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The big and the small and the grand...
Aug. 12th, 2010 08:17 amI came to a good stopping point in my work yesterday just after a set of thunderstorms passed by, and Galina suggested we take a drive to get out of the house. So we got in the car and headed toward "downtown Pagosa Springs." (The phrase, from a 1975 song about Wolf Creek Pass, was perhaps the straw that broke a 1991 family deadlock regarding where to spend vacation time in Colorado, whereupon one thing led to another, but I digress...)
Once there, I thought it would be a shame to have come nearly halfway to Site Lima and not check to see if there was any mushroom activity. So, we headed on down Highway 160 until we got to Lima. Along the way, there was some nice scenery.
There were no lobster mushrooms in evidence at Lima, but I did see two pitifully small mushrooms that turned out to be edible. However, two small edible mushrooms do not a dinner make, nor even a punctuation for, say, a side helping of rice, so I kept looking for more mushrooms.
Eventually, we found enough of these items (another form of Suillis, I believe) to take home and enjoy with rice and onions, the mixture playing a grand second fiddle to some gently fried salmon filet. Before settling down to the formidable task of making the mushrooms ready for the table, I took a photograph.
The skies opened up again around 9 pm, and I despaired of having the weather clear up by the middle of the night, but when I roused myself at 3:15 am (and to tell the truth, I almost went back to sleep without looking at the sky), the sky was almost completely clear and filled with stars.
Soon, I was out on the driveway, with the camera on the tripod, and enjoying the Perseid meteor shower.
Among other things, I figured out once and for all how to activate my Droid X's GPS feature. (And how to deactivate it as well, as it's a formidable drain on the batteries.) There turns out to be a Google Sky Map app for Android that combines the GPS feature, the phone's positioning sensors, and software to create an image on the unit's screen that scrolls automatically, showing what's "behind" the screen in the sky above (and, technically, beneath your feet, "behind" the screen and that planet you're standing on).
I really didn't need the help, as I can find Perseus from Cassiopeia (that awkward W in the northern sky), and even if I hadn't known how to do that, the meteor trails in the sky would've shown me the general location of Perseus, because just as the rails of a railroad track seem to emanate from a point on the horizon when you stand and look down a straight stretch of track, most of the trails of a meteor "shower" seem to originate from one area in the sky. Last night, that one area was where the constellation Perseus was located. As showers go, it was reasonable, and I estimate there were somewhere around 100-150 trails per hour during the time I gazed at the sky.
I had my camera set to take a 15-second exposure at ISO 1600 (maximum sensitivity), which is about as long as an exposure can be without stars starting to turn from dots into dashes, the result of the apparent motion of the stars as the Earth rotates in space. One "penalty" that had to be paid with such a setup was having to wait for the camera to spend 15 seconds after such exposures to generate a blank picture that's used by the camera's software to eliminate "noisy" pixels when saving the original photo. (Because the sensor elements in a digital camera are electronic, there's a certain amount of "noise" recorded in addition to the useful information in the image when a photo is taken. This is not a problem for "normal" pictures taken at high speed, but can be a major annoyance when taking long-exposure photos, because over that long exposure, the noise becomes noticeable.)
In my experience, it's hard to catch a meteor trail on a digital exposure, both from the timing point of view and from the brightness point of view. A trail has to be really bright to the naked eye to register even faintly on a digital image. I concentrated more on enjoying the show than on trying to take pictures, but I did take about a dozen. I did catch a trail on one of them (in the image below, it's the vertical smudge between the bottom left corner and bottom center of the image; the trail can be seen more clearly in the full-size, 5-MB image).
One interesting thing I learned about using ordinary alkaline batteries in a digital camera is this: When a lithium battery starts to go, it goes rapidly and dies quickly, causing the camera to shut down almost immediately after the camera's battery icon reads zero percent. Last night, I was able to take a good half dozen shots after the icon hit zero (I even learned that said icon turns red a little after that happens, which I hadn't noticed before.)
There are huge gobs of work to do today. I better get to it.
Cheers...
P.S. After a long hiatus, I logged back into my flickr account, uploaded the sky image, and sent it to the astrometry.net group. Once added the the group, the image is analyzed and the image is annotated to show prominent stars and celestial objects (such as galaxies and nebulas), and a text comment is left with other information, e.g.
Once there, I thought it would be a shame to have come nearly halfway to Site Lima and not check to see if there was any mushroom activity. So, we headed on down Highway 160 until we got to Lima. Along the way, there was some nice scenery.
There were no lobster mushrooms in evidence at Lima, but I did see two pitifully small mushrooms that turned out to be edible. However, two small edible mushrooms do not a dinner make, nor even a punctuation for, say, a side helping of rice, so I kept looking for more mushrooms.
Eventually, we found enough of these items (another form of Suillis, I believe) to take home and enjoy with rice and onions, the mixture playing a grand second fiddle to some gently fried salmon filet. Before settling down to the formidable task of making the mushrooms ready for the table, I took a photograph.
The skies opened up again around 9 pm, and I despaired of having the weather clear up by the middle of the night, but when I roused myself at 3:15 am (and to tell the truth, I almost went back to sleep without looking at the sky), the sky was almost completely clear and filled with stars.
Soon, I was out on the driveway, with the camera on the tripod, and enjoying the Perseid meteor shower.
Among other things, I figured out once and for all how to activate my Droid X's GPS feature. (And how to deactivate it as well, as it's a formidable drain on the batteries.) There turns out to be a Google Sky Map app for Android that combines the GPS feature, the phone's positioning sensors, and software to create an image on the unit's screen that scrolls automatically, showing what's "behind" the screen in the sky above (and, technically, beneath your feet, "behind" the screen and that planet you're standing on).
I really didn't need the help, as I can find Perseus from Cassiopeia (that awkward W in the northern sky), and even if I hadn't known how to do that, the meteor trails in the sky would've shown me the general location of Perseus, because just as the rails of a railroad track seem to emanate from a point on the horizon when you stand and look down a straight stretch of track, most of the trails of a meteor "shower" seem to originate from one area in the sky. Last night, that one area was where the constellation Perseus was located. As showers go, it was reasonable, and I estimate there were somewhere around 100-150 trails per hour during the time I gazed at the sky.
I had my camera set to take a 15-second exposure at ISO 1600 (maximum sensitivity), which is about as long as an exposure can be without stars starting to turn from dots into dashes, the result of the apparent motion of the stars as the Earth rotates in space. One "penalty" that had to be paid with such a setup was having to wait for the camera to spend 15 seconds after such exposures to generate a blank picture that's used by the camera's software to eliminate "noisy" pixels when saving the original photo. (Because the sensor elements in a digital camera are electronic, there's a certain amount of "noise" recorded in addition to the useful information in the image when a photo is taken. This is not a problem for "normal" pictures taken at high speed, but can be a major annoyance when taking long-exposure photos, because over that long exposure, the noise becomes noticeable.)
In my experience, it's hard to catch a meteor trail on a digital exposure, both from the timing point of view and from the brightness point of view. A trail has to be really bright to the naked eye to register even faintly on a digital image. I concentrated more on enjoying the show than on trying to take pictures, but I did take about a dozen. I did catch a trail on one of them (in the image below, it's the vertical smudge between the bottom left corner and bottom center of the image; the trail can be seen more clearly in the full-size, 5-MB image).
One interesting thing I learned about using ordinary alkaline batteries in a digital camera is this: When a lithium battery starts to go, it goes rapidly and dies quickly, causing the camera to shut down almost immediately after the camera's battery icon reads zero percent. Last night, I was able to take a good half dozen shots after the icon hit zero (I even learned that said icon turns red a little after that happens, which I hadn't noticed before.)
There are huge gobs of work to do today. I better get to it.
Cheers...
P.S. After a long hiatus, I logged back into my flickr account, uploaded the sky image, and sent it to the astrometry.net group. Once added the the group, the image is analyzed and the image is annotated to show prominent stars and celestial objects (such as galaxies and nebulas), and a text comment is left with other information, e.g.
Hello, this is the blind astrometry solver. Your results are:If you want to see the annotations and the complete comment, click here.
(RA, Dec) center:(59.7023702324, 45.4577884652) degrees
(RA, Dec) center (H:M:S, D:M:S):(03:58:48.569, +45:27:28.038)
Orientation:97.60 deg E of N
