and each point within each episode, illustrated with an historical analogy or with a simple demonstration, contributed to that argument. To point out that complex organic molecules are easy to make, and that the laws of science — of physics and chemistry — are the same throughout the universe, is to support the argument that life on other worlds is not only possible, but probable. A parallel argument is our connectedness to the greater universe: how, for example, supernovae essentially built us, by providing our planet’s heavy elements and the cosmic rays that enable mutation-driven evolution. And so forth. This was never a mere science program, or even a science program with a lot of neat material on the history of science.

One unexpected reaction — we must be getting old — was that despite our strong interest in the series’s subject matter, Jennifer (and I, to a lesser extent) had real trouble staying awake. PBS programming was slower paced in 1980, and Sagan’s manner of speaking and tone was surprisingly soothing.

To pick up on Megnut’s and Damien’s memories of the 1986 Challenger explosion on its twentieth anniversary:

When it happened, I was in Grade 8, a space-crazy kid filled to the gills with Star Trek and histories of NASA, and the deaths of seven astronauts was more than just a shock. I found out at the noon hour — I’d come home to make myself lunch and had flipped on the television for background. I was stunned, riveted — but of course, I had to go back to school, where I could think of little else.

At that time the Winnipeg Free Press was published in the afternoon, and I had a paper route after school. It was late that day; in a rare move, the paper had stopped the presses and remade the front page, which now read, in the biggest type I would see until Gorbachev was ousted in a coup, “Shuttle explodes.” Later that night, as I was collecting my paper money from my customers, I couldn’t help myself from talking about it with them — or with anyone.

It might be that for my generation — those of us who were children then, in our late twenties or early thirties now — it was our Kennedy assassination, our Pearl Harbor, our 9/11: the event that brought us to a collective halt.

(I live-blogged Columbia’s destruction three years ago.)

Why should I go to the trouble of tracking down and blogging all the news and photos from NASA’s Mars landers when there’s already a blog out there that covers that very thing? Have a look at Mars Rover Mission Blog.

The Stardust probe performs its flyby of the Wild 2 comet today. It will collect samples from the cometary tail and return to earth in January 2006.

A Globe and Mail article uses the fact that tonight Saturn will be closer to Earth than it has been since 1975 as a segue into the arrival of the Cassini-Huygens probe at Saturn (and Titan) in July. Also mentions a Canadian astronomy magazine, SkyNews. (I’m starting from scratch, here.)

Bob and Ann are friends with reptiles and a telescope. I wrote Bob with advice on getting started. While he’s dubious about the entry-level refractor in question — he says that they’re frustrating to use — he recommends as a starter Exploring the Night Sky by Terence Dickinson. Now that’s a young-adult title, so I spelunked a bit on Amazon to find a couple of other beginner titles that may be more suitable, also by Dickinson: The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide and Nightwatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe. Will investigate. More suggestions welcome.

Jen gave me a 420×60-mm refractor telescope for Christmas. We’d been discussing getting into backyard astronomy again — both of us were interested as children, but neither of us had the hardware to do much about it — and this entry-level scope will give us the opportunity to try it out. Unfortunately, neither of us seems to have the astronomy books we had as kids, so we’ll have to start from scratch again in that department. Time to do a little browsing.

In the meantime, there’s a ton of astronomy software out there. I have, or had — time to go rifling through boxes — a copy of Redshift that should run on Jen’s old Windows laptop. As for Mac software, it’s fortunate that Applelust has been providing saturation coverage, thanks to the interests of its contributors: Night Sky, KStars (revisited), Starry Night Pro, Stellarium, Equinox, AstroPlanner, and more.