Didymium filter fol-de-rol!

I've been thinking about taking a "portrait" of McCormick Observatory, with star trails behind the dome, but good ol' Charlottesville has been growing over the years and now fills the sky with a diffuse orange glow. So rather than slip over to Bear Mountain and get a REAL dark-sky starfield, and then PhotoShop the image behind the dome of the Observatory, I decided to try to knock down the skyglow in-camera as it were.

Perusing the internet, I came upon web pages detailing the use of didymium glass filters to do this very trick. Glassblowers have been using the glass in safety glasses for some time so that they can see the melting glass they're working on despite the sodium light of the flame they're working with. Photographers (as contrasted with astrophotographers) use didymium filters to boost the color saturation of the red end of the spectrum (as compared to the more yellowish middle) in landscape photography.

I found several photographers who claimed the Hoya filter to be the best, so I ordered one for my Nikon:



The filter is supposed to knock down the yellow of sodium outdoor lights in particular. After some additional internet skulduggery I found out more about skyglow & filter specifications Here is a compilation of a spectrum from sodium lights & the didymium filter's transmission performance:



The blue line is the light pollution relative brightness, while the red line is the transmission curve for the filter. The higher the blue line, the brighter the sodium light is for that wavelength. The lower the red line, the less of that color light gets through the filter. So what I want is the "valleys" in the red line to cover up as much of the "peaks" in the blue line as is possible. I carefully aligned the wavelengths (color) for the 2 graphs so that they're as accurate as humanly possible.

You can see that the dip in the red line just below 600nm takes out a bunch of the peaks of the blue line there. It's not perfect, but every little bit helps. The sodium lines that I particularly was interested in is a pair at 589.0 & 589.6nm. This pair of lines is very familiar to chemists & astronomers alike, they're very distinctive.

The blue spectrum line, by the way, is courtesy testone22 and can be found here:
testone22's page in a new window.
And the red line is courtesy of Starna Cells, Inc. a Califormia manufacturer of spectrophotometer cells:
Starna's graphic in a new window.
Starna's home page in a new window.

He informs me that the actual peak has been inverted because of self-absorption (the discovery of which netted Kirchoff the 1862 Rumford medal). Thus the worst part of the light pollution has cancelled itself out! How convenient. Nonetheless, there is ample yellow light on either side of there from the pressure broadening in the high pressure lamps that is coloring the sky and a goodly part of this light is taken out by the filter.

By the way, here's a source for more didymium information:
Wikipedia's didymium page in a new window.

Where I came on this fascinating tidbit:
"During World War I, didymium glass was reputedly used to send Morse Code across the battlefields. Didymium did not absorb enough light to make the variation in lamp intensity obvious, but anyone with binoculars attached to a prism could see the absorption bands flash on or off."
Wow! Using the unique spectral signature of the glass to hide the fact that Morse Code was being sent! Triksy hobbitses!

After seemingly innumerable days of clouds & rain (the "new astronomy gear curse"), it was clear enough last night to do an experiment. I quickly drew a little grid on a post-it note with my plan for exposures: 2 min, 4 min & 10 minute, both with & without the filter.

I headed outside with the camera on my fluid head tripod ready for use. I plunked down the camera and carefully framed the shot so that a neighbor's mercury-vapor "security" (aka "the burglar's friend") light was behind a small tree trunk and started a 2 minute exposure. I used the stopwatch feature of my iPod Touch to time the shot. I would have put red plastic over the bright screen but that prevents the touch control feature from working. I vowed to buy a simple stop watch like I used to have back when I worked in TV news.

So far so good, one exposure in the bag, now for a 4 minute shot...

Halfway through this shot, a motion control burglar assistance light came on in another location, off the frame to the right. I moved around to the front of the camera so my shadow was being cast on the lens and thought about what to do. I knew that this new source of light pollution was lighting up any close-by dust in the sky as well as the foreground with a different lighting regimen than the 2 minute shot had, so I decided that this image wouldn't work for me. You may have noticed a certain negative attitude toward outdoor lighting at night. I'll have to work up a blog post about the issues surrounding light pollution & light trespass. Stay tuned!

As the 4 minutes was up then anyway, I ended the shot as I normally would have and thought about my new options. Should I wait out the light and resume the exposure series I had planned on? I decided to press on and get a next shot, the 10 minute one, with me stuck standing in front (but not in the shot) to shade the lens.

I started the exposure and after a couple minutes I had a rude awakening.

Yet another motion controlled light came on! Aagh! This time it's a light that is supposed to scare away deer from a different neighbor's wine grapes. The deer are completely used to the light now and ignore it, but now I had a second source of light pollution that wasn't in either the 2 minute or 4 minute exposures! Worse of all, it was on-camera! I terminated the 10 minute exposure at 3 minutes or so.

Now I'm in a pickle. I have no good options about camera placement and no way to block all 3 lights that were shining in my face. I briefly considered getting out my stepladder and unscrewing the 2 offending lights when one after the other they both went out. Yay! I quickly decided to just get two 4 minute long exposures, one with and one without the filter. I held my breath while the camera's shutter was open and hoped for the best.

Okay, I didn't really hold my breath, but I was nervous, I'll tell you!

Success! Have a look:



You can easily see the difference between the non-filtered image and the filtered one. The annoying orange skyglow is not so orange any more and the contrast in significantly improved. It doesn't look like a dark sky site all of a sudden, but it is a definite improvement!

My next step in this saga is to make the short trek to McCormick and see what trouble I can get into up there. I'll have to take along my trusty Mac laptop so I can check up on my progress and respond to changes. Maybe Charlottesville will have an unexpected blackout and I can get the real thing!

Yeah, like THAT's ever gonna happen!

LCROSS found ice after all! At least I think so...

All weekend I've been telling people that the mainstream media (MSM) have been missing the best part of the LCROSS lunar impact story. The MSM have reported that it was a dud, a failure. They were SO disappointed that they didn't see any of the expected debris plume. There was a brief flash of sodium light on impact (seen in mid-IR wavelengths by the trailing spacecraft) but no ejecta.



But maybe this was not so much a mission failure as a reality check from the Moon itself. The NASA press office was simply following the lead of the scientists, who all expected a pretty ejecta plume that people with telescopes (or a TV set) could see & enjoy. They didn't really overhype the story in their press releases, they were all caught of guard by the unknown conditions on the crater floor. That there was no plume is a heck of a story in itself and the MSM just didn't get it.

Fly that Centaur upper stage into the Moon anywhere else and you will get a regolith explosion and a very pretty conical cloud. But whatever LCROSS hit didn't do that.

Very interesting!

I've been telling anybody who'd listen that the booster must've hit ices that were internally shaped like a sponge. The energy of the impact was dissipated into the interstices of the ice, where there are gaps & voids left by sublimation. Rather like the aerogel that captured cometary dust particles a couple years ago. Take the green foam material that florists use (called Oasis) and jab a pencil into it and you get an idea of what happened.



However, Spaceweather on Sunday the 11th. got it right:

"The absence of debris plumes does not mean LCROSS was a failure. On the contrary, by offering up the unexpected, LCROSS is teaching us something new about the lunar surface and the products of lunar impacts. That makes it, by definition, a successful experiment. All that remains is to figure out what the new information is. Researchers will be announcing their findings in the days and weeks ahead. Stay tuned."
http://www.spaceweather.com/

Now if only MSM paid attention to science bloggers they could've gotten it right too. They've fired all their science reporters and now the reporters they're left with haven't a clue what they're writing about. The NASA press office needs to get busy getting things straightened out and the real story out there.

It's probably a good thing long term that we didn't make a debris plume. The ices would've largely gotten sublimated to gas and blown away by the solar wind. What a waste. Now the ice is still there, but we have to send a rover down into the crater to discover it.

What is spectroscopy after all?

One of the most amazing things about astronomy is our ability to see inside the atoms that make up a star. We can't resolve the star into a disc, but we can peer into its inner workings like it was nothing!

It's like I'm looking through my telescope and see that there's a speck on a hillside. I know the speck is a person, but I can't tell if it's a man or woman, or if it has both legs, nothing. But I can read this person's mind!

Completely counter to what we'd expect, huh?

But how the heck is this even remotely possible? By spectroscopy, that's how.
Way back in 1814 Joseph von Fraunhofer, a German glassmaker discovered dark lines in the Sun's spectrum of colors. (He also discovered the diffraction grating and was the first to examine the spectra of stars, but that story is for another time.) It took till 1859 for Kirchhoff (and Bunsen of Bunsen burner fame) to figure out that these Fraunhofer lines (as they had come to be called) were a result of and depended on the energy levels of the electrons in the atoms of the material.


Fraunhofer lines.

Kirchhoff discovered these 3 laws:
1) That a solid body (like a lump of iron) when very hot will produce a continuous wash of color in its spectrum.
2) That a hot gas will produce discrete lines of color at specific points in the spectrum, and
3) That a hot solid body surrounded by a cooler gas will show darker lines like the Sun does.

Item #2's lines are called an emission spectrum, and #3's lines are called an absorption spectrum because the one is emitted and the other is absorbed. Not only that, but the color position of the dark & light lines are the same when the gaseous element is the same:



Interesting, but in order to explain how it works we need to take a little trip. A trip into the world of the atom.

We like to think of the atom like a miniature solar system, with the nucleus of the atom being like the Sun and surrounding it the electrons take the place of the planets. In the solar system the planets approximately orbit in a plane we call the ecliptic. (Note the spelling there, it's not elliptic, it's ecliptic, with 2 "c"s.) In atoms the electrons don't have to keep to a flat plane but can orbit however they please, but you can continue to think of them being in a plane - it'll help.



Now in the solar system, if you were to fly a spaceship from Earth to Venus you would set out and presently you'd find yourself a quarter of the way there, then halfway, then 2/3 of the way and so on. The world of the atom, however, has a different set of rules called quantum mechanics that basically says that you can be at Earth or Venus and not in between. Yeah, it's weird, but that's how the universe is built.

These different orbits represent different levels of energy. So if an electron gains energy it can jump instantaneously from Venus to Earth. Likewise, if it looses energy it can jump from Earth to Venus. This is what is meant by a "Quantum Jump."

So how does an atom gain or loose energy? What does this have to do with spectra? Where you goin' with all this?

Here's how! Light! Yup, it's all done with light. A photon (a particle of light) has energy that is proportional to its color. A redder color equals a low energy photon and bluer color is a higher energy photon. In the case of the Sun (like #3 above) the Sun's continuous spectrum is partially absorbed by the cooler gas above the surface. There are photons of all energies in the continuous spectrum coming up from below. Those few photons that have the exact energy (the exact color) required to make an electron jump from one level to another are absorbed, making a dark Fraunhofer line.



It's that simple.
The atoms of cool gas strip out all the photons that have that particular color/energy from the continuum of colors, leaving a gap in the spectrum. That particular color is filtered out from the light coming up from the Sun's surface.

The hot gas in #2 emits lines as its electrons loose energy and drop from a higher energy orbit to a lower energy orbit. They loose the energy by emitting a photon of light whose color (or energy) is equivalent to the difference in energy of the 2 orbits, the ammount of energy lost by the electron. So the atom sits there, cooling down with the electron still at the higher orbit level until it is cool enough for the electron to exist at the lower level, then PING! the electron drops down (it makes that quantum jump) & a photon is emitted.

So simple! Scientists use the word "Elegant" to describe phenomena like this. Elegant. It fits.

So looking at a star's spectrum, even though you can't see the disc of the star, gives us a look inside the workings of the atoms in the star's atmosphere. This works for planets, too, when our robotic spacecraft go zipping by taking pictures. This is how we know what the volcanoes of Jupiter's moon Io are spitting out.

When the Hubble Space Telescope takes a pretty picture of a gas cloud or galaxy (or whatever) the public wants to see the visible light picture and go "Oooh!" but scientists, ever hungry for deep knowledge, ask for the spectrum. They want to know what they're really looking at and only a spectrum will do the job.

Spectroscopy absolutely rocks! It's a cornerstone of science.
And now you know how it works. Now you rock!

Outreach with Cub Scouts!

It -DID- look bad. It did.
Clouds as far as the eye could see. Thunderstorms expected for later.

I managed earlier in the day Friday to talk the scoutmaster into coming up to McCormick Observatory, though, and Dr.Mike Gorman showed the kids the scope and talked to them at length. He then let them slew the scope, turn the dome & raise & lower the observer's chair. Then after a good bit of this they came in to the classroom and I started my seemingly endless "Richard Drumm The Astronomy Bum" spiel.

I showed them librations of the Moon. Then I showed them a star chart and gave each of them a star map to keep:

I talked about Astrology, and precession of the equinoxes & astrology's problems. I covered the scientific method and Occham's razor.

After a while the scoutmaster announced that it was still cloudy and that they'd have to come back another time to look through the scope. I'm sure the kids were disappointed at this but what can you do? I talked a good bit more, about types of telescopes and how the telescope was invented. I had just finished talking about how it's OK that Pluto is not a planet anymore when Mike announced that he had Saturn in the scope!

All the kids and adults got to see the planet! I passed around the meteorite and talked to everybody some more out in the museum room till they all left. A couple of random groups of people showed up and I explained to them the public night/group night schedule as I showed them the scope. They'll be back for the next public night at McCormick.

All in all a fabulous night! Victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat! W00T!

Patterns in Titan transits & shadow passes!

I don't know why, but I've always been fascinated by patterns. Titan's orbital period is approximately equal to 2 weeks + 2 days - 1 hour. So we have 3 patterns superimposed here:

- You can see the time of day for the events slowly march backwards in approximately one hour increments from 4:52 AM to 3:16 PM.

- You can see the lack of transit transition through "barely" a transit to full transit to perfect ringplane transit to full transit to "barely" transit to no transit.

- You can see the altitude at shadow pass start times decrease, then increase. I'm not sure why Mar 28 has 18*43' and not 21*, but I'm just going by what Starry Night Pro indicated. I tried to eliminate as a source of error how far advanced the shadow was when I stopped the software and read off the numbers. The time is when the whole shadow is first visible. I also made a point of recording the minutes of arc as well. Still the March event is lower in the sky than the April 13 event. I'm stumped. The only thing I can think of is the curvature of Saturn's surface is playing a role here.

This pattern is to be expected as the ecliptic is doing its usual "Summer = Sun high, planets low / Winter = Sun low, planets high" pattern. The April 13 event has the highest altitude we're going to see for Saturn this year.

- There's a 4th pattern that I didn't really allude to very much, except with the "Rings flipped" reference. The shadow of Titan starts off to the left of Titan, and thus trailing behind Titan (which is moving left to right in front of Saturn), then it transitions after passing behind the Sun to the state of having the shadow of Titan leading it. You can see that the Aug 2 event has the transit starting in daylight, but the shadow pass starts at 9:25 PM, after sunset. Thus we start with a "Transit first, shadow after" pattern, then go to "Shadow first, transit after" situation.

I didn't continue into 2010, there probably are more there, but the inexorable "time of day for the events marching backwards" pattern will put the transits in full daylight. Not much for photography...

Titan shadow pass start times:
----------------------------------------
Mar 28 - 4:52 AM - 18*43' alt - No transit.
Apr 13 - 3:40 AM - 19*1' alt
Apr 29 - 2:45 AM - 18*17' alt
May 15 - 1:43 AM - 17*20' alt
May 31 - 12:46 AM - 16*1' alt
Jun 15 - 11:56 PM - 14*20' alt
Jul 01 - 11:04 PM - 12*38' alt - No transit.
Jul 17 - 10:12 PM - 11*6' alt - Titan barely transits, ends at sundown, 8:13PM.
Aug 02 - 9:24 PM - 8*55' alt - Transit starts during daylight, till 10:47PM (but sets at 10).
Aug 18 - 8:37 PM - 6*38' alt - Nice transit, but is setting & close to the Sun.
Sep 03 - 7:52 PM - 4*1' alt - Lost in Sun. Rings exactly edge on. Titan centered on ring plane.
Sep 19 - 7:08 PM - 1*15' alt - Lost in Sun. Rings flipped. Shadow precedes Titan.
Oct 05 - 6:23 PM - 1*18' below horizon.
Oct 21 - 5:42 PM - 4*42' below horizon. Titan just barely transits at 10:23 PM.
Nov 06 - 5:01 PM - 8*8' below horizon. No transit.
Nov 22 - 4:24 PM - 12*25' below horizon. No transit.
Dec 08 - 3:49 PM - 17*13' below horizon. No transit.
Dec 24 - 3:20 PM - 23*11' below horizon. No transit.
-------------------------------------------------
I just love patterns and astronomy is chockablock with them!

The evolution of roads & asking for directions. Really.

I know it's been a long while between posts and I apologize for that. I initially wanted to keep the Halloween post up there for a while just because I think it's an important idea for amateur astronomers (pros too) to use the one night in the year where there'll be kids out and about ready to look through our telescopes.

Then I just got busy & lazy.

So no more excuses, here's something I came up with on my own a couple years ago while driving down Rt. 29 in my brother's Camaro. It's completely off-topic and not particularly astronomical, but that's how the cookie crumbles sometimes.

I had the girls in the back of the car sleeping (as kids are wont to do) so I had to amuse myself while driving. I was taking the girls to a week-long Girl Scout camp in Ferrum, so it was at least a 2 1/2 hour drive. This was just before I started listening to an iPod and the car's radio didn't work, so I had nothing but my thoughts to keep me company.

I kept my eyes on the road and noticed how I could tell that the road ahead was going to curve to the right even before I could see the road surface because I could see the lack of trees ahead and to the right. It was as if I was driving in a tube of treelessness and I could see the tube ahead even if I couldn't yet see the road itself.

I got to thinking about roads, and how smooth asphalt strips like I was on were a recent invention and mused at what a caveman would think of the road & car. I then wandered mentally into what must surely be a gedanken experiment.

I thought about the caveman era, with small villages of 20 or 30 people every 10 or 20 miles in a seemingly trackless expanse of forest. The men were the hunters and the women would go out gathering in the traditional hunter/gatherer society. It came to me that the women were probably the road (trail) builders of their era. They would journey to the same spot on the creek, the same fruit trees and berry patches and wear down a trail with their feet. The trails must've led outward, branching this way & that to the various destinations, the water, food, sources of raw materials for making cord & rope, clay for pottery, that sort of thing. Later on there would be garden sites near the village, but the trails still went onward to the source of water & raw materials.

I mused how the men would go out hunting and initially would follow one of the many trails the women made until at some point they'd veer off the trail and head into the forest to hunt. Then the men would be on their own, without the familiar landmarks that they had along the trail. Women, using the trail, would use the landmarks, a particular tree or rock outcropping to tell where they were, but the men would have to make a rather large map in their heads to orient themselves. They'd also have to be able to navigate by the Sun & the stars too. I was rather attracted to this explanation due to my astronomical background.

Then it occurred to me that a man who couldn't make such a mental map, or who couldn't otherwise navigate in the forest wouldn't be able to find his way back to the life-sustaining village and would likely become tiger chow. Thus I came to believe that this might be the origin of the male reticence regarding asking for directions while driving his car (as I was doing at that very moment).

A man back then who had to ask directions was a dead man.
And dead men leave no descendants.

I don't want to ask directions because I frakkin' evolved not to ask! I can find my own way with my maps, mental or otherwise, so I don't need to ask anybody for directions. I also don't even want to ask directions, it's almost a point of pride that I can find my own way without help. It's like a puzzle and I want to figure it out for myself. It's purely conjecture but it sure looks like evolution's at work and powerful forces are at play. Better not mess with Mother Nature, ya know!

It's a guy thing.
;-)