Author Archives: momdude

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About momdude

Space cadet | Family dude | Photographer | Music lover | Traveler | Science fiction fan | Hugo Award nominee | Writer | 5x NASA Social participant | KC Chiefs fan | LA Kings fan | Senior Director of Finance & Administration for ALS Network | Member & former staff Finance Officer at the Commemorative Air Force SoCal Wing | Hard core left-wing liberal | Looking for whatever other shenanigans I can get into
June 11, 2020 · 21:25

The Finches Have Been Busy Again

Maybe it’s the SoCal weather, maybe they’re just randy little flying fuzzballs, but Mama Finch is back on the nest.

Back in February and March we had four pairs in four different nests under the eaves of our back porch. I’m not sure all four ended up with families, but at least two of them did.

They all sort of went about their way in late April and early May. They were all still flying about, noisy, doing bird things, but I never saw them up by the nests.

Until about two weeks ago, when it was just like February all over. Just two of the four nests seem to be occupied this time, but Daddy Finch is out there perching on the fridge and the BBQ and the porch chairs and making quite the ruckus while Mama Finch can be seen all day long sitting in the nest.

I had suspicions.

Today when I went out into the back yard to take out the trash, Mama Finch took off as she is wont to do. I figured that I had a few seconds to take a quick peek before she came back and tried to poke my eyes out.

The hummingbirds next door only had two eggs. The finches have been BUSY, if you know what I mean!

The incubation period for finches is 13-14 days, and we’ve seen Mama on guard for at least five or six days, so I give it another week. Stand by, news developments to follow.

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Filed under Critters, Photography

June 10, 2020 · 22:18

The Hurrier I Go…

Who knew that Lewis Carroll was the Nostradamus of his day, predicting 2020?

What really bugged me though was not remembering who said, “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.” I was thinking it was from a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon, or maybe the old Pogo comic strip or something. It finally bugged me enough to do a quick look up – it’s from “Alice In Wonderland.”

Well, that make sense. Our world today can’t be any more strange than Wonderland was.

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Filed under Paul

June 9, 2020 · 22:29

No Context For You – June 09th

In the coverage of the current societal situation in the US I’ve seen any number of people suggesting that certain politicians need to be “shot into the sun.” This was also something that was mentioned a number of times in the first four seasons of “The Expanse” which we’ve just binged over the last few weekends. (Very good show, we enjoyed it a lot, FWIW.)

While there is a certain visual image that brings joy to the heart of all good and decent people when they fantasize about the Mango Mussolini and his cult being dropped into the corona to be fricasseed and flambeed in 17,000,000° nuclear fire, the simple fact of physics is that it’s hard to shoot people into the sun!

It might be counter intuitive – we think of the sun as being at the bottom of a gravity well and all we have to do is let got of them, right? Well… wrong. The Earth doesn’t drop into the sun because we’re in orbit, and moving at about 67,000 mph to keep us here. So to “drop” into the sun you need to lose all of that energy and slow down to about 0 mph relative to the sun. That’s a delta-v (change in velocity) of about 29.95 km/sec.

On the other hand, if you want to send something (or someone) on a trip out of the solar system to wander aimlessly through the galaxy with almost zero chance of ever hitting anything or even coming near anything before the heat death of the universe, you only need about 42.1 km/sec. Since the Earth is already going at almost 30 km/sec, you only need a delta-v of about 12.1 km/sec. That’s well less than half of what it takes in rocket fuel to drop someone into the sun.

You can launch TWO politicians on a slow boat toward Alpha Centauri -ish for the same delta-v as you would use to launch one politician into the sun, and still have enough delta-V left over to go to the Moon!

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Politics

June 8, 2020 · 23:18

Lost Time

They’ve said that one of the possible symptoms of COVID-19 is the lost of taste and smell. I think for those of us in quarantine for twelve or thirteen weeks now, we’re suffering from a loss of all sense of time.

It’s bad enough that I can’t remember what day of the week it is any more. But between the odd and long hours of working from home, not sleeping well, all of the other various physical and mental strains and stresses, and the fact that I spend hours at a time without any outside view or reference to day and night (unless there’s an ISS pass or Venus or something to go see), the last few days I’ve been having trouble having a good sense of what time of day it is.

One minute I’ll be thinking it’s about 20:00, maybe 20:30, and then notice that it’s 22:30. Ten minutes later I’ll be feeling like it must be at least 02:00 and I need to get to bed and I’ll be screwed in the morning trying to get up – but it’s 22:40.

Or it could just be that I picked the Jean-Michel Jarre Pandora channel (with lots of JMJ, Enigma, Tangerine Dream, Amethstium, and so on) on the headphones for the last fourteen hours. It kept the sound of the howling winds out, but it may have sucked my brain into an alternate dimension where the clocks run a bit differently.

If we’re going to be switching dimensions or timelines, I have a few requests…

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June 7, 2020 · 22:14

We Need That Tree To Be Tall

Following my post of a picture of our cedar trees yesterday, long time reader and commenter and author and generally wonderful human being Jemima Pett commented:

“Now if you just trim the top off flat… there.. it’ll do for the Close Encounters models of the meeting place!”

This is correct and true, and also assumes 100% correctly that I would love to be the guy going to meet the little grey/green dudes with those big black eyes and their very own starship. (Why does my autocorrect still think that “starship” is not a word in my dictionary? Has it not been paying attention lo these many years??!!)

However, no matter how factually accurate Jemima’s comment is, there are two major factors preventing such actions in the real world.

  1. Our landlord – we don’t own the house and are renting after going through ***HELL*** two years ago when we sold our house.
  2. The finches use those trees to announce their presence with authority.

This one was in his full blown, bright red chest feathers, “Look at me! I’M VIRILE!!” mode.

It was about sunset – that helps the hues a bit but they really are getting that bright and that loud. It’s quite marvelous.

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Filed under Critters, Photography

June 6, 2020 · 23:22

A Green-Tree & Blue-Sky Day!

No red letters in sight.

Pay attention or you’ll miss the jokes around here. This is because they’re very small and not very funny.

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Filed under Photography

June 5, 2020 · 17:35

A Red-Letter Day!

There won’t be photos of tonight’s pretty decent ISS pass – it’s cloudy with a 20% chance of rain out there. If you know anything about SoCal it’s that we get rain in June about once every other blue moon. Fate, man, it’s a bitch.

But it’s a red-letter day!

I needed to use shampoo on my hair this morning! Granted, not a lot given the circumstances, more like I just sort of opened the bottle and let some of the fumes waft over my scalp – but it’s a start!! And I can now use a towel to dry it again instead of using a squeegee!

Big doings here!

What are your plans for the weekend?

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Filed under Farce, Paul

June 4, 2020 · 23:02

ISS Pass & A Bonus

The weather’s better, there’s a nice, high, bright, ISS pass… Let’s see if I can avoid screwing this up two nights in a row, shall we?

(Image – Heavens-Above.org)

It was sweet, especially with a little contrast cleanup in Photoshop.

There was a bright, almost full moon rising, so I kept the exposures shorter, just 2.3 seconds each.

Then I tried to shift to another location to catch the rest of the pass as the ISS swung overhead and headed back toward the southeast where the moon was rising. The rabbits covering the lawn didn’t appreciate it and tried to trip me going down the hill.

I finally made it and got set up to see it fade into night as it got down near the moon (that honkin’ bright thing at the lower left edge).

As I pulled the tripod and started heading home (I had moved a couple houses down the hill to clear the street lights and trees) I noticed another satellite straight overhead. I quickly put the tripod back down and started shooting again.

It was MUCH dimmer than the ISS – this is a single frame and you can see it in the center top, heading down and slightly to the left.

Why not a combined file like with the ISS? When I tried to combine these images in StarStaX the satellite trail vanishes. It’s too dim and therefore too thin and each segment gets overwritten by the other layers where it’s dark.

But… I learned a new trick and I’m not afraid to use it three days in a row.

In a GIF format, you can see the unknown satellite moving down toward the horizon, before it too goes into darkness.

The fact that it went into darkness at about the same distance to the east of us means that it was probably at a similar height to the ISS. If it were higher, it would have stayed in sunlight longer – lower and it would have gone dark sooner. Beyond that, I have no idea what it was.

Keep looking up. You never know what you might see!

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Filed under Astronomy, Paul, Photography, Space, Video

June 3, 2020 · 22:37

Back In Focus

There was a so-so ISS pass tonight – there’s a much better one tomorrow. This one was low, not the brightest you’ll see (M-2.5) but not terrible, fading into night only 30° above the horizon.

(Image: Heavens-Above.com)

However, it was only partly cloudy tonight after several frustrating, cloudy nights, so it was time to test my theories about focusing my new lens.

(Images stacked using StarStaX)

The good news is that the focusing issue seems to have been resolved.

The bad news is that I was shooting with a honkin’ huge street light just off to the left, the neighbors’ yard lights directly across the street, light haze, scattered clouds, and a nearly full moon that that the haze lit up light a neon light. Plus, you know, the usual godawful light pollution in LA.

So I shot shorter exposures, eight seconds instead of ten or fifteen.

The next cover of  “Sky & Telescope” magazine? Hardly. A solid proof-of-concept test of my new lens, or more accurately, my ability to correctly use it? Pretty good.

Wait, what was that trick I learned yesterday?

Just remember, if you go out to look for yourself (like, maybe tomorrow!) it’s going to be a bright pinpoint, not a line, and it’s going to move at about fifty times slower. In real life this video took about two minutes and fifteen seconds.

But I do like making these little GIF’s!

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Space

June 2, 2020 · 21:30

Frustration

So much frustration right now. *waves vaguely at everything*

There are little things that make me think that the gremlins are just rubbing it in.

For example…

I’ve mentioned that I had to get a new “normal” lens for my Canon Rebel XT. The original lens is flaky, at the wide end of the zoom it won’t trigger, just locks up the camera mechanism. The new lens I got is much more new and faster and wonderful, but might be too new and wonderful for the old camera body. It auto-focuses like a dream, but for manual focus like I use all the time in astrophotography it’s just been a nightmare.

I thought that I had figured it out, right up until I didn’t.

One trick from when I had “figured it out” was to go out a few minutes early and take a test picture which I could review on the spot in the camera. And I got this. Recognize the Big Dipper? Maybe? Kinda? Yeah, if you say so…

Ten frantic minutes trying my new “trick” over and over and over – same results. Finally it’s time for the ISS and Dragon to rise, so set up one more time and take my chances.

It looked amazing. I’ve got that memory.

Do you see that streak in the bigger, right-hand oval? That’s the ISS. See that dimmer streak in the smaller, left-hand oval? That’s the Dragon spacecraft.

It’s more obvious in a blink comparison with the images before and after this one. (New thought, stand by – can I do that in Photoshop?)

(thirty minutes later)

YES! I can. (Remember this for a minute, I’ll be back to this in a minute.)

Here’s a three frame animation with a long pause on the third frame so you can see the looping action. Dragon shows up just to the right of the telephone pole in the middle frame.

Frustrated by this failure on Saturday night, on Sunday I sat down with the camera to figure out just WTAF is going on with this new, fancy, somewhat expensive lens that should be perfect but instead makes me want to scream.

And I figured it out.

Short version – the lens is sort of “fly by wire” in that the focusing ring doesn’t move the lens elements, so it doesn’t have a mechanical hard stop when focusing in or out. Instead the lens simply detects motion on the focusing ring and makes the mechanical adjustments to move the lens elements based on that input. BUT, and here’s the key, since this is being run off of the camera battery, in order to avoid draining the battery at an extreme rate (apparently) it shuts itself off after about five seconds. If you don’t know this (I didn’t) you can spin that focusing ring until the heat death of the universe and it’s not going to change a thing. If you do know this (I do now!) you can flick the power off and then right back on to “wake up” the lens, focus away, and then wait for it to “go back to sleep” after about five seconds.

So I was proud of my stubborn ass self. I had figured it out! REALLY really this time! Now to test it!

There was a pretty good ISS pass on Sunday! And it was cloudy.

So try it on Monday, an even better pass! And it was cloudy.

A great pass tonight! And…

Completely socked in.

As I said, the gremlins are just screwing with me because they can at this point.

Which was my original point when I started writing this an hour ago. But then my brain said, “Wait, that looks better in a blink comparison type of GIF, can I make one of those?” And I didn’t have a clue but I tried and asked the question and fought through some so-so tutorials and finally got close enough to just figure it out on my own before I fiddled with it a bit to make it better and when all was said and done, not only did I have a tiny little thing that I created myself and shared with all of you, but that made the existential angst-ish blanket of frustration lift just a little bit.

And that helped.

It also helped that this popped up on my news alerts about five minutes ago:

Change is possible. That’s one absolutely evil, ignorant, guanopsychotic, complete waste of protoplasm down, a few hundred more to go.

It won’t be tomorrow. It won’t be completely done in November or January. It’s going to take the rest of our lives, and maybe our children’s lives and grandchildren’s lives.

But we’ll get there.

One at a time.

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Politics, Space