Eclipse Curves

Since my original montage of the December 10th lunar eclipse was pretty angular, and didn't feel at all like a path the moon might actually take, ever, I decided to try a more curved layout.

Martyn on PhotoSIG also proposed that the shot of the red moon in totality should be at the top of the montage, so I made a flipped version.

So, what do you think?  Should I stick with the original angular version?  Or is one of the curved ones better, and if so, which one?

December 10, 2011 Total Lunar Eclipse

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, there was a total eclipse of the moon early this morning (local time), and I had... well, I'd consider it a rather good vantage point.  Above 40% of the atmosphere, above 95% of the water vapor in the atmosphere, and so on.


I promised various people that I would put something together, image-wise... so I have.  Click to see a larger view of it... and then consider that the larger view is only 1/4 as wide and high as the actual original image.  Maybe I'll make a giant print of it or something.

Update a day later: I made a couple versions with the stages of the eclipse arranged in a more curved manner.

Using a Lunar Eclipse to Study Earth

Working around lots of insanely brilliant Ph.D. types, I occasionally run into ideas that wouldn't occur to me.

Tonight, there's a total eclipse of the moon, with the "exciting" parts starting in less than 20 minutes.  Great!  Like many people, I like eclipses.  Like many people, I think, "I'll just use my zoom lens to take pictures of the moon at various points during the eclipse.  That'll be fun."

Insanely brilliant Ph.D. types, on the other hand, submit proposals for telescope time, with titles like "Refined Measurement of Earth's Transmission Spectrum through a Lunar Eclipse." And the proposals actually get accepted, by a telescope with an 8.2-meter mirror and the highest-resolution visible-light spectrograph on any large telescope in the world.

Yes, kids, if you grow up to be an astronomer, you can actually talk people into letting you point huge telescopes at the moon.  Cool, huh?

But the insanely brilliant Ph.D. types aren't taking pictures - they're taking a spectrum of the light being reflected off the moon, at various stages during the eclipse.  The're using the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope, with 11.6 times the light-gathering area of the Hubble Space Telescope, and its High-Dispersion Spectrograph, the highest-resolution visible-light spectrograph on a large telescope anywhere in the world.

And to make it even cooler, they're not taking a spectrum of the moon, or even of the sun (since the moon merely reflects sunlight) - they're taking a transmission spectrum of Earth's atmosphere!  When the moon is totally eclipsed, the only light reaching it has been bent through the Earth's atmosphere.

Comparing a spectrum of that light with the known spectrum of ordinary sunlight, and with a spectrum of light coming straight into Earth's atmosphere from a well-known star, will enable them to figure out which features of the spectrum are specifically due to the light passing through Earth's atmosphere.  And those spectral features will tell them which chemical elements are in Earth's atmosphere, and how abundant they are.  It could even give an estimate of how polluted Earth's atmosphere is, on average.

This technique is applied all the time to distant exoplanets that transit in front of their stars,  to get some idea of what their atmospheres are like.  But applying it to study Earth's atmosphere, using a telescope on earth, is a pretty neat trick, and definitely an interesting approach to a lunar eclipse.

As for me, I'll just keep taking pictures, and post some when it's over!

Work approves of what I do in my free time.

Photo: Suzanne Frayser/Subaru Telescope, NAOJ

I mentioned the annual Volunteer Dinner in a post last month.  For the last several months, I've had the good fortune to have my friend and fellow volunteer Josh as a co-worker, and to get to help train him. 

We've each volunteered over 1,500 hours since 2004, and have both been recognized for "Long-Standing Contributions."  Josh was named "Volunteer of the Year" as a student, and I've been in the running for it the last few years.

Since we volunteer in a field related to our work, and our workplace's press officer attended the dinner and insisted on taking our photo, we kind of knew that sooner or later, work would have something to say about what we do with our personal time.

I'm really looking forward, though, to next year's dinner, because as of late summer, we have two newer co-workers - our old friend Jennie and our new friend Rita - who are also both volunteers.  So next year, there should be at least four people, or two-thirds of our entire department, in the photo!

Happy National Gullibility Week!

And congratulations, South Sudan.

An unintended use for Google+ pages?

Today, Google+ rolled out its new Pages feature. On the surface, Google+ pages are pretty similar to Facebook pages - a way to create a presence for a business, movie, cause, or whatever.  They're not exactly the same, though.

On Facebook, users can like a page.  A page can post on its own wall, as can users if the page allows it.  A page can add other pages to its favorites, and page administrators can easily switch between doing things as themselves and doing things as any of the pages they administer.  Google+ pages pretty much match all these features.

On Google+, though, pages share more capabilities of normal accounts.  They have circles, and can post things for members of specific circles. If a user or page circles a page, the page can reciprocate, and can then comment on posts shared with it.  In fact, the only obvious thing I've found that a page can't do is circle an individual user who hasn't circled it first.

So what's this mean?

Well, let's say you want to follow everyone in the excellent news-outlets circle created by "Breaking News" on Google+.  But you don't want 90% of your stream to be posts from news outlets - you want them to be there for you to look at when you feel like it, just like news usually is.

Easy: Create a page, and circle them all from that page.  You can even comment on their stories, same as always.

You can do the same if a few people posting about a given topic dominate your stream.  Or, you can create multiple pages for people from different aspects of your life to circle (and then circle them back) - kind of like normal circles, but providing stronger segregation and keeping your personal stream cleaner.

Of course, this doesn't appear to be how Google expects us to use pages.  I'm just saying that it's an unintended effect of the feature, which some may find useful.  Whether they'll let us do so on an ongoing basis remains to be seen, but I hope they will.

BRAINS!

Four months ago, we bought a used car from a friend, and started discussing the idea of getting personalized license plates.  Of course, lots of good ones were already taken, like "ATOMIC," "ALIENS" and "GEEKS" - which belongs to friends of mine. Others, like "SNIPER" (which one of us really wanted) were deemed "offensive" by the government.

Eventually, we narrowed things down to a choice between "BRAINS" and, if I recall, "ERASED."

Car 54, what is the license plate of the vehicle you've stopped?
Uh... ERASED.
No, really, what is it?

Anyway, "BRAINS" won out, and about three months ago, I put in the application for it, along with the fee for personalized plates.  Yesterday, the letter came saying the plates were ready to be picked up, and today, in a quick 13-stop process due to one of the rear mounting screw mechanisms being entirely dysfunctional (Motor Vehicle Registration twice, mechanic twice, Ace Hardware three times, home once, Walmart once, NAPA once, O'Reilly Auto Parts once) that wound up only taking all morning, I got them and installed them.

About 15 seconds after I finally got the rear plate mounted the way I wanted, a lady across the parking lot at Ace asked, "What does that mean?  Is it like a Ph.D or something?"

I told her it could be zombies, or it could be smart people.  She seemed content with that answer, so I didn't have to tell her the truth about what it really means:

Smart Zombies.

Run!