Aurora in Iceland, 1996

with the Pleiades and a rising Moon.

Old Mars photos from 2003: No, it's not going to be big in August.

Inspired by a query regarding the false meme going around about Mars, I took a look at some images I took of Mars during it's big opposition in 2003. That was a great opposition. Here's a couple of those images. The first one is a single image without manipulation, the second and third are Registax processed images from videos, and the last is one of those videos.
Mars at the moment is not approaching one of those awesome 17 year oppositions like 2003 or 1988. It's just fading away from its January opposition and currently visible in Leo in the evening.

The view from Thorvaldseyri of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption

The view from Thorvaldseyri of Eyjafjallajökull

You can just pick out the ice sheet from underneath the clouds.


Compare this with the view the farmer had recently:
http://icelandreview.com/icelandreview/upload/images/news/almennt/thorvaldseyri_olafur_eggertsson.jpg

From:
http://icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=16539&ew_0_a_id=361234

For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path

For Photographers, the Image of a Shrinking Path

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
Published: March 29, 2010
Amateur photographers, happy to accept small checks for snapshots, are underpricing professionals.


I made some comments about this issue last year in this post: http://dwarmstr.blogspot.com/2009/06/intersection-of-onlinesharing-culture.html. Since then, I made that Faustian bargain of getting an image of mine on a book cover without payment save a few copies of the book (although I haven't gotten them yet, CRC Press). The publisher said they had no budget for images, it would likely sell very few copies (a very technical book), etc... should I have done it?

Conversely, if you are a corporation, why shouldn't you find free or cheap photography instead of paying for it? Photography has been freelance for sometime, and never unionized that I am aware of.

ISS at twilight

The International Space Station on September 11th, 2009, as viewed from Chicago. Click to enlarge.

near-IR Yerkes Observatory

Click to enlarge. Image taken on April 22th, 2007 with Canon S300. Hue/Autolevels modified.

Image of the Day: Mercury

This image of Mercury was taken yesterday, September 29th, 2009.


credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Here was Messenger flying past Earth in 2005: http://dwarmstr.blogspot.com/2006/04/messenger-departing-earth.html

And Mercury transiting across the face of the Sun from Earth: http://dwarmstr.blogspot.com/2006/11/mercury-transit.html

Image of the day: Enceladus

Enceladus' north pole.


Click to enlarge to awesome.

via Planetary Society Blog.

IR clouds

Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter first images

The first test images are back from the LRO.





I've annotated a previous image of the moon with the location of the image: The orange markers are at the crater Hell E, which is listed in the press release as being just a few kilometers west of the image site. Hell E is listed as 10km across, so the images are just a touch to the right of that crater. Click on the image for a large original.



Credit for the LRO images are NASA/GSFC/ASU.

The intersection of the online/sharing culture, copyright, and photography

Seth Anderson at B12 Solipsism has an excellent series of posts (here, here, and here) about the intersection of the new online/sharing culture, copyright, and photography.

The first post is about the issue of copyright and fair use--many people fail to understand that "fair use" means you have already violated copyright, but you have a valid legal excuse. In photography, Seth points out that the ability to take an excerpt is potentially not possible, leaving every use of a photograph without permission a copyright violation.

The second post is a dust-up by a writer for the New York Times, who argued it was okay to print out a copy of any Flickr photograph and put it up in your private residence. This did not go over well with people who create--i.e., the photographers. While it may be ok for certain Creative Commons and Public Domain photographs, it is a violation of copyright to do that to a owned photograph. The legal question is, as I mentioned above, is this use considered Fair? You would be surprised at the muddled mess in the case law. A professor for instance lost a copyright case because he made personal copies of many science papers and kept them in his office. The turning distinction on that case was the amount of papers he made copies of that drove the copyright violation from "fair use" to a civil violation. Is one printed photo fair use? What if you decorate your whole apartment with them? What size can your print fairly? What about your friends' apartments?

The issues are completely muddy and complex--as a photographer, for instance, I feel I should be compensated for my work. Websites like say Chicagoist or Treehugger use flickr CC shared images to illustrate their stories. In the traditional media, the photographer would be compensated for their work, either by being employed or by a fee. This is not being done at all for most of the non-traditional sites on the internet. It is also a truth that these sites probably couldn't afford the going rate for photographs. Getting your image out for people to see for a photographer is a very important thing, but is it driving the image creation business out of a profession and into the hands of casual photographers? (The latin term amateur is perfect for here but misused--these photographers love what they do and are often just as good as a pro, but the amateurs are not paid).

You would be surprised what it costs to get the rights to every photograph in a magazine. Years ago I was paid once for an image covering less than 1/4 of a page in a small publication more than it costs for ten years of Flickr Pro. More recently, if someone can't get the image use for free, they move on to find another CC licensed image. At what point do I give away my images? For specific charity non-profits? For non-profits? The National Geographic Society is a non-profit, should they get images for free? For school textbooks? For medical school textbooks? There are no good answers, except I am sure there will be fewer pro photographers out there in the future.

There is also the new culture driven out of the Free Software/File Sharing culture where the belief is all content is free and the driving force behind creation of works is not the desire to make money; if you make money you have to find a way to do it selling something tangible, whether it be technical support, concerts, or physical items. This belief is moving beyond the software paradigm, is being fought in the music and movie industries (and being lost completely by the industries), and now is moving into books, photography, and other creative markets. Google was asking illustrators to create for free custom themes for the search engine. Google, a company with a 134 Billion market capitalization, was asking artists to work for free.

I benefit from many of these changes. I listen to music online (and I also still buy CDs, old fashioned me). I work in a field that utilizes free software every day. It is conflicting internally to know that somewhere an artisan may end their craft because they cannot afford to continue, because I chose the free option. I also know there are things I cannot do unless the cost is cheap enough for me to afford. For me, much work remains to allow the creative domains and artists the ability to ply their crafts in the future. I do not know how to get there from here.

Audio isolation transformer

I used to record audio off my Tivo on my desktop computer--but when I had the cable TV connected, I would get a loud hum. The reason for this is related to the idea of "ground" in electrical systems, which are used as a reference point for zero voltage and/or safety purposes. The kicker was the cable TV cable offered a different path to ground compared to the PC's ground.

For consumer generic audio connections, the audio signal (a varying AC voltage of about one volt) is compared to the ground of the system. Hence the two connectors on an RCA connector, signal and ground, or three connectors on a stereo jack: left, right, and ground. If your ground happens to be varying up and down at 60 times a second (because it's not a good ground, for instance), you will also get that hum on your output.

For some professional audio systems, the reference ground is brought with the signal, so you have three connections for any channel. When both the signal and ground vary up and down in sync, it's easy to subtract the pickup noise and have a clean signal.

In simple, single systems, either approach works fine. The problem is when you start interconnecting equipment.



I made a stereo isolation audio transformer to solve this problem. The left and right channels enter a 1:1 600ohm audio transformer, which transmits the audio signal (which is AC) but blocks any DC connection. This prevents ground loops and currents between the two devices. I got the two transformers from old modems. One of the jacks is a fancy panel mount, the other is from an old sound card, and this old one is actually needed, because it is plastic, isolating it from the case, which is connected to the ground of the panel mount jack. Of course, I put everything in an Altoids tin.

I suppose it would also help if I put some ferrite on the inputs to also reduce RFI/EMI problems, but I haven't yet. Just having this device between a shortwave radio and a PC has reduced interference pickup quite a bit.

You can see more photos of the build at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dwarmstr/sets/72157604679420753/. Essentially, 1. Measure and Mark your holes. 2. Make a small punch to keep drill centered. 3. Drill a pilot hole, then the right size. 4. Solder the connections. I used a multimeter to figure out which connection was which on the transformers. 5. Hot glue for stability.

Parts cost: about $2.50 for the 3.5mm stereo panel mount. Everything else I scrounged for from old parts, not counting my time. Here's the equivalent commercial product at $32: http://www.amazon.com/3-5mm-Stereo-Audio-Isolation-Transformer/dp/B001GUS7EO. I do enjoy the look of that commercial case.

400 Years of the Telescope: Friday on PBS

This such an auspicious year. I watched an interview on Chicago Tonight with one of the creators of "400 Years of the Telescope", to be broadcast on PBS this Friday. Immediately a shot of the Yerkes 40-inch refractor passed by in glorious HD, a scope I am intimately familiar with, and now I am compelled to watch. Friday at 8PM on WTTW. Of course, I am very happy when E.E. Barnard pops up on the schedule page on the site--Barnard's experimentation with astrophotography has a tie to the RAS observatory: our 1895 Warner and Swasey mount was first lent to Yerkes Observatory so Barnard could test camera lenses.

Messier 77 - a galaxy in Cetus

Messier 77, a spiral galaxy in Cetus. Click to enlarge. About 30 minutes exposure.

This galaxy is about 50 million light-years away. At the core of M77 is a well-studied massive and active black hole of at least 100 million solar masses.

Shuttle ISS pass in Chicago on Tuesday

I caught one of the ISS/Shuttle passes on Tuesday evening. All the shakiness of the Shuttle is me and not the Space Shuttle, obviously.



You still have some chances to see them pass, even if they aren't perfect passes.

Leo 1: a local group galaxy

Leo 1 is a dwarf galaxy located about 800,000 light years away in the constellation Leo. In fact, you can nearly pinpoint the location of the galaxy with your naked eye by looking at the bright blueish star Regulus. (You can find Regulus, if you don't know many constellations, by looking at the Big Dipper. Know the pointer stars on the bowl that point to Polaris? If you go backwards from them, they point to Regulus). Regulus is only a 1/3 a degree away from this galaxy, and its glare is always in the way. Take a look at this fantastic image from Russell Croman

Occasionally slightly crazy, I decided to attempt to image this galaxy last Friday. The moon had just risen and it was slightly hazy. In other words, I was completely crazy.


About 45 minutes exposure. Click to enlarge


It's tough to see, but look at the slightly knobbier noise just to the bottom right of center. Compared that to the noise in the rest of the image. You can use the two stars in the upper left to compare the frame with this image from Wikipedia/Digital Sky Survey/STScI:



I definitely need to get some better flats made.

42 Orionis nebula (NGC 1977)

Click to enlarge. A total of 53 images, each 15 seconds each, totaling 13:25 minutes. Taken on December 29th, 2008.

42 Orionis is a bright B1 star in Orion's sword, just to the north of the spectacular Orion Nebula (M42 & M43). It is always overshadowed by its neighbor and many miss the NGC 1977 nebula entirely because the Orion Nebula is almost always glowing in the field of view and very distracting. NGC 1973 is the nebula surrounding the star in the upper right of the frame. 42 Orionis itself is the bright star just to the right of center. The bright star to the left of center is 45 Orionis, an unrelated foreground (370 ly away) star. Unwritten is that this nebula is part of the same giant Orion Molecular Cloud complex that the Orion Nebula is part of.

As always, I am never happy with processing. On this one, there were a significant number of sub-images that were trailed. Normally I align all the subframes and then add the subs together. Since adding will send the pixel values all to 32767 (I use Iris, which is limited to 16 bits), in most cases I utilize either a median combine (which will get rid of the trails) or use "add_norm", which normalizes the final result to fit in 16 bit space. However in this one, I first multiplied all the values in all the images by 0.02, then added them all up, then I subtracted the images I knew were trailed. Some modified equalization and a touch of gamma, and all done. Until I am unsatisfied again.

IR focus test: Regenstein Bartlett Quad

Combo visible / near IR image with a Canon S300.
I can't remember if I posted this in the past or not.

IR focus test: Agave

IR focus test: Palo Verde

An old focus test. As you can see, the right side is not doing so well.