For more topics, scroll down,
press Ctrl-F to search the page,
or check previous months.
For the latest edition of this page at any time,
use this link: www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog
2016 November 29-30
Pleiades at even greater length
The rest of November is going to be busy, so I'm uploading this
entry early (November 27). See you in December!
Here's an even longer (total) exposure of the Pleiades, showing the dust
clouds and their strange streaks and stripes.
Stack of 50, yes, 50 1-minute exposures, AT65EDQ telescope, Nikon D5300,
taken in my back yard on a rather clear night.
The Orion Nebula, same technique as above, but only 32 exposures stacked, and
the picture was processed with the HDR Multiscale Transform in PixInsight to bring
out detail. The process is: do the nonlinear stretching, but do it half-heartedly
so that little or none of the picture reaches maximum white;
run HDR Multiscale Transform; and then do a little more nonlinear stretching to
boost contrast.
You've seen this galaxy before, but not quite this well.
This is M33, in the constellation Triangulum.
I showed you another photograph of it earlier this month.
This one, however, was taken at Deerlick.
Stack of four 5-minute exposures, Canon 300-mm f/4 lens at f/5,
Canon 60Da.
And that concludes the series of pictures I took at Deerlick on October 28 and 29.
There was a hiatus in my early activities as an amateur astronomer, and as a result,
a striking phenomenon snuck up on me.
I was an avid amateur astronomer from 1968 to 1973 and again starting in 1979.
For a while during my college years, though, I didn't follow astronomy.
As a result, when I was standing in Memorial Court at Clare College, Cambridge,
on the evening of June 4, 1978, I was at first not able to tell my fellow students
which two planets were so close together in the sky.
It was Mars and Saturn, and they were less than a tenth of a degree apart.
Here is the star cluster M52 in Cassiopeia and its surroundings in a rich field
of the Milky Way, including some nebulae, which show up red.
Stack of five 5-minute exposures, Canon 60Da, Canon 300-mm lens at f/5,
AVX mount with autoguider, taken at Deerlick on October 29.
Before November is over, let me get back to showing you last month's
astrophotos! This is part of the Veil Nebula or Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant.
Stack of ten 5-minute exposures with Canon 300-m f/4 lens, AVX mount,
and Canon 60Da, at Deerlick on October 28.
This is a nebula that photographs in different colors with different cameras because
it emits so much blue hydrogen-beta light as well as red hydrogen-alpha.
This camera (the Canon 60Da) has lots of response to red. Other DSLRs ender
the same nebula blue.
In 1973 I turned down an invitation to meet him.
He was making a state visit to India and staying in the Ashoka Hotel.
I was in the same hotel with a student group.
I got in an elevator that already contained 2 well-dressed men who
were speaking Spanish and standing close to the control panel.
As they looked politely toward me, I said, "Número siete, por favor" (my floor number).
They were startled to hear their native language and immediately introduced themselves
to me in English. They were part of Castro's entourage and invited me to come meet him.
I turned down the invitation because I was on a National Science Foundation-sponsored
trip and figured I ought not to do anything that
might lead to publicity without checking with our leaders.
I could just imagine my picture appearing in Granma (or even Pravda)
and spoiling my chances of getting a security clearance forever.
This entry is mainly for my Christian readers, but it may interest
some nonbelievers who are going to visit a church during the holidays,
or who just want to know what we think about such things.
Our pastor, David Mills, recently shared
this essay by Thom Rainer, which obviously
addresses only one part of a complex picture. Here are my thoughts on the whole picture.
I'm glad one of the rituals of the 1960s is dying out.
When I was a child, "dressing up for church" was a serious
stumblingblock for me. The jacket and tie were uncomfortable. If I
could have dressed for Sunday School the way I did for regular school, I
would have been a lot more willing to go. My Catholic friends opened my
eyes to the fact that one can go to church without "dressing up." They
have so many other rituals that they didn't feel a need to make a ritual
out of getting dressed.
The church that I attend conveys a message that diverse kinds of attire
are acceptable. The pastor wears a suit; the musicians don't.
I didn't have comfortable suits until,
as an adult, I was willing and able to spend enough a lot of money on
them. But I don't wear them to church because I think they're a bit
fancy for that. Also, and more importantly, I choose not to
wear a tie because I don't want less well-dressed people to feel left
out or unwelcome.
I think the strong emphasis on "dressing up for church" in previous decades
goes back to the days when most Americans were farmers.
For a farmer, Sunday morning is welcome relief from having to wear
work clothes — at least until something needs tending or feeding
later in the day! But modern city dwellers are dressed for reasonably
dignified indoor activities every day. They don't see the immediate need to
wear something different to church.
What about the notion that you should wear your best to honor God?
Well, that's a good idea as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far.
1 Samuel 16:7
makes it very clear that your outward appearance cannot impress God.
In 1 Timothy 2:9,
St. Paul warns people to dress modestly and simply. And so on.
"Wear your best for God" rose to the level of a folk doctrine (or heresy)
fifty years ago, and I think it impeded the church's mission.
(It almost got rid of me!)
Obviously one must strike a balance.
We do want to show our respect, but that's not the same as showing off.
Don't forget that suits, ties, and nice dresses are secular status
symbols or even ways to show off wealth.
(Among people who only wore them to church, this point often became blurred!)
Then there are women who have had it ingrained in them that "every woman
should always look her best" as if that were a biblical commandment.
Much as I like beautiful women (1 wife, 2 daughters, 2 granddaughters so
far), I don't want them to think God made them primarily for eye candy.
That's a serious step down from what God meant them to be.
If asked, I would say that churchgoers should avoid clothes that are
positively undignified (e.g., shirts with derogatory writing on them)
and women should not dress provocatively (this includes brides at their
own weddings!) but apart from that, just dress for an orderly indoor
activity. And I would say to any fellow Christian that if you think
your clothes will impress someone, or that you will look better than
someone else, it's time to tone it down.
And I would urge extreme tolerance for people who dress differently.
You never know what might prevent them from dressing more elaborately
(maybe they're traveling, or poor). And at the other end of the scale,
I wouldn't take away my friend's 3-piece suit — it's his tradition
— it's what he's used to — just as much as my tweed jacket is for me.
Addendum: Clearly, two things have to be balanced,
(1) looking respectful, and (2) avoiding vanity and exclusiveness.
In my childhood, (1) had displaced (2).
In some churches, (2) has probably displaced (1).
To my friends who wish everyone dressed better for church, I recommend
leading by example, but never looking down on or rebuking someone who
does not dress as well for church as you do.
If you're going to visit an unfamiliar church, click
here for a helpful FAQ.
We're having a rather low-key holiday season this year because Melody is suffering
from mechanical failure of an implanted hip joint, caused by infection, and can barely
walk with a walker. But we do have things to be thankful for this year.
Most importantly, Sharon is getting relief
from the nerve injury that has plagued
her for five years. And we have a schedule for getting Melody better; after two
operations, she should be walking by the end of March. Business is booming,
and we have four thriving grandchildren!
What we don't have is a lull in activity, the way we used to when I was in academia.
If anything, I have as much work to do this month and next as I've ever had.
I don't mind; that's what I went into business for.
I haven't disappeared — but haven't written much, either.
I have lots of consulting work in hand; I'm even making a potential client wait;
and I'm scrambling to make up time lost while I was skirmishing with
toothaches a week ago. My tooth came through the root canal procedure just fine
and will be crowned next month. (A root canal doesn't hurt. What hurts is
needing one and not having it!)
Melody has 2 hip operations coming up and is presently scheduled to be in the
hospital over Christmas, though the dates may be changed. Your prayers are
appreciated. What we are thankful for is that now we know what the problem is,
and we have a schedule for correcting it.
Here you see the Pleiades star cluster, with plenty of the reflection nebulosity
(dust) that surrounds some of the stars and is pulled into a streaky pattern by
the stars' magnetic fields.
I wasn't expecting much from a picture taken through hazy skies, with the moon rising.
This was basically an autoguider test, but I did come out with a presentable picture.
Stack of 10 2-minute exposures, AT65EDQ telescope, Nikon D5300.
Tennessee, South Carolina, and the northernmost part of Georgia are full of uncontrolled
wildfires thanks to an extreme drought. That's why I haven't photographed any celestial
objects fainter than the moon for a while. There's a strong smell of smoke in the air, and
we are advised to limit our time outdoors. In fact, a few times, a whiff of the smoke has
gotten into a building unexpectedly, and I've found myself looking for something on fire.
If you don't know how bad it smells, the smoke does add to the picturesqueness of autumn,
complementing the leaf colors and the elegant architecture of the UGA campus. Here's an
example:
There is not normally any visible haze in front of buildings viewed from across
the North Campus quad.
My tooth is behaving itself thanks to antibiotics and rest, and my root canal procedure
is tomorrow morning (Nov. 17), followed by a crowning (coronation?) a couple of weeks later.
And scrambling to catch back up with work!
I remembered that the N-1 standard deviation (that is, the first formula) was traditionally
used for the standard deviation of a sample that estimates that of a larger population.
But what's going on, exactly?
There are many longwinded explanations in books, but the key idea is that if you
use the second formula, and you are indeed analyzing a sample of the population,
your estimate of its standard deviation will be too low...
...because you're using the mean of your sample rather than the mean of
the whole population. And the mean of your sample is necessarily closer
to the values in your sample than the population mean would be (unless by some chance
it happens to be the same).
The astronomer F. W. Bessel came up with the idea of using N-1.
There are proofs that this makes the estimate of the variance unbiased
(that is, although it is not a perfect estimate, it is no more likely to
be too low than too high). The standard deviation is the square root of the
variance, and Bessel's correction does not result in an unbiased estimator
of the population standard deviation because the square root is nonlinear,
but it helps.
Doug Downing and I are both rather mystified that R insists on using the N-1
standard deviation exclusively, with no built-in function to do it the other way.
That's just wrong when you're summarizing an entire population.
Particularly in signal processing, the N standard deviation (the RMS value of
the signal) is often needed. We're puzzled.
I remarked a while back that, in international relations and in medicine,
every crisis has its own timescale.
In the case of my toothache, I went to the dentist one day too early,
with diffuse soreness all over my gums, and
all he could diagnose was a diffuse irritation
of the gums. The next day, when I went back,
the gum pain had all gathered in the vicinity of one
tooth that was known to have problems. What's more, that tooth had lost its
long-standing sensitivity to heat and cold, and after going through a day
or two of seeming good health, acquired a new kind of sensitivity to pressure,
almost as if it had been hit hard and almost knocked out and was then
settling in again.
So it's "irreverisible pulpitis."
The infection has killed the nerve in the tooth and started to come out through its root.
I'm getting a root canal on Thursday morning,
and the tooth will get a crown a few weeks later.
In the meantime, it's responding to an antibiotic.
I'm taking a day off work to gather my strength — I have germs to kill!
The closest lunar perigee of my lifetime is noteworthy, and it
occurred at 6:24 a.m. EST on the 14th, as measured from the center of the
earth. My own closest pass to the moon, however, happened around midnight
on the evening of the 13th, because at midnight, you're on the side of
the earth that is turned toward the moon.
At that time I was closer to the moon than I have ever been before.
I went outside and looked up. The moon, high overhead,
did look a bit bigger than usual. The sky was gray with haze and smoke
from wildfires in the mountains, so the stars were almost not visible,
although I could make out Orion. The bright moon dominated everything.
Earlier, around 9 p.m., I took pictures with my trusty old Celestron 5.
One of them completes an illustration I had been planning for a while:
The other is just a picture of the nearly full moon, with the color slightly
enhanced:
Each (including both halves of the first one) is a stack of six still images
taken with a Canon 60Da. They were cropped and binned 2×2 with PIPP,
then stacked with AutoStakkert 2, then sharpened and postprocessed with Photoshop.
It's not just what media you read, it's how you use your mind.
"You can't trust the media" was a watchword during this election season.
Unfortunately, it left a lot of people with the confused impression that the
news media are just fiction — that they are not reporting reality at all.
Not true. There are good ways to get accurate information. I'm going to outline
a few of them. What I say is very basic, but even so, the word needs to be spread.
(1) Make up your mind that accuracy is what you want. That is crucial.
If you aren't cultivating a habit of truthfulness in your own mind, you'll never
have a good grip on the truth.
If what you really want is a thrill of anger, or a set of illusions
that support your beliefs, then that's all you will get.
The truth it out there — and it is often strangely dull.
It doesn't cater to your emotions.
"I only read conservative news sites" or "I only read liberal news sites" —
those are the slogans of people whose first priority is opinion, not truth.
(2) Go for information, not entertainment.
Let's face it, the Fox and CNN web sites are more entertainment and commentary
than news these days.
I get a good bit of my news from Reuters,
which is somewhat duller, and from
the BBC.
Neither of those is perfect, but they do hold themselves to a high standard.
(And don't forget how much good information you can get straight from the
horse's mouth. If you want to know what the Trump campaign is saying about
something, how about going right to their own web site, the way journalists do?)
(3) Distinguish hard facts from interpretation and speculation.
For example:
"Trump says he wants to repeal Dodd-Frank" — That's a hard fact.
Either Trump said this, or he didn't, and if he didn't, nobody would be
reporting that he did.
"Trump supports big banks" — That is interpretation.
Trump is doing some things that someone interprets as support for
big banks.
The news story should say what he's doing, but it's up to you to decide
whether the interpretation is correct.
"Trump may cause another financial crisis" — That is speculation.
It's just someone's opinion. If it's a well-informed opinion, it might be
worth listening to, but it's not news. It is not a hard fact or set
of hard facts.
Hard facts are actual, confirmable events that anyone with accurate information
should agree on. They should be able to be confirmed by more than one source.
(4) See through the interpretations and extract the hard facts.
That's my secret weapon. Even when reading a heavily interpreted story,
I look through it to see what the hard facts are.
For example, the Washington Post was obviously anti-Trump, but they weren't
reporting pure fiction. They were reporting real events and putting their
interpretation on them. With this in mind, it's not hard to extract the
real events and discard or question the interpretations.
Another good tactic is to ask, What is the other side of this story?
For example, Fox reporter Todd Starnes often reports one side of
scandalous events and situations.
What is he not telling us?
If a news source doesn't tell you both sides of a story, ask yourself
what the other side might be and seek information from other sources.
That doesn't mean both sides are equally good; the situation may still
be scandalous; but you shouldn't be ignorant of the other side.
(4) Use multiple sources.
If something really happens and is important, multiple sources will confirm it.
If you see something on only one web site, be skeptical.
Somebody may be mistaken.
(5) Beware of fakers.
Remember that any crank can create a web site with "news" in its name and
take (or steal) a picture of a well-dressed announcer under a "Breaking News" banner.
Some of them steal pictures from real TV networks and tell you the picture shows
something it doesn't.
(6) Above all, strive to be a fair-minded person, not eager to believe evil.C. S. Lewis
asks us to imagine what we would do if we heard of something scandalous,
and then, later on, got better information indicating that the scandal was not as bad
as it first appeared.
A good person should be relieved that something is not as bad as it could have been.
But many people would be disappointed instead, because they wanted a juicy story.
Lewis says to beware of such a mindset — wanting to believe things are worse
than they really are — because it leads to a black state of mind in which you
want to believe that everything is bad.
And I think we have all encountered people in that black state of mind.
You've heard there's a "Supermoon" Sunday night (Nov. 13). Here's what's going on.
The moon's distance from earth varies because the orbit of the moon around
the earth is not a perfect circle.
It doesn't need to be; Newton's theory of gravity says that orbits are
normally elliptical.
The apparent size of the moon varies this much:
(These pictures were taken with the same telescope and camera.)
The moon reaches perigee (minimum distance) and apogee (maximum distance)
every month. These do not coincide in any regular way with the phases of the moon.
Because the phases of the moon depend on the direction of the sun, and perigee and apogee don't,
you can have perigee or apogee at full moon, new moon, or any phase in between.
But on top of all that, the shape of the ellipse varies because of the sun's gravitational pull.
That means the minimum distance is smaller at some times than others.
That brings us to Monday,
November 14, at 11:24 UTC, which is 6:24 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
That will be the closest perigee since 1948, measured from the center of the earth.
(The moon is closest to the part of the earth where it is high overhead.)
The moon will be nearly that close for about a day either side of that time.
It happens that the exact moment of full moon is about two and a half hours after that.
Perigee and full moon need not coincide, but this time they do.
That's what they call a supermoon — a perigee full moon.
Of course, we can only see the supermoon when the moon is in the sky, and the full moon is
in the sky all night and none of the day, so in America we will see it on Sunday night.
Should you go out and see it? Well, it's a perfectly normal full moon except that its
apparent size is a few percent bigger than average.
Sky and Telescope suggests
making a handheld gadget that you can hold at arm's length to measure the
apparent size of the moon, then trying it again some time when the moon is not
at perigee. No telescope is needed.
Don't confuse the supermoon with the moon illusion, a familiar optical illusion that makes
the moon look bigger when it is seen against trees or distant buildings than when it is high in the sky.
By taking pictures of it in both situations, you can show that the moon illusion is an illusion.
On the pictures, the moon will be (very slightly) bigger when high overhead.
To photograph the full moon, use a telephoto lens (or zoom out as far as you can) and
put the camera on a tripod and use delayed shutter release to minimize vibration.
With a DSLR, focus manually using Live View; autofocus isn't precise enough.
If the camera isn't a DSLR, set the focus to infinity (the mountain symbol).
Then, when you have the picture, try Unsharp Mask in Photoshop to bring out detail.
And go back and photograph the full moon again in May or June, when it's near apogee and will look
significantly smaller.
The outcome of an election is not just a winner; it is a distribution of votes,
indicating how severely the people are split and what they are split between.
With that in mind, what's best for the country, in any particular election, is
surely a distribution of votes, not a unanimous winner.
We do not normally want people to be elected unanimously.
It would lead to overconfidence and poor government.
It follows that people who vote differently can all be doing what's best
for the country. I seem to recall a time when this was common sense.
Let all the voices speak, and listen to as many of them as possible.
For my fellow Christians, now, replace "what's best for the country" with
"the will of God." I do not think God normally "anoints" one candidate and
wants that person elected unanimously. And if the will of God is a distribution
of votes, it follows that people who are perfectly doing the will of God need not
all vote alike.
Let's remember this as we try to recover from this traumatic election.
It is appropriate to photograph NGC 7331 from Deerlick because of a complex
chain of naming. A while back, Tom Lorenzin
observed NGC 7331 and the galaxies near it (close, much smaller, and to the left of it in the picture)
from Deer Lick Gap, North Carolina, and named it the Deer Lick Group.
(In a quick online search, I can't find exact records of this.)
Then a group of my fellow Georgians dubbed themselves the Deer Lick Group
and founded the Deerlick Astronomy Village
(without a space between Deer and Lick).
And that's where I took the picture.
At the lower right is another cluster of galaxies, Stephan's Quintet.
Stack of five 5-minute exposures, Canon 300-mm lens at f/5, Canon 60Da, AVX mount and
autoguider.
Both presidential campaigns were very negative, designed to frighten people about
the dire consequences of electing the other candidate.
They succeeded. Everyone is frightened and angry.
A second confounding factor is that a great many voters felt that both candidates
were bad, but one was not quite as bad as the other.
To such a person, winning is almost as frustrating as losing.
Some don't understand their own
frustration and are looking for another target for it.
That is also why the polls didn't work. "Lesser of two evils" is a kind of political
position that polls aren't designed to pick up. Many people who felt they were
voting for the lesser of two evils probably did not reveal their preference to
pollsters at all.
As the transition to the new presidency unfolds,
my advice to my fellow citizens is to pay attention to real events,
not speculations about what might happen, and not to give undue weight
to rare isolated incidents.
This irregular galaxy is relatively nearby and was the first galaxy
whose distance Edwin
Hubble estimated using variable stars. In a sense, it was the first galaxy to be discovered —
the first "stellar system" that was shown to be so far away as to be unconnected to our own.
Stack of nine 5-minute exposures, Canon 300-mm lens at f/4, Canon 60Da, AVX mount.
Along the top of the galaxy, you can see a couple of its own nebulae (H II regions),
which look almost like bluish stars. They
show up bluish because they are strong in hydrogen-beta light.
This object is much closer. It is the Helix Nebula, similar to the Ring Nebula
but much closer (700 light-years). It consists of gas blown off by its central star,
and my understanding is that it's not really a helix, just a ring with one side somewhat
bashed in by interstellar gas.
Stack of four 5-minute exposures, Canon 300-mm lens at f/4, Canon 60Da, AVX mount.
Today is the 41st anniversary of the day Melody and I met at a University of
Georgia recruiting event. I've told the story in more detail elsewhere.
Unlike most of the prospective students, she arrived unaccompanied by parents,
siblings, or other entourage. I saw my duty to the University and did it.
I recruited her, shall we say, successfully.
We didn't start dating until May of 1976. In retrospect, I don't know of a good
reason for the delay, except that God makes things work with His timing.
We were together as undergraduates at UGA in 1976-77, and then we had a
long-distance relationship for five years while I was in graduate school.
We survived almost six months of not seeing each other during my last two terms
at Cambridge, from January to June 1978, and by then we were sure that
nothing could separate us.
What I want to add to the story today is something we've been reflecting on.
My main thought in our early days was not "What a nice girlfriend I have," but
rather, "Now there are two of us!" I didn't think of her as an acquired girlfriend
but rather as my best friend or even second self.
(Amicus est alter ego, says the Latin proverb.)
What followed was not courtship so much as the gradual merging of two lives.
For some people, marriage consists of finding an attractive person, marrying them,
and then trying to get to know them. Not us!
Part of the background is that by late 1975, both of us had become aware that
it might be all too easy to acquire an unsuitable girlfriend/boyfriend, an
admirer who is not actually a good long-term companion, even though they think
they are. Melody was, for me, totally different from all the other girls in the world.
And she has assured me that part of my function in 1976-77, even though I didn't
know it, was to scare off other admirers!
[Note added 2020:] Part of the reason for the slow courtship was that
when we met, we were young — 17 and 18 years old respectively — and each
of us didn't want to deprive the other entirely of the experience of being young
and single. We didn't want to demand a lifelong commitment at age 18, and we didn't want to be
equated with the engaged couples that were forming all around us among our slightly
older college peers. That is why, even though we were inseparable companions, we
were shy about letting people call us a "couple" for the first year or two.
We also feel, in retrospect, that during the initial 6-month delay
between when we met and when we started seeing each other,
we were being prepared for each other in subtle ways.
So everything happened as it should have.
Today Melody has found out she is going to have to have at least one and possibly two
more hip operations, to correct a failure of the hip implant that was put in two
years ago. Your prayers are appreciated.
Another point of contact with the 1976-77 school year occurred yesterday.
In 1977, UGA had two co-valedictorians. I was one; the other went on to
become the eminent geneticist Cynthia Kenyon.
Yesterday she was back, to give the Charter Lecture, and I went to the University Chapel to listen.
The key point of the lecture is that aging is a biochemical process. We know this because there
are genes whose expression or non-expression speed it up or slow it down.
(We see one of these in dogs; big dogs have a shorter lifespan than small dogs.)
Most intriguingly, sperm and egg cells have to be factory-fresh, so to speak, regardless
of the age of the animal producing them, so they won't produce a prematurely aged baby,
and there is a biochemical process for removing aging-related damage just before fertilization.
With all of this emerging biochemistry, it's quite possible that we will soon have medications
that extend our lifespan (and our span of good health) by acting on the aging process directly.
The research is done mostly on worms with a 2-week lifespan. Obviously, if you use any animal
that lasts much longer than that, it takes too long to do the experiment. In fact, one reason
so little is known about human aging is that it takes 70 years to see the effects of any change!
Although Cynthia and I were exact contemporaries, we did not know each other in college, so our
prior acquaintance was confined to the graduation ceremony. I'm pleased to say she recognized me,
with some difficulty, despite having no indication that I'd be coming. Apart from that, there
didn't seem to be any mutual acquaintances in the audience, except for one,
John Barrow, the former Congressman.
Her valedictory speech in 1977 was about the divide between North Campus (humanities) and South Campus (sciences).
Talking with her and recalling that speech, I explained that I had been a student on North Campus
and came back as faculty on South Campus; in fact, a good description of my early academic career
might be scientist in humanist's clothing (defining "humanist" as a scholar in the humanities,
not a person who accepts Humanism as a philosophy).
Like me, she has retired from academia in order to work in industry. It seems to be the thing to do.
Last month I noticed, a photograph taken from Athens, that the star 44 Cygni is surrounded
by a reflection nebula. On October 28 I got to Deerlick with my Celestron AVX mount,
Canon 300-mm lens, Canon 60Da camera, and, most importantly, the STV autoguider and miniature
guidescope, enabling me to take long exposures. Here's the region of 44 Cygni, a stack of
five 5-minute exposures:
You can see that 44 Cygni is surrounded by white reflection nebulosity. The reflection nebula is known as
van
den Bergh 133 (vdB 133).
To the upper right you see the small, bright red emission nebula Sharpless 2-106 (Sh 2-106).
Neither one was observed with telescopes in the 19th Century, so they don't have NGC numbers.
If you click on the link, you will see that van den Bergh catalogued reflection nebulae around
"BD and CD stars." By that he meant stars listed in the Bonner Durchmusterung
and Cordoba Durchmusterung, star catalogues of the time. When he was doing his
research, the SAO Star Catalog (1966) was not yet available.
By the way, I learned that Simbad was not incorrect to equate VDB 133 with 44 CYG (that's how they write them).
By policy, in Simbad, if a reflection nebula has one star in it, the nebula and the star are treated as
the same object.
OK, here's the third Notebook entry today. I have a lot of pictures to
catch up on processing and sharing!
Taken under the dark skies of Deerlick on October 28, here's a picture of the
star cloud right at the "spout of the teapot" in Sagittarius.
The star near the bottom edge, right of center, is Nash (Gamma-1 Sagittarii).
In front of the star cloud you can see two prominent small dark nebulae
(dust clouds). Stack of six 1-minute exposures, Canon 300-mm f/4 lens,
Canon 60Da, Celestron AVX mount.
Now for a detail. Near the center of the picture is an 8th-magnitude nova,
indicated by the arrow below. This is the star tentatively designated
TCP J18102829-2729590.
This designation suggests that it has not been confirmed to be a normal nova,
or else its designation would at least start with PNV, becoming eventually
something like Nova Sagittarii 2016 No. 3 (or 4, or however many we're up to).
It used to be thought that novae were exploding stars. The current view is
that novae are pairs of stars orbiting each other so close together that the
smaller star is occasionally able to "refuel" itself, grabbing matter from
the larger star and greatly increasing in brightness.
This is indeed an explosion, and it can even drive off an appreciable amount
of gas into space, but it doesn't destroy the pair of stars, and they can do the
same thing again a few years or centuries later;
RS Ophiuchi has been seen flaring up 6 times.
Stars that blow themselves to bits are supernovae, a much rarer phenomenon.
Continuing to present my recent astrophotos least-spectacular-first,
and moving backward through time like Merlin, let me show you the two
most recent. I was testing
PHD2 Guiding software
with my DMK21AU04 camera and a tiny homemade guidescope.
Because of the prolonged test, I ended up making ten, count 'em, ten
5-minute exposures of the star cluster M34 with my 6.5-cm f/6.5 refractor,
Nikon D5300, and CGEM mount. All of them were good enough to stack, so here
they are. M34 doesn't need 50 minutes of exposure, especially in Athens' bright
artificially lit skies, but here's the result.
Here, filling the upper left part of the picture, is the star cluster NGC 752
in the constellation Andromeda. This is the cluster that fools people when
they're trying to sight M33 with the unaided eye. Stack of 5 5-minute exposures, same
equipment as above.
But before you look at it, let me call your attention to something.
I've rendered the picture rather light for a reason.
The starry background below and to the right of NGC 752 isn't just stars.
Quite a few galaxies are visible. I leave it to you to figure out how many;
the most prominent ones are near the bottom of the picture.
These are roughly 15th- or 16th-magnitude galaxies, all photographed
with less than three inches aperture, in town.
And every one of them is millions of light-years away and is
bigger than the entire sky as you see it with
the unaided eye.
This skeleton of a North American ground sloth has adorned the lobby of the
Science Library for decades. It was one of Cathy and Sharon's favorite things
when they were little. We even have a tape recording of Melody telling the story
of the ground sloth so that Cathy and Sharon could hear it any time they wanted.
On November 4, the ground sloth was moved out to the Classic Center.
Here you see its original enclosure partly dismantled, the information placard,
and the sloth on wheels being moved out.
Time out from astronomy in order to summarize some recent Facebook conversations.
I'm not going to tell you how to vote, but I do want to point out three ways
people are making bad political decisions.
First, a lot of people's underlying attitude seems to be,
"Life was easier when I didn't know there were people different from myself.
I want to go back."
This is accompanied by childhood memories (meaning a child's level of knowledge)
of an idyllic little town where everybody is just alike.
No foreign languages, no other ethnic groups, no international crises.
Once you think about it, expelling everybody different from yourself is not a praiseworthy goal.
It's just selfishness, extended to one's own small group.
Besides, if you think America was untroubled and idyllic when you were 8 years old, I invite
you to go read a newspaper from that time (whatever time it was).
A second mistake is classifying everything as "liberal" or "conservative" rather than true
or false, good or bad, fair or unfair.
The way this game is played, you label yourself "liberal" or "conservative," then you
label everything else in the world with those same labels, and you support whatever
has the same label as yourself.
This leads to nonsense like "I only read conservative news sources" or even
"you can't trust Google, it's 'liberal.'"
The political controversies of 75 years ago, leading to today's labels, do not necessarily
contain the solutions to tomorrow's problems.
Anyhow, what such a person is looking for is a license to ignore facts, a license to never
have to do any thinking.
The third mistake I want to point out is
ignoring everything that's too complicated or requires information, simply pretending it's not there,
and in general, pretending that the world is simpler than it is.
"ISIS and Islam aren't the same thing? That's too complicated for me. I'll just lump
all those A-rabs together and fight 'em all."
That's the mindset of a person who can't even distinguish
Muslims from Syrian Christians. The real world is too complicated, so we'll just
pretend that simple solutions are right.
I think it was H. L. Mencken who said that for every complicated problem, there is
a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong.
I also once saw a diplomat quoted as saying that the situation is unclear, and attempts
to impose clarity on the situation distort the facts.
Too many people don't mind badly distorting the facts as long as it makes the
world seem simpler.
Even worse, I'm increasingly convinced that something terrible has happened to a lot
of people's approach to truth and reality — they now think everything is fiction
and you can just believe whatever you feel like.
A philosophically minded friend of mine once suggested that such people should step out
in front of a bus while trying hard to believe it's not there.
That's a bit too gruesome for me, but I see the point.
What happened? Maybe the transformation of news media from reporters of facts to
suppliers of emotional entertainment, especially political anger.
This has been going on for thirty years. Too many people now go to the news for
thrills of anger, not for information and discernment.
Here's why I won't tell you who to vote for.
We have two unusually bad major candidates this year, and all I can say is,
choose your poison.
Bad things are going to happen no matter which one wins, and I want you to be sure,
in your own mind, that following your own conscience and the best information you
could get, you chose the one that you sincerely thought was less risky.
Or, if you considered them indistinguishably bad, you deliberately chose to vote
for a third party.
This is not the time for rallying and cheering and being loyal for loyalty's sake.
We're hiring a CEO for the government, and there are serious problems with all
the applicants.
I've taken a lot of astrophotos lately, and as usual, I'm going to present
them starting with the least spectacular one.
On the evening of October 30, I experimented with autoguiding my AT65EDQ refractor
(6.5-cm f/6.5) on my CGEM mount, by mounting my piggyback autoguider
(an SBIG STV with a homemade 3.5-cm f/4 objective) on a second dovetail on top of it.
This was in town, under a rather bright sky.
The Pleiades were in an area where stars were only visible down to about 4th magnitude.
But I got something:
Stack of four 5-minute exposures (which is much more exposure than was actually needed)
with a Nikon D5300 at ISO 400.
Not a great picture, but you can see the Merope Nebula and some other reflection
nebulosity. You can also see that this refractor has no internal reflections.
Those are normally the nemesis of anyone photographing the Pleiades.
Maybe this year, from a darker site, I'll finally get a really good picture
of the Pleiades reaching deep into the nebulosity.
Here, under the same conditions and with the same equipment as the picture above,
is the spiral galaxy M33 in Triangulum.
This is a stack of five 5-minute exposures, and it was in a somewhat clearer area
of the sky (higher up). It's remarkable how much of the structure of the spiral galaxy
I could photograph under such conditions. Note that a bright H II region is visible
(a fuzzy bright grayish spot, paired with a nearly matching star to the upper left
of center). It is grayish from hydrogen-beta light, which this camera picks up more
effectively than hydrogen-alpha.
This, in turn, is the globular cluster M15 — a type of object that photographs
well in spite of city lights. Here it is presented at higher magnification than
the pictures above. Same equipment, same evening, stack of three 5-minute exposures.
Not bad for a telescope less than three inches in diameter.
This is a private web page,
not hosted or sponsored by the University of Georgia.
Copyright 2016 Michael A. Covington.
Caching by search engines is permitted.
To go to the latest entry every day, bookmark http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/Default.asp
and if you get the previous month, tell your browser to refresh.
Portrait at top of page by Krystina Francis.
Entries are most often uploaded around 0000 UT on the date given, which is the previous
evening in the United States. When I'm busy, entries are generally shorter and are
uploaded as much as a whole day in advance.
Minor corrections are often uploaded the following day. If you see a minor error,
please look again a day later to see if it has been corrected.
In compliance with U.S. FTC guidelines,
I am glad to point out that unless explicitly
indicated, I do not receive substantial payments, free merchandise, or other remuneration
for reviewing or mentioning products on this web site.
Any remuneration valued at more than about $10 will always be mentioned here,
and in any case my writing about products and dealers is always truthful.
Reviewed
products are usually things I purchased for my own use, or occasionally items
lent to me briefly by manufacturers and described as such.
I am an Amazon Associate, and almost all of my links to Amazon.com pay me a commission
if you make a purchase. This of course does not determine which items I recommend, since
I can get a commission on anything they sell.
If what you are looking for is not here, please look at
previous months.
We're having a rather low-key holiday season this year because Melody is suffering
from mechanical failure of an implanted hip joint, caused by infection, and can barely
walk with a walker. But we do have things to be thankful for this year.
Most importantly, Sharon is getting 
