The picture I meant to take the other night
North America Nebula (NGC 7000)

Last month I took a picture of star clouds in Cygnus, and due to difficulty aiming the camera (pointing nearly straight up, with no access to the viewfinder, on an iOptron SkyTracker with no computerized pointing), it showed only some ordinary star clouds.

Here is what I was actually trying to get:

Song of the day: "Mere Image"

Click here to hear "Mere Image" on YouTube

I've written elsewhere about how Mannheim Steamroller's "Fresh Aire" albums were the soundtrack of Melody's and my marriage.

Of everything on those albums, "Mere Image" was Melody's favorite. I don't know if the name is a pun on "mirror image." What I do know — and have just confirmed — is that this piece depicts progression from childhood through maturity and old age. You can hear that in it: a childlike theme, then increasing maturity, then dignity, then slowing down, then a reprise of the childhood theme.

That is in the liner notes. Curiously, on line I found a commenter saying it was a variation on "Greensleeves," which it is not. It does remind me a little of "Lovely Joan," the second song in Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on Greensleeves," but it is not that either.

What I learned today is that "Mere Image" was originally performed as a ballet at Mannheim Steamroller's first concerts in Omaha, but not since.

Some kind of malfunction is affecting YouTube's video embedding code, which is why I cannot show you a preview of the video above.

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Am I now Trump's enemy?

Trump has now provided Americans with a loyalty test that I am proud to fail:

Besides a loyalty test that almost no one will pass, this may also be a demonstration that even Trump's own staff don't take him seriously. At least, I have heard of no attempts to enforce this requirement.

Superintelligence is already a technical term that means something else. It means artificial general intelligence that surpasses human intelligence in many or all dimensions. No such thing has been achieved or is in sight.

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NGC 7331 with supernova

On September 1, a supernova flared up in the galaxy NGC 7331, and it's still near maximum brightness (around 13th magnitude, easy to photograph, hard to see even in a big telescope). Here, NGC 7331 is the biggest galaxy in the picture, and the supernova is the star just on the lower-left edge of its bright core:

Compare to the picture of NGC 7331 I took with the same equipment last year.

Stack of 240 (yes, 240) 30-second exposures. Celestron 8 EdgeHD on Losmandy GM811G mount, f/7 compressor, Altair 26C camera.

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Some details of Melody's childhood

I am not qualified to write a complete biography of the amazing Melody Mauldin Covington, but I do want to note some details that she shared with me.

• On the day she was born, her father paused to put on a tie and jacket before taking her mother to the hospital. He was about to attend the birth of an important person and wanted to show due respect.
• Melody had a big vocabulary even early in childhood and remembers having to speak "easy English" to adults, both to be understood, and to avoid being chided for pretentiousness. I had the same experience.
• She attended Pleasantdale Elementary School (Tucker, Ga.) for grades 1-7, then Tucker High School for one year as a "subbie" (sub-freshman, 8th-grader), then moved to Winder and went to Winder-Barrow High School. Her 12th-grade year there was entirely in absentia, attending Gainesville Junior College while still considered a Winder-Barrow student and graduating as valedictorian.
• She got glasses after failing a test in fourth grade because she couldn't see the board.
• She won a costume contest at school by going as Mary Poppins.
• She professed faith in Christ and was baptized at age 8 (at First Baptist Church, Tucker) after careful counseling. That's a rather early age, but not at all unreasonable for someone as intelligent as her, and she was very consistent from then on.
• One of her favorite places to visit in middle school was the Fernbank Science Center. Mine too, but I only got there a couple of times from Valdosta; she was local.
• She was one of the Girl Scouts who gave out programs at the dedication of the Stone Mountain carvings.
• In 7th grade (I think), as a member of the school Safety Patrol (the students who help other students cross the street, etc.), she was treated to a trip to Washington, D.C., by train. It may have been the same dates as my 9th-grade trip to Washington. (In 7th grade I got a Safety Patrol trip to the Kennedy Space Center.)
• She reached full adult height at age 12 and was often mistaken for an adult when she was as young as 13. Her mature seriousness tended to scare off, rather than attract, older male admirers... until I came along!
• During spring break of 10th grade (1974), she went on a trip to Paris and London (mainly Paris) sponsored by her high school. She was the student who could speak French. In every high school, only a very few students really learn the languages they are taught. She really learned French and was the student that the others followed around. Correspondingly, in my school I was the one who really learned Latin.
• Her high school valedictory speech (which I did not hear, since the ceremony was moved indoors on short notice and only parents could go) was based on a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, "This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it." She never shared the speech with me, and I got the impression she felt she had not delivered it well. But I know it was the product of a wise mind.
• While at Gainesville Junior College she was active in Rotaract (Rotary Club auxiliary) and went to a convention at Jekyll Island.
• Also while at Gainesville (Ga.), she was on a committee that helped organize a school dance — apparently not playing a major role in it, but she was there. At the beginning of the dance, the band had not shown up. Then the committee got an anguished phone call from Gainesville, Florida...
• During the first summer we were dating, her family planted a large vegetable garden in the back yard and had a bountiful harvest.
• Her last family vacation with her mother, father, and sister was a trip to Myrtle Beach in 1977.
• An earlier family vacation that she described with some whimsy was what she called the "vice tour" to Winston-Salem, N.C., and other places, where the entertainment consisted of tours of factories to see cigarettes and beer being manufactured. She found some of the technology interesting, such as machines that counted things by weighing them, but she already hated tobacco and, after one sip, decided she didn't like beer either.
  
  I remember seeing an article in Reader's Digest advocating plant tours as something to do on vacation, and reportedly, that's what gave Melody's father the idea for this trip. But I think he was also trying to live in a world in which tobacco would not be a health hazard and his smoking would not be something to be ashamed of. Actually, smoking is what killed him.
• Apart from University of Georgia recruiting people, the only person Melody and I are sure we had both met, before we met each other, was the controversial politician Lester Maddox. He did meet a lot of schoolchildren...

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Flowers for Melody's birthday

Over the years, I would often surprise Melody with a dozen red roses. Kroger, next to the hospital, was one of my usual places to buy them, and during her last hospitalization, as I darted in there to pick up food and saw the flower section, I made a mental note to bring her roses as soon as she got to a place that permitted flowers (the ICU didn't). Sadly, she never got out of the ICU.

Today, her birthday, I bought a dozen red roses at Kroger and brought them home in honor of the occasion. It may become an annual commemoration, or I may decide that one posthumous birthday is enough. We'll see.

I also checked that the artificial red roses on her grave were in tip-top shape. They are holding up very well. We don't have real flowers there because the deer would eat them.

Here also is a picture of us casting long shadows on the eve of her birthday in 2013, heading into Jason's Deli (where First Watch is now, on Alps Road) for a birthday dinner.

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The floor of Mare Orientale

On the evening of September 28, I managed to photograph the flat floor of Mare Orientale, which is seldom visible from earth. The non-circularity of the moon's orbit makes it swing into view occasionally. Compare my earlier success here, under even better conditions.

Celestron 5 (5-inch telescope), best 25% of 4,994 video frames taken with a ToupTek 678 camera, aligned, stacked, and sharpened.

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Lit from the other direction

Now scroll through this view of Mare Crisium and its environs. This is the region of the moon that you would see as a thin crescent in the evening, except that here, we're seeing it when the moon is slightly past full, and if you were standing on the moon in this region, the sun would be setting rather than rising. Lots of familiar details are lit from the opposite of the direction we're accustomed to looking at.

Same setup as before, best 50% of 3,821 video frames.

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First glimpse of Saturn

Finally, with the same setup, I got the season's first view of Saturn. This is not a very good picture; the telescope was too small; but it does show you what Saturn looks like in a small telescope. Best 800 out of 2,387 video frames.

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