Starstruck

Over the past few years I have complained about the difficulties of driving at night, particularly in rain. I figured it was one of the benefits of growing old. More recently I have noticed how my vision has been variable over the course of the day, generally being at its worst in the morning, but gradually improving during the day. I guessed that my blood sugar was varying over the day, changing my vision in the process.. At last, I found my glasses were not correcting my sight well enough most of the time, and I called on my friendly neighborhood optometrist for a checkup.

“Hmmm.”. Along with “oh-oh” that’s a word you don’t want to hear when you’re having any kind of check-up. In this case, it preceded the strange (to me) pronouncement of “your right eye is uncorrectable.” That turned out to mean that a visit to the ophthalmologist was in order. There’s a long lineup, so it wasn’t for a few weeks that I got the next part of the message, which wasn’t, as I expected, that I was developing cataracts, but rather that I had a relatively rare genetic condition which results in a corneal problem called ‘Fuchs Dystrophy’ (or sometimes ‘Fuchs Endothelial Dystrophy’ or FED for short). This results in the cornea turning white, with occasional painful blisters. In other words, I’m going blind – and since it affects both eyes, it will be complete and total. Ugh.

Fortunately there is a transplant treatment, so at some time in the future I can hope for a few endothelial cells to be slipped under my cornea, and if that goes well, a couple of weeks later my vision will be on the road to (more or less) recovery. It won’t be perfect vision, be it will be good enough for me to navigate around a room, and probably enough for me to keep reading.

For this to work for me and other sufferers we will need donors. So sign your donor cards when you renew your drver’s license! You’ll feel good about yourself.

Aw, hell!

I never met Steve Jobs. And yet somehow he has been a major factor in my life.

I didn’t get on the Apple bandwagon until 1984 when the Mac debuted. Before that I used mainframes, then Commodore machines. the unlamented TRS-80, and the like. After the Mac, Steve’s vision dominated my interaction with computers. In my business life I worked with MS-DOS and later, with Windows, but I never liked the ungainly mundanities. Macs were poetry. Macs were magic. Macs were the way of the future.

As the years have passed, I think that initial assessment has proven true, over and over. True ease of use, the whole GUI and WYSIWYG approach, would, at the very least, have been drastically delayed but for Steve Jobs’ initial push. Xerox Parc may have been the birthplace and early proving grounds for these approaches to computer interfaces and usages, but it was Steve and the Apple Corps who pushed them out into an initially skeptical world and made believers of the Rest of Us.

During the Wilderness Years while he was away from Apple the company stumbled and very nearly died, but he brought it back and led it to new triumphs. So while there are at least seven Macs scattered around my house, there are also a couple of iPads and an iPhone, with iPods resting in honoured retirement here and there. I’m sure there will be more wonderful devices out of Apple, coming from the teams Steve nurtured, but the world is a little dimmer today than it was last week.

Dammit. Just … Dammit.

It’s Starfest time, but I’m not there – I expect to go tomorrow, Saturday, but then again, I expected to go on Wednesday. I’ve been watching the Clear Dark Sky forecasts for the site as well as the weather forecasts for nearby Mount Forest, and with poor skies predicted together with Tornado Watches, I haven’t felt it was worth heading out. Friday night was predicted to be good after midnight, but I spent most of the day feeling slightly queasy, so I passed on that also. Instead I stayed up late here at the house, and stepped outside a few minutes ago to check on things.

It’s about as dark as it gets here in suburban Woodbridge – my dark sky meter reads 18.03, which is just about as dark as I have seen here (Bortle 8 or 9). Jupiter is climbing up in the southwest, and the air seems steady, with no noticeable shimmy or flicker. The trouble is, I can see Jupiter, but only three or four other stars – transparency seems to be much worse than usual, which is disappointing since the prediction was for average transparency at worst, improving to better than average towards the early morning hours.

It’s been in the 30s today, and my A/C is not working – looks as though there is some sort of start capacitor which has blown [yup! Simple fix, but still $110 – but no consequential damage], because the fan won’t start without help. I’m just wondering how long it has been running this way, and if there has been consequential damage to the rest of the unit. When I manually start the fan (by carefully spinning the blades) the fan keeps running, but there is no cool air coming out of the AC vents. I guess I’ll find out soon, as the HVAC folks are due for a maintenance check at the end of the week. That’s my hot and miserable start to the week.

Meanwhile, I’m just back from a visit with my daughter in Southern California. While I was there I happened to see that the Riverside Telescope Makers Conference (RTMC) was being held over the US’ Memorial Day weekend. I was due to jump on the plane home on Saturday, but I went up to the site on Wednesday and stayed until early Friday morning.

The weather was dry and pleasant during the day, and downright cold during the night. I fired up the new Astrotrac and took a few exposures, mostly of the region around Vega and a little south of Antares. There was a hulking great mountain to the south, so I didn’t see much point in trying for the southern sky. This was an impromptu exercise, and I wasn’t well prepared.

I was able to set up and align reasonably well. The first night I learned that it was better to set up with the tripod legs fully extended, as trying for a minimal extension resulted in greater stability but an aching back. I ran two image sequences up to about 1 am, but packed up when the wind picked up. I have no idea what the actual wind speeds were, but 50 mph gusts had been predicted, and it certainly sounded as though that was what came through.

The following night I set up with full extension and was much more comfortable in both the alignment and object selection processes. Unfortunately the second night I was exhausted – didn’t sleep well – and quit after only one image sequence.

Since I hadn’t expected to be observing – and certainly not imaging – I had nothing to process the images I captured, and didn’t have any capture software with me either. I captured using an intervalometer I had in my gadget bag, and didn’t capture any darks or flats. I don’t expect the final images to be impressive, but in any case I will post them when I have had a chance to stack them and remove the sky glow.

Shooting at f/4 and ISO 800, I felt comfortable with 4 minute exposures, but not at 5 minutes. Stars were nice and round after a couple of alignment tweaks, and I took sequences of 20 or so each time the Astrotrak fired up. I’m happy with that.

I was shooting with a 70-200 and a 24-105 lens, each with L glass, but I will have to check the EXIF data to see what the nominal focal lengths were for each series.

Seeing wasn’t great on either night, but I thought it was a little better the second night. Skies were fairly good, but I think Starfest skies are a little better. There was a bit of a light dome to the NNE (Las Vegas?) and on the second night another observer complained about the light dome from San Diego (?) to the SSE. The mountains seemed to do a fairly good job of blocking the lights of the greater Los Angeles area, but there was a lot of sky glow along the entire horizon. The site is just barely a borderline green zone on the sky pollution maps, while Starfest, as I recall it, is solidly green.

I’ll try to plan a little better next year so that I can attend the entire event (I missed the swap meet and just about all the vendors, which I normally enjoy at Star Parties). I also have permission to purchase equipment and leave it with my daughter, so I should be able to do more next time. It was a tiring event for me, but considering it was all catch-as-catch-can, I’m pretty satisfied with the way things went.

P.S. Access to the event site is via California Highway 38, a twisting little road full of hairpin turns with breath-taking drop-offs waiting for you if you take them too fast. White-knuckle driving for me, but long-time attendees told me “you get used to it.” Eek!

Somehow
I lost a few months.
Writing nothing,
though there were things to write about.

Somehow,
even things I found
of interest
passed on by.

Perhaps I died.
Maybe just
a little.

Or perhaps it’s just
just this blog has always been
erratic, informal,
and this last break is just,
just waiting grown extreme.

Life is bigger,
bigger than you and you,
and you, who are not me,
who knows
the lengths that I will go to,
the dark behind my eyes,
oh no, I wrote too much,
and yet
I left this up.

Consider this, consider this,
the hint of the century,
the slip that brings me to my knees,
trying to turn my life around,
but it just puts me in the ground.

But is this just a dream ???
life is just extreme.

This was just extreme,
this was just extreme,
that’s me in the corner,
that’s me in the spotlight,
object of derision,
trying to keep up with life,
but I don’t think I can do it,
oh no, I wrote too much.
and yet
I never wrote enough.

I thought that I heard you laughing,
I hope that I made you think,
I think, I thought, I saw you try,
but this is just extreme,
this is just extreme,
cry or try, cry,
I can only dream,
be is drowned in seem.

I become the dream,
I engage the dream….
I think I’ve done too much.
Or not enough.

With thanks to Losing My Religion

It wasn’t all that close – Toronto and Ottawa are separated by a couple of hundred miles – but yesterday’s earthquake was noticeable down here in not-so-sunny Woodbridge. It’s not quite true to say we’ve had no sun, but we have also had a couple of deluges in the last day or so.

I’m not sure if the combination of these two events is a contributing factor, but when I went out to the observatory today I found that the bubble level on the mount was no longer showing a cleanly centered bubble. Instead, the bubble is off to one side, so it looks like the mount has shifted quite a bit. It looks like the next time I go out I should set aside a half hour or so to confirm and reset the alignment.

Oh well. At least the wrath of a vengeful god didn’t make the earth gape open and swallow the observatory whole. That won’t happen until 2012….

While I’m on the subject of castles (previous post) this is a view of Lincoln Castle. The walk up to the castle was by way of a stiff climb along a street named appropriately – Steep Hill.

Good exercise – for those who like to walk, and are in good shape!

One reason I haven’t posted much recently (aside from the continuing WordPress saga) is that I spent three weeks visiting relatives in England during the month of May. I took “lotsa pictures” and, hopefully, one of them will be attached to this post, resized as needed, and online with the article.

This is Hermitage Castle, a small castle in the border region between England and Scotland. It passed a couple of times between the English and the Scots, and while the inside lies in ruins, the castle still has a brooding presence – particularly when the clouds roll in as they did on this day, with a chill rain spattering down from time to time.

This image was sent from my iPad, so the process does work, but I am not sure if the changes which I had to make to the site are safe. I will be watching to see if any glitches show up as a result of the modifications – but eventually I will post more images of the trip (i’m not sure, but that may pass for a threatening remark – don’t say you weren’t warned!).

OK, I lied.

While it’s certainly another day, it’s only another version of an app which failed previously – namely, the WordPress app. The last time I tried this out, it failed about as many times as it succeeded, and I eventually gave up on it. However, I didn’t delete it from the iPad, and yesterday the App Store let me know that there was an update available.

So far though, I have to say, not so good. In trying to post this item, I lost the edit about halfway through the setting up of the headers – specifically, when I tried to set the category, the entry screen reset to blanks, and I had to start over. I’ll forgive that, at least for now, but it doesn’t bode well for the continuing saga…

It’s rather unfortunate, but since the iPad version of the WordPress app fails, I’ve had to update this post manually. There are some very strange quirks in the update process, related no doubt to the auto-completion which I have enabled. However, while this article reports the same troubles with WordPress as I have experienced, it also reports trouble with updates using Safari on the iPad—which I am not seeing at all. Strange -about the only weirdness I see with Safari is that in text entry for this blog I am unable to position the cursor at the first point on a line, and have to set it at the second character and then backspace to get to the position I really want. I find that to be only a minor irritant, but YMMMV.