Snow buildup and pattern on the dome

Just a quick still of the dome after some of the snowfall Friday. I was driving around from one errand to another and on the way past I pulled off and took a quick snapshot from my car.

There's snow everywhere and the roads of course were a mess with a lot of ice. Good old fashioned Michigan weather. In the old days we didn't make a big deal about winter. Snow was no big deal and expected. It would snow in November and there would be snow on the ground much of the year and we usually would have a White Christmas. . . that was before global warming took away all the snow. . . or sun and weather cycles . . . depending on your point of view.

In the old days, we'd walk to the school through huge drifts of snow in order to get a glimpse through the telescope. Back then old timers like me had walk through the snow barefoot or in homemade shoes to get to see the stars. . . okay maybe I'm getting a little carried away here. Maybe I'm feeling like an old guy.

In actuality real old timers went to school maybe 80 or 100 years ago in a more rugged environment. I have a friend who mentioned his grandfather ran into a bear on the way to school up north as a teenager. This was perhaps 80 years ago. The bear attacked this teen 80 years or so ago, and his grandfather killed the bear with a bowie knife. Having to fight you're way past wildlife to get to school is really roughing it. This apparently happened on the way to school somewhere north of here, toward the thumb area of Michigan. During more rural times.

The bear apparently lost his life, but my friends grandfather lost an eye.

:)

Astronomy in the morning, questions in the afternoon

Here's a picture of the Hector J Robinson Observatory the other night (2-23-2010) as I was approaching it. I wanted to take a picture of the snow around the observatory without any tracks in the snow and obviously no sidewalk or path was cleared. I was happy to have my winter boots on which easily tracked through the snow making a one man path. It gave me a feeling of being up north breaking new trails through the snow. The fresh snow without tracks reminded me of "virgin snowmobile trails up north" which is a trail that nobody has been on yet after a fresh snowfall. No tracks in the snow, just a path to walk or in the case of snowmobiling, drive through. We of course don't have snowmobile trails in Lincoln Park, so if I want to combine sledding and star watching, I'll need to take a pair of small binoculars or something small in a backpack up north. Some years back when snowmobiling up and standing out at Black lake under the dark sky, I wondered how cool it would be to have brought along a small telescope. (Maybe I should try a snowmobile and dark sky view trip and post about it in the future. . . :)

2-26-2010

I heard some phrases from an old movie playing Friday morning that had some comments about astronomy.

This is some old obscure movie, perhaps even an "out of print" movie difficult to find. (Perhaps bought from a relatively unknown B actor, Gloria Jean herself over the net. But that's another story.)

One of the "kids" in the movie was talking to a college teacher.

STUDENT

Astronomy is the study of heavenly bodies isn’t it?

TEACHER

Yeah. . .

STUDENT

You study you’re heavenly bodies, I’ll study mine.

And then quickly later in the movie. . . I heard . . . one of the "students" say . . .

And “Professor. Astronomy is a pretty dull subject, even from you.”

This was some movie shot in the 50s on black and white film. Perhaps a film that Gloria Jean was in, it might have been a movie called "Mr. Big" with Gloria Jean and Donald O'Conner. Or some movie of that type. I didn't stop to find out what the movie was exactly, I headed off to work.

These movies were about kids at that time and light musicals. Made at a time when the idea of kids music was changing toward rock and roll and still giving perception of "big bands" swing dancing or tap as being things the younger generation did. This of course was at times a Hollywood generated light and musical way of life and these Black and White B movies were more like a made for TV movie than a huge high budget MGM feature.

The movie dialog reminded me of that in general most people view astronomy as something that's a rather dull subject.

THE LUNCH ASTRONOMER

Later in the same day, I was at lunch reviewing some photos taken at the Hector J Robinson Observatory and dark frames on my laptop. Dark frames are photos of nothing but the dark. More about them in a different post.

I saw a guy walk into this diner and noticed he had a new Ford van and asked him how he liked it. He said he liked it a lot. It's that small van Ford imports from Turkey, I forgot it's name, but it's a small cute van. When I asked about the fuel economy, he replied he gets 25 mpg.

He sat down nearby and I went back to the task of looking up exposures and recording what I had in detail. He was waiting around for his order and heard me talking to myself a little as I was working on the computer.

(Computer guys often talk to themselves a little when on the computer, which is a sign of being crazy I suppose.)

I read out loud the name of the file and said something like, "what exposure is this dark frame?" or something like that to myself. When he overheard me say "dark frame" his interest picked up. "Astronomy club? You're from an astronomy club?" I guess the word "dark frame" tipped him off and he noticed my FAAC jacket.

He then asked me a telescope question. He had had a "13 inch Coulter" in the past and was thinking about getting a 12 inch dob. He wanted to know if there would be much of a difference in what he would see going down to a 12 inch discovery(?) I think he said Discovery which if I recall correctly is a dob built by Orion.

I replied that I'm not an expert at that but have read that there is a lot of extra light gathering power added on the edge of a mirror by going up sizes and he might notice a difference, but perhaps not that much between a 13 inch and a 12 inch. It's only an inch. He stated someone mentioned that there was a 44% difference in brightness between the two. I didn't have time to check this figure out, but I have read that you may need 80% or more brightness difference between a couple of telescopes to notice much difference. I said, I don't know if you'll notice much difference, but when was the last time you looked up with that Coulter?

"Twenty years ago."

Well I've been out of astronomy for a long time about 32 years before getting involved again only about 6 months ago. I can say there's a lot more light pollution now in the cities and you may notice it's a lot harder to see much due to light pollution now than 20 years ago. He seemed to agree with that. I said you might notice the difference an inch would make, but more likely would notice two inch differences in light gathering power. There's a lot more difference between a 12 inch and a 14 in theory, because you're talking more like 80% difference in light gathering power. (As you can see I've been reading the Obsession telescope site lately.)

(The other thing I wondered about was the quality of the mirror in his older Coulter, compared to a newer discovery or whatever he was thinking of getting. I didn't mention this at the time, but sometimes the old optics in some of those old telescopes is quite good and it's hard to say if the newer scopes have mirrors that are figured as well and provide as nice an image.) There are a ton of other things of course to take into consideration. But that's for another post and there are a lot of good links out there and forums with telescope reviews and buying advice.

I asked him if he ever went to an astronomy club and he said he had been a member of the Warren club in the past. He said it like he attended, but I don't know why he stopped going. I asked him if there was a reason he stopped going? I was more curious than anything, kind of like a guy taking a survey. He didn't really have a reason and of course I couldn't tell if there was some reason he quit going. He mentioned he might see me at a future meeting, so who knows he might know enough guys and local club information to just show up at one of the FAAC meetings.

So there's two astronomy coincidences that happened to me on Friday and I wasn't even looking for them.

A great movie and could it be an early peek at “The Hale”?

I was watching a movie during the last month that we recently added to our collection called “The Heavenly Body”. No it’s not a recent film about dancing or whatever that more modern film with the same name is called. This is an older film from 1944, produced by MGM and sold in the Warner Archive Collection.

This movie is about astronomy and astrology. It’s a great movie, but I’ll save the reviews for a short article in the FAAC newsletter.

There is a “big telescope in the movie”. And for a while I thought it might be the “Hale Telescope” at Palomar. I watched the clip and read up a little more about the telescope online. The Hale telescope was being built but they stopped it’s construction during WWII. Could this mean, that someone was able to use it for a prop and a few scenes in this movie.

I decided to see if I could get some expert advice. Who better than someone out in California at the observatory. So I ripped a short clip of the big telescope in action and posted it on Youtube as well as talked to the Public Affair’s co-ordinator at Palomar. Scott Kardel. When I called he answered the phone and I asked him if he knew of an old movie from 1943 that might have the Hale telescope in it. He didn’t know of it or heard of the movie. He said he’d like to pick up a copy and watch the movie. It’s an excellent movie by the way and really a great movie for Astronomers and old classic movie fans.

Once I ripped a clip showing the “telescope” in action I sent him a follow up email with a link to the Youtube video.

(See first comment for link to Youtube video clip which will be removed in a few days.)

Before I tell you the results let’s take a look at a screen grab and talk about this compared to the image of the actual Hale Telescope today.

On the left you can see the telescope in the movie. It’s base looks a lot like the Hale in design. It’s back could have been the Hale at some point. The axis and counterweight area of the yold looks differently. Ther is a ladder that goes up on the movie version on the left side of the back of the yolk. But no cover over the base of the yolk and movie version shows a counterweight that is bare. Later in the movie our “professional Astronomer” in the movie played by William Powell stands behind the movie telescope. The movie telescope even moves. But the sky in the background outside the shutter looks fake. Could it be they draped some fake sky over the real dome for the movie? The dome looked pretty close to the Palomar dome, but of course all domes that were large looked that way. It would be easy for a studio to create a dome or set that looks a lot like the Palomar dome.

The Hale would not have a real mirror in the telescope, but we only see the scope in the movie used in a very basic way. The yolks to me look very similar, but there are some support braces missing in the movie version and it’s a different color scheme. Perhaps two tone. Also there is an extra ring cage on the top of the movie telescope. Could it be that this cage was on the original Hale during part of the construction and appeared in the movie?

Even the doorways, not shown in the scene, but there are doors and passageways that seem to match a bit from the modern photos and the hale. In another actual modern movie of the Hale, the floor has a circular round section. In the movie there seems to be a hole and place in the floor below the movie telescope, but it’s surrounded by a permanent looking wall and the floor may have some kind of basement stairwell or something like that inside it. Could they have moved or built some kind of more conventional looking wall around the pit below the telescope for the movie?

The desk in the movie looks fake kind of like a prop with controls that look more like buck rogers perhaps than a real control desk. Could it be that this was some early prop placed in a perspective to show the actors. Maybe they hauled a desk and did a little dressing at the Palomar observatory for a few quick shots?

In the movie the telescope moves toward the dome, but the yolk doesn’t rotate at all.

There are a lot of things that look very much the same, which you can see by comparing the screen shot below.

As I was waiting for his reply I found a Time life site, from under one of the links of “Friends of Palomar” site that had historical photographs of the Hale telescope. There is a cage at the top where a person sits. There was no ringed extra cage area on the top like that shown in the movie. Surely if this was real it might show up in some historical photo. That seemed to be a bad sign.

So what do you think?

Within a few hours an email arrived in my mailbox. He had told me on the phone the Palomar and Hale were featured in some science fiction movies. Would it be in this early movie. Did I discover some rare footage that was kind of lost from many of the Hale moving as a movie prop?

Scott stated there were enough things missing from this and in the basic way the movie prop functioned to show it clearly as a prop. The way it functioned proved it was not the Hale telescope. He stated it was a movie model that was built to look like the Hale, but it was just a model.

Even so, when you look at the scale of the set you will feel impressed and will feel like you are watching a huge Hale like telescope being used. For a prop or model looks massive. Perhaps the cutaways of William Powell behind the scope are even on a different set and they did some good trick photography with a model.

And perhaps a clue is the size of the back, but I thought for a while it was perhaps the inside rear cylinder and that was perhaps about 6 foot across and the model looked massive. If you watch the entire scene you’ll be able to see what I mean. I’m not leaving that clip up very long, as it was just put up for basic research and review purposes. I’m going to be taking that clip down soon. Even though it is a clip and I’m going to be reviewing the movie and it might be considered “fair use” I’m going to be taking it down soon.

For pictures of the real Hale telescope, check out the time life archive here.

http://images.google.com/images?q=palomar&q=source%3Alife

These came from a much more impressive blog about Palomar here.

http://palomarskies.blogspot.com

If you’d like to see an interesting shot of an early model of the Hale. Check out this direct link. It shows only one upper cage. Why would they add one for the movie?

The telescope or model in the movie gives you the feeling of a huge space and something as big as 200 inches. It was a really good model in my opinion.

Not bad for special effects in 1943.

Some ice on the floor - a small dome leak

There is currently a small leak (yikes) in the dome. It's probably a small hole to the left of the shutter when looking at the dome from inside. This allows some water or ice and snow to enter. It left some ice on teh floor between the electrical breaker and the telescope tube an old tube that we have to move to the museum.

This of course will need to be fixed. I didn't take a shovel or anything to remove the ice. It was pretty thin and I'll probably have to take something to scrape and brush this out next time.

This is why it's a good idea to have a cover over your telescope even if it's under a dome. A little extra protection is a good thing.

This is also why it's a good idea to leave a cover on the telescope when opening or moving the dome in the winter. Who wants to have a piece of ice fly into your telescope.

The perils of winter viewing.

How do you fix an aluminum dome? I remember seeing some kind of aluminum expoxy a while back when reading about snowmobiles. I wonder if this would work on the dome. There are maintanance experts out there that can address this better than I can at this time.

Another look and a very basic beginner stack test

What a common stacking program for the Macintosh can do. I'm not really sure when looking at this picture if one can really tell what's going on and the advantage to stacking. I basically played with a stacking program, but have to review the images to give more details. I took four images and staked them. I played with the colors a bit using this piece of software called Lynkeos.

There are other settings, but I'm no means an expert or even an intermediate user. I'm mostly experimenting currently. I used a Gaussian blur on this as well, and really don't know at this time if it did much to improve the image. I'd have to play with the program more and perhaps with more images or better images to learn more. Is this a better image than the first one? I'll leave it for the viewer to judge. Perhaps we'd see more ability to change the image with less noise because the images are stacked. But in this case the image consisted of only four photos and Lynkeos appears to only work with JPG source material. I'll have to look more at the software and options to see if it can work with RAW or if there's a big advantage to pre-processing these with some kind of Canon utility perhaps altering the raw images first before stacking them. It seems that most members in the Astro imaging SIG (Special interest group) at the FAAC club, stack first and they adjust contrast and other image attributes. With more time and practice and more photos to play with hopefully I'll improve and have some better images to post in the future.

Orion Nebula - First EOS photo from new telescope