Stealthy Shadows

Yesterday, December 28, my planetarium software warned me of an Io shadow transit later in the evening- when one of Jupiter's moons casts a shadow on the planet's surface. The sky was clear and it wasn't too cold so I planned on trying to capture it.

I was worried about the approaching haze in the west leading up to that time. Indeed, it was thick when I got everything set up yet I could almost see the tiniest black speck on the planetary disk in spite of it. The haze actually cleared after a few minutes and I was certain I could see the shadow at x125 magnification along one of the cloud belts. I realize trying to boost the magnification when dealing with planets is not the recommended school of thought, but it worked so whatever!

After I was satisfied I found it and admired it a bit I proceeded to set up my imager. This is where it all fell apart. I have the Orion Starshoot Color Imager IV and it just uses a generic webcam capture software. Having fiddled with the exposure settings and allocating file space I started the capture. I was recording at 30fps for 100 seconds which should have given me 3000 individual frames I'd sort and stack later. Unfortunately, I must not have allocated enough file space and the frame counter at the bottom of the application window was dropping more frames than it was capturing. So I tried again, allocating much more space but as I was recentering the planet and readjusting the focus, the image on my monitor started blinking and blacking out all together. This happened a few months ago with Venus but the imager still picks up light when I point it at the monitor. I'm completely baffled. I decided to try to capture it anyway but I was losing as many frames as last time and it was starting to black out for several seconds at a time so I aborted and got around 800 frames.

Well, ok, let's work with what we have. The first .avi file wouldn't load in Registax. I'm not sure what the problem is but when the progress bar pauses at 67% I know I'm boned! The second file, the one with the black outs, loaded nicely though. I aligned and stacked several times with different quality cut off settings giving me between 200 and 400 frames with no noticable difference so I stacked as much as I could and tried to sharpen the result. That is is what you see below.

I can't be certain, but I want to say I can see a black smudge on the southern cloud band but this may just be wishful thinking.

Clavius and Friends

This shot is several weeks old but it never posted for some reason.

It is definitely one of my best yet.

Custom Princess Luna Vectrex Controller Overlay

Vectrex joysticks are apparently notorious for losing their self centering ability when one of the springs breaks. This is what happened to mine. It can be repaired by transplanting a spring donated by one of those Atari 2600 cartridges you just can't get rid of, but to open the control panel up you have to access five screws hidden underneath the hard plastic label. These things and even the modified Sega Genesis controllers are hard to come by these days but since I had a spare and I knew I would end up destroying the label if I attempted to remove it I was content to just leave it as is. However, when playing games that use analog control and a few games that don't, it tends to pull to the left even though the stick itself is in the center.

After my confidence was boosted by successfully cleaning a pair of jittery Atari paddle controllers and reading an article about reproducing damaged Vectrex labels I thought: How cool would it be to have a custom My Little Pony Vectrex control panel! After some digging I found a scale vector of the original overlay and swiped a few vectors of Princess Luna and the night sky from google. I'm not really into the gamer Luna joke but she just seemed like the most appropriate candidate and besides, who doesn't like Luna? The design process was somewhat uninteresting inspite of the progress reports I kept annoying my friends with. It basically consisted of changing colors and rearranging everything to look nice.

I didn't even try to remove the original label carefully and just tore it off and tediously removed the adhesive. While I had everything apart I cleaned all the buttons and both potentiometers. Cutting and installing the spring (extracted from a Packman cart) was surprisingly easy, and if it weren't for the new overlay you would never know it was restored.

The label, however, did not print as nicely as I had hoped it would. I used a pretty generic shipping label paper and the colors are a bit dark and don't seem to register as well as they could. Ultimately I decided that the quality would probably not be any better using a more expensive paper so I chose the best ones and carefully cut them out. I learned that it is easier to cut the adhesive paper first and then the paper it sticks too. If you try to cut both at once it will tear. They were a little big but the buttons lined up nicely so I just cut the edges on the next one a little further. I sprayed it down with enough fixative to make it bullet proof, slapped it on the controller and that was the end of that.

This was a fun project and I would like to find more things to fo like this. I tend to get sort of depressed this time of year if I don't keep my self distracted.

I nabbed the Luna art here: http://tamalesyatole.deviantart.com/art/Luna-Philosophizing-308136918 But I can't seem to find the other resources again!

When the moon goes behind the trees, just photograph the trees.

This reminds me of a sumi-e painting. It's upside down because newtonian reflectors rotate images 180 degrees and I was too lazy to adjust it.

Ruins of a Past Civilazation.

These photos were taken several weeks ago when my brother and I went sailing on the usual lake. The day started off shaky when every possible little thing went wrong but once Dawn Puffin was in the water it went a little smoother.The highlight and most interesting part of the day was the discovery of an old sunken road in the middle of nowhere.

We were sailing past what we thought was an island but further investigation proved it to be attached to the other shore with a swampy area. We were dicussing trying to land but decided that since we were on such a nice heading for now, it would be a shame to spoil it and we'd try another time. Coming about to avoid snagging on some driftwood in a narrow section of the lake,(most likely put there durring the spring storms) we ended up on a tack that would take us to the mystery land with no trouble and aimed for a spot on the beach. Raising the centerboard we drifted a little more than I anticipated and struck a giant flat rock that we thought was mud. The boat seemed pretty secure so we went ashore to explore and have lunch. After looking at this massive slab of stone and picking a few chunks of it out of the grass I realized: this is no rock, it's a space statio- er, a road!

What is an old road doing in the middle of a lake? Where does it go? The first question is easily answered as it is a man made lake and there must have been a small road that ran with the river before the dam was built. The second question we will have to answer next year when we're on the lake again and can explore the shorelines. That was our last sail of the season: it's getting cold and there a lot of little repairs needed on the boat before we go again. For now, all we know is the road leads to a door. A door to THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

Theophilus and a Ghost Crater

Someday I will be good at this. I did manage to capture the remnants of an ancient crater around that lightbulb shaped one, however, in the middle of Sinus Asperatits. My printed authorities tell me the ghost crater is unnamed but the one inside it is called Torricelli and the large crater with a central peak that I used as a reference point is Theophilus.

Grey Pegasus

This is my Entry for G. M. Berrow's illustrate her pony novel contest. This is the first scene that came to mind that I could reasonably make look nice although I had a few ideas from Pinkie's book too.

From Twighlight Sparkle and the Crystal Heart Spell p. 15-16

Selenography

What if we lost the screw?

Then we'd be screwed.

My brother and I went sailing last Sunday. We went to my favorite lake which, up to now, has been largely kept secret and most of the time there would be nary another soul on the water or on the shore. This day was not one of those days. In the morning, most of the people were friendly and cheerful: saying how pretty my boat was, watching the eagles or generally not causing a fuss when the boat loses steerageway near the shore where they were fishing. Near lunch time all the shore fishermen just scowled at us. One particularly nasty old lady said "if you doon't knoo how to handle and boot, doon't go in ze water."

I am under no dillusions about my capabilities; I may have been certified in advanced theories on 40ft leviathans, but my skills have since atrophied, especially on a small boat where everything happens at once. Perhaps I don't know what I am doing, but how can anyone learn how to do something without actually doing it? They were fishing with bobbers in the weeds anyway.

The weather was great. The heatwave of the previous week had broke and the wind started out light but got stronger throughout the day. The new trolling motor worked to keep the boat heading into the wind to make sail and power out of tight spots, like when we could not get enough momentum to tack into the wind and sail in the other direction and stopped all together before drifting directly onto the cranky old lady's line.

My sister's boyfriend said he'd meet us there but he never showed up. My brother ate his sandwich when we intentionaly grounded the boat and had lunch on the boulders on shore.

We forgot the sail twice. In the morning I got all the saftey equipment ready and picked my brother up. We hooked up the trailer and took off, getting half way down the road before realizing we never loaded the boom and mainsail, trolling motor, battery, oars and the tiller. Then later, after hauling the boat out of the water and getting attitude from a massive jetboat owner for being in the way (the trees foul my mast anywhere else and high powered engines are illegal on this particular lake anyway) we de-rigged and double checked to see if we left anything on the beach. We gave a boat a helping shove because the skipper was being a jerk to his neophyte wife who couldn't do it and headed home. When we were putting away everything I opened the jib's sailbag to discover there was no sail in it. We frantically checked all the lockers and checked to see if we furled it down with the main when I remebered folding it in the grass. At the lake. ALL THE WAY BACK AT THE LAKE.

All in all, it was a good day. My only regret is that my favorite lake is turning into a tourist attraction like the only other lake within miles and miles. Maybe towards fall or on a weekday we'll find some privacy.

One of these outings I'm going to write down the frame rate and exposure time used to capture a video before I stack them in Registax. I think this is Mare Crissium but I'm not sure. I don't have a lunar atlas and I'm too lazy to look it up any other way.

Worlds Utterly Insignificant

My imager could not detect saturn- whether this is because my telescope does not collect enough photons or I derped the software settings is uncertain- so again I've fallen back to smartphone afocal astrophotography.

Gibbous

It seems to me, I get better lunar shots by pointing my phone camera through the eyepiece of the telescope than anything else. I believe that is called afocal astrophotography...

The Clouds of Jupiter

I do not remember the details of this one... Except that it was captured with the Orion SSSCI-IV and processed in Regiatax and remains my best planetary photo yet.

Sunspots taken with my phone camera (which is why there appears to be darker, shadowy areas on the disk) through a newtonian reflector at, I believe, x75 magnification, and a baadar solar filter in place. At the time I was sure I could see convection cells in the photosphere, but here any granulation is probably electronic noise.

The Wind Blew that Day

If I am going to post artwork here too, I guess I'll start with my latest piece.

I've been feeling ubmidia lately.

Because sometimes there is just not enough places on the internet for people to ignore you. Also, I needed a place to show off my astro-photos and other random stuff.