Remembering Earth-that-was
Callao, Lima is a very busy port, and since our ship didn’t move for two days, we had plenty of time to watch it. When we arrived, there were several hundred new cars parked, fresh off the boat; the next day, they were gone. My attention was drawn to these:
Ports are full of exotic machinery…
We arrived at the Lima international airport, and were whisked to our hotel, the JW Mariott, to recover from our 24-hour ordeal flying from SFO. The next morning we transferred to the ship where we would live for the next 21 days, cruising the Chilean fjords, then around Cape Horn.
The plan was to depart that evening, but it didn’t work out — shortly after our arrival at the airport, a serious accident happened on the single runway and blocked all air traffic for a day. There were no flights for disembarking passengers to fly home, and the passengers on arriving flights couldn’t land and thus couldn’t join the ship.
Information about the accident has been hard to find. There was a plane taking off, and a firetruck, possibly on a training mission, collided with the tail section. Two firefighters were killed, but everyone on the plane survived. However, the plane couldn’t fly, and the crash would have to be investigated. The wreckage blocked the runway for more than a day. Flights were diverted or canceled, and temporary lodging had to be found for stranded passengers from literally around the world. Several hundred people were affected.
The upshot was that the ship delayed its departure for two days while the cruise company scrambled to make new arrangements for their customers. We were lucky to get on the ship at our scheduled time.
The activitypub plugin, according to the writeup at
makes your wordpress blog into a Fediverse Server. Indeed, a mastodon search found “@mosqueeto@mosqueeto.net”. I’ll see if this post shows up in my timeline…
I wouldn’t say Mendocino is spectacular, but it is bewitchingly pleasant…
The days are clear, but the mist rolls in about midnight, so it’s been difficult to take any pictures. Here are a few from the last month or so…
NGC7538 is sometimes called “The Brain” or “The Northern Lagoon”. It’s the bright knot at the top center. M52 is the open cluster bottom left of center.
Someday, maybe, I’ll move to a mountain top, with clear dark skies. For now, I live in haze and city lights.
This image is from 18 5-minute exposures. With luck, I’ll get some more tonight and sharpen it up a bit.
Edit: As promised, here’s the same image with additional exposures:
The single exposures aren’t bad on their own. However, the noise in the image is terrible:
(The electronics in the image sensor caused the odd artifact along the upper right edge.)
For your convenience, here are a couple of 100% crops of the single vs. combined images.
Single exposure:
Note the many tiny bright blue dots. These are defects in the image; pixels that fired inappropriately. There are many other fine grain flaws, but the blue dots stand out.
…with 65 sub-exposures:
The blue dots are gone.
When I started this hobby I thought the purpose of multiple exposures was to make dim objects brighter. But it isn’t — the goal, the magic sauce, is noise reduction. With many exposures, the errors cancel out, and a clearer view of the underlying reality emerges. We hope.
In the single exposure above, the inaccuracies of the individual sensor elements give a gritty character, as if the image was a sand painting made with somewhat impure sand. The image that results from combining the 65 sub-exposures has much less of that gritty appearance.
M10 is left of center; K2 is a little lower and on the right side. This picture was taken 14 Jul 2022, just about the comet’s nearest approach to Earth.
I took the picture under desperate circumstances; high fog was crashing my party, and I only had about a half hour to collect these photons. Even worse, the telescope was having trouble pointing (something I will need to troubleshoot when I’m not under time pressure).
It’s a standard weather pattern for this time of year — beautifully clear during the day, with high fog / low clouds developing as the night cools down. It has been like this for a couple of weeks.
NGC7635, the “Bubble Nebula”, is towards the lower left, and M2 is the open cluster along the upper right side.
The Hubble has, as usual, produced a lovely rendition of the Bubble — I guess we could call it the “Hubble Bubble“.
On a different note, the New Space Telescope has dropped its first images, and they are spectacular, as expected. Ditch astrophotographers such as myself tremble in awe. Several side-by-side comparisons of HST and NST images show wonderful improvements in clarity and detail. Stephan’s Quintet has special significance to me because it is the most difficult object I ever saw visually, back many years ago when my eyes were better and I had a 10″ Dobsonian. It was only discernable with averted vision, but definitely there.
However, the Hubble images are still as exquisite as they ever were. The universe has wonders at every scale — it is a fractal of wonder. The Hubble reveals wonders at its scale. The New Space Telescope reveals wonders at a different scale. And My Little Telescope (MLT) reveals wonders at its scale.
Another heroic image 🙂 — 18 hours with a small telescope and poor conditions. Post-processing is minimal — just some brightness and contrast adjustments in gimp to minimize the distracting sky glow.
Life these days is extremely depressing.
Morbius: ‘My poor Krell. After a million years of shining sanity, they could hardly have understood what power was destroying them.’