Scanner Camera color

If you could synchronize a tri-color set of filters with the RGB set of LEDs in the Canon Canoscan scanner, you could produce color images with a single scan of the diy scanner cameras out there.

National Geographic on Light Pollution

The End of Night: Why we need Darkness

National Geographic Magazine brings the issue of light pollution (or expressed for concerns outside astronomy, Light At Night) to the cover of the November issue.

Inbound bolide: 2008 TC3

Astronomers have discovered a small inbound object a few meters across that appears to be on an impact course with the Earth. The object may enter the Earth's atmosphere somewhere over Europe or North Africa just after 2:30AM UT Tuesday (9:30PM CDT tonight). The orbit is uncertain enough to have a number of possible interactions with the Earth, including missing entirely. It is small enough, based on its brightness, to cause no concern, but should be a nice bright fireball and might drop some meteorites. The self-assigned ID is 8TA9D69, and it was discovered on Mt. Lemmon near Tucson, Arizona by the Mt. Lemmon Sky Survey.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mpml/message/21070

Update: It's now designated 2008 TC3
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/K08/K08T50.html

I showed some RAS folks how to use the CCD camera last night. We couldn't get the drivers installed on the new laptop, despite tweaking the INF files to identify the USB device (at least in Windows, when you first connect a USB device, the device sends an ID number down, and Windows looks in the INFs to locate the driver). Unfortunately the manufacturer of the Starlight Xpress SXV-H9 camera changed the camera and the driver without changing the name or offering the old driver for download--the result is old camera owners can't get it working at all. Having to ask for the driver when it could just be on a website someone is really dumb.

Anyways, we got the camera working on the ancient soon to die laptop (94MB of RAM!) and took this 3 minute (12x 15sec) exposure of the Dumbbell Nebula. Enjoy.

Article in Sun-Times about Light Pollution

Yes, Light pollution does affect the ecology of the region.

http://www.suntimes.com/lifestyles/1199598,CST-NWS-night03.article.

Do I believe "A spokeswoman for the Chicago Bureau of Electricity said the city "has been actively pursing different methods to address the issue of light pollution."? Not in a second.

The University of Chicago just added over $7000 in electrical costs a year in extra, non-effective lights on campus. Is that sustainable?

Raft part 2

They finally got underway again, after a stop at the Riverdale Marina. They ended up replacing their outboard with a newer and slightly more powerful model. This then tripped them up as it tried to tear away from the raft. Suitability reinforced, they left this morning down the Cal-Sag to parts south.

This image is really the best, caught by Dave D., a boater who had seen them earlier while at the Riverdale Marina, he just happened to see them while crossing the 127th St. bridge, and he then headed further west to the Ridgeland Ave. bridge and caught some great shots.



Update: I just got a call from Igor; they've docked for the night near the last SEPA station right at the junction of the Cal-Sag and the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal, just a touch past the Illinois and Michigan Canal remnants and will be walking a mile up and across the river to the nearest gas station to pick up some gas.

Ah, panic

Nonrational behavior cleans out the gasoline supply in Nashville. No reasonable reason, of course, but panic takes out the gas supply of an American city. A minor problem with the US gasoline supply is that it is unable to handle panic buying or hoarding of gasoline. We've relied on the fact that most Americans haven't freaked out at any particular moment.

Raft

My time has been taken up with four friends of mine who are building a raft. Building a raft to travel from Chicago to New Orleans. I've been helping out as my schedule allows, although I took a few days off recently to help out on moving the preassembled parts from the backyard of a Hyde Park apartment to the Croissant Marina on the Little Calumet River. (This marina is a great spot--amazing for the friendliness, the methane purgers on the other side of the river, and the barges passing silently by). The weather gods have not been kind though. The majority of the water on the Little Calumet is effluent, and this weekend Chicago received the highest one-day precipitation event ever, AND the remnants of Hurricane Ike, in two separate rain events. In the scheme of things, it was so bad they opened all the normally closed locks that keep the Chicago river and canals from flowing into Lake Michigan. So, our previous spot at the marina is now covered in combined sewage and storm output by ten feet. It put a damper on the weekend for a lot of people; a lot of people are flooded out of their basements and apartments. Ryerson Observatory reports almost 11 inches of rain in the past seven days.

While we now have a 16ftx32ft raft, we still need to mount the 35hp motor and construct the cabins and hammock supports for the travelers. Try this link for construction photos. You might be able to see it without a facebook account--I'm just dumping stuff without much editing.

Volcanic sunsets part 2

Jennifer points out the local Chicago view from 8/31. Last night the colors were all there without any crepscular rays. Another image at WGN Weather. Spaceweather says the cloud is moving off from North America, but I still thought last night's was great.

volcanic sunset

Me, earlier this week walking to the supermarket: "Boy, it's funny. The western sky has odd colors. They vaguely remind me of the Mount Pinatubo colors from so many years ago. But there hasn't been any eruption lately."

Me, just now, reading Space Weather: Facepalm. Aleutian volcanic eruption a couple of weeks ago.


Also see WGN weather blog for a number of identical "Boy, what a sunset" posts.

EDIT: And thinking about it made me remember catching some news on Highly Allochthonous about how three of the Aleutian volcanoes were erupting and whether the volcanism was related.

Deep Time for Dummies

Snark!

"DEEP TIME FOR DUMMIES

History's Shortest Geological Column


The decade-long failure of The Congressional Record to note the 6,000th anniversary of the Earth's Creation (4004 BC-AD 1997) shows the dire need for a Geological Column that junior Senators, Congressional pages and Washington Times editors can easily master in a single session of Sunday School."

Link

SDSS conference news

Sloan Digital Sky Survey summary conference this weekend.

The likely press highlight of the Solar System session on the morning of Monday, August 18 will be announcement of the discovery (by SDSS astronomer Andrew Becker) of a remarkable object that is currently about the same distance from Earth as the planet Uranus but whose 27,000-year orbit carries it to more than 70 times that distance. This object is akin to the famous dwarf planet Sedna, but its orbital properties are considerably more extreme, with a much more elongated path that takes it nearly twice as far from the Sun.

Press release

When in doubt, blame the instrument: It wasn't the lightning.

The WGN Weather blog shows a video from Bucktown of the intense thunderstorm of August 6th here: http://blogs.trb.com/news/weather/weblog/wgnweather/2008/08/incredible_viewer_video.html, but they claim that the nearby lightning strike at the end of the video actually produced arcing close to the camera. That wasn't the case. The "arcing" is actually an artifact of the CCD sensor in the video camera. To understand what's going on, you'll have to deal a little bit with the physics of CCDs. In silicon, incoming photons will excite electrons out of a lower energy state and into the "conduction" band where it can then migrate through the material. You can call this liberating the electron. In a CCD control voltages create zones where these freed electrons are trapped in the silicon until they are moved out and measured. Those zones are best known as pixels. Depending on the type of CCD, when the exposure is over, the electrons are moved pixel by pixel in columns to be read.


Intensely bright sources of light will produce so many electrons that they will overwhelm the control voltage and flood out of the pixel and into the surrounding pixels and circuitry, producing spurious effects. You've probably seen these effects -- it starts showing up at 1:57 in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs video for Maps for example, or in the SOHO image above (it's Venus doing the blooming).
In this case the electrons flow out and down the columns that the electrons would normally be read. The Sun is a great source of column bleeding in a lot of videos online: see this one, for instance. Or bright stars--here is a weak version (it's the faint vertical column, not the diagonal streaks):


Since it's difficult to control all the sources of light in any possible photo scene, the CCD manufacturers have ways of trying to mitigate the overflowing electrons. One technique is to put drainage canals around the pixels and dump the electrons. This is good, but the extra space for drainage costs you some light sensitivity and light measuring accuracy.


Another problem can develop while you are moving the electrons off the CCD to be measured--if you have a shutterless camera, then light is still hitting all the pixels and can still cause overflow problems. One technique (used a lot for video cameras, at least in the old days) is to make the CCD twice as big with half of the chip covered up. At the end of the exposure you quickly move the electrons in the lit part over to the dark part and then leisurely read them out. This helps, but you can still have those overflowing electrons come down into your dark area.

So, in the lightning video, you can see that the extremely bright strike produces too many electrons in the CCD of the camera, and they flow 1. into the dark frame-transfer area and 2. down the columns (the vertical bleeds).
You can see at least one of these effects in some of the other strikes in the video.

In case of weather emergency in Chicago

Rely on WFLD, Fox 32, for your severe weather information. Do not expect the otherwise stellar Tom Skilling at WGN to give you info until well after the threat passed you by. This is born out by the south suburban tornado in June and yesterday's severe weather, which I watched out the window while downtown during round 1 and in Hyde Park during round 2. Telling the bartender to switch to WGN offered no new information other than the county was under a tornado threat--and that was obvious from watching the Cubs game. Watch the line organize here.

Stanley Fish doesn't get it on lighting

Stanley Fish writes in the NYTimes:

But my house is now full of environmentally approved lightbulbs. They are dim, ugly and expensive, but I am told that they will last beyond my lifetime. (That’s supposed to be reassuring?) A neighbor told me today that he is planning to stockpile incandescent bulbs in the face of a prediction that they will be phased out by 2012.

Meanwhile, by the weak light shed by the virtuous bulbs, ...

Clearly he didn't read the article in his own newspaper about the importance of choosing the right CFL for each location.

Buy a higher rated CF wattage than the so-called equivalent, pick the right color, and don't give up. There are acceptable CFLs for high-usage, non-wet, non-dimmable locations. You've got to get the right one for each situation and not give up because one "cheap" size does not fit all.