Month: December 2022

After the Andromeda Galaxy, my next astrophotography project was the Iris Nebula. I didn't have any particular reason. It's pretty and a little less well known than some of the other, bigger nebulas.

But there's a sad story behind this. As usual, I did some test runs to figure out what settings I wanted and what exposure to use. Then I was ready to haul everything out to the desert, where I'd do the final run under the best possible conditions.

Unfortunately, as you might recall, my telescope went dead that night. It took me a couple of weeks to fix it, but by then the moon was up. A few days later I went on a short vacation to Virginia, where I fell down and hurt my leg. Then I got better, but the moon was up again so I had to wait. Finally, last Wednesday was a dex night with good weather and the moon safely below the horizon. Off I went.

But I had failed to check the position of Iris after a couple of months, and it turned out to be very low in the sky. Unfortunately, traffic on Interstate 10 had been heavy and I got to the desert late, which made it even lower. But since I didn't realize that, I chose a spot that happened to have a tree nearby. I only got six shots before Iris fell below the tree.

So my plan was to go back today. Yesterday, however, I discovered that the weather report for the rest of the week was terrible, so I made a quick decision to move dex day up to Christmas and head out. Traffic was light, I got up there early, and the sky was magnificent. I had plenty of time to set everything up and get a good six or seven hours of shooting time. Until I realized that . . .

. . . I had left my computer at home. Everything is controlled by the computer—cameras, mount, north pole alignment, guiding—so I literally couldn't do anything. I ended  up eating dinner and then going home.

And that's it. The weather is bad this week, the moon is up after that, and by next month Iris will be so low in the sky that it's hopeless. September is probably the next time I'll have genuinely good viewing conditions.

So I'm going to move on. For now, here's a series of images of the Iris Nebula through the end of 2022. The top one is my best and final image. It stacks every shot I took both on Wednesday and on November 9, all handily registered by Astro Pixel Processor. This amounts to 111 images of various exposures taken over five hours.

The middle one uses just the shots from Wednesday. It's a stack of six exposures of ten minutes each.

The bottom one is a test run taken on Palomar Mountain. It's cropped more tightly than the others because I was focused solely on NGC 7023, the central part of the entire nebula. It's a stack of ten 6-minute exposures. I used longer exposures for the other two in an attempt to capture the orange-ish gas that forms the full Iris Nebula. You can see a pretty good image of that here, and I really needed more exposure time to get it. In the event, I was able to get a hint of the orange cloud, but that's all.

You'll also notice that the top image has fewer stars than the others. This is because I finally figured out some good settings for star reduction in APP. This is very handy since the drawback of long exposures is that they produce very intense and unnatural star fields.

I keep reading people—progressives, of course—asking "What do they mean by woke, anyway?" Well, I'm here to help.

There is, naturally, an original meaning of the word from progressives themselves. It's an old metaphor that was re-popularized by Black Lives Matter after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. It meant, roughly, being perceptive of racial prejudice, especially in the criminal justice system and more generally in the area of social justice.

Simple enough. But what does it mean to modern conservatives who use it pejoratively? I don't think this is much of a mystery either. It refers to a good idea that's been taken way too far.

This is a common dynamic. Once an idea is let loose on the world, there will always be a cadre of supporters who try to push it to its hyperlogical endpoint. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. Human nature being what it is, it's usually the latter in the short term but sometimes the former in the longer term.

Woke is still in the short term, so naturally as people experiment with more and more unusual interpretations in order to test boundaries, it's going to inspire lots of pushback. This is because some of these interpretations really are dumb, while some is because conservatives have an unfortunate animus toward being perceptive of racial prejudice of any kind, even when it's pretty obvious.

Anyway, that's what woke means to conservatives. Its overall proximate cause is a dislike of anything that suggests white people sometimes act badly, while its case-specific causes are usually just matters of cherry picking the dumbest and most extreme examples of progressive attempts to promote less obtuse language. This will probably never change since it has the happy effect of allowing conservatives to ignore the problem being addressed.

Hey, do you remember that one of the world's largest and most trusted crypto firms crashed earlier this year, prompting plenty of assertions that crypto was ruined for good? It did and it did. But a mere four months later, when FTX went belly-up due to very similar business practices (i.e., embezzlement and fraud¹) it seemed like that had all been forgotten. It was just SBF and his pals who were ruining things.

We sure don't learn from the past, do we? When Binance cracks up I wonder what we'll think then?²

NOTE: I was aroused to write this post after noticing that the Three Arrows affair apparently didn't even draw much attention in real time. No wonder no one remembers it.

¹Alleged embezzlement and fraud, of course.

²I don't have any inside information. Or even an expert opinion. But I'll give odds on a bout of ill health with extreme prejudice before long.

Let me get this straight. It turns out that most of the groups dedicated to helping migrants don't actually object to red state governors busing them to other states. They don't even really object all that much to migrants being dropped off in freezing weather in Washington DC. They won't be there for long anyway.

Mostly they object to Texas and other states doing this without coordinating with anyone. If they did, advocates say, the buses would be a good way of getting migrants where they want to be. That's generally why they're on the buses in the first place.

As for dropping them off in front of Kamala Harris's official residence, that's obviously just juvenile partisan grandstanding. But that wasn't the intention in the Christmas Eve case. The buses were supposed to go to New York but were rerouted due to cold weather and closed roads.

I don't even know if this makes things better or worse. It turns out that with only minimal effort these red state governors could make their migrant busing programs into a win for everyone, but they still won't do it. They want it to seem callous and ugly, the same way they deny Medicaid expansion for poor people even when it's practically free.¹

Cruelty may or may not be the point, but the appearance of cruelty sure is.

¹In fact, when you count all the costs it's less than free. Most states literally lose money by turning down Medicaid expansion.

This comes via Neville Medhora and shows what we've been searching for on Google during 2022:

NFTs got a fair amount of sustained attention, but I'm heartened to see that the biggest and longest attention-grabber was Wordle. This is not because I care about Wordle one way or the other, but it seems nice and normal compared to so many of the others.

Who loves Christmas more than cats? From top: Charlie investigating a new cat toy from Aunt Gin; Hilbert seemingly aware that this box has some new pillows; Hilbert getting ready to play amidst the wrapping with Charlie; Charlie peeking out from behind a mountain of tissue paper.

The Wall Street Journal says that Santa has delivered a wonderful gift this year. For the first time since the pandemic started, our supply chains are finally in great shape:

Gone are the weekslong backlogs of cargo ships at large ports. Ocean shipping rates have plunged below prepandemic levels....In the U.S., retailers have ample inventory. Railroads averted a labor strike and package delivery trucks have plenty of spare capacity....Parcel carrier FedEx Corp. and other regional carriers are having an easier time delivering packages this peak season, with additional capacity and steady parcel volume.

....Procter & Gamble Co. [] expects to spend $100 million less than it had anticipated on transportation and warehousing in the fiscal year ending in June 2023....After more than a year of paying ever-higher prices for goods, Walmart Inc. and other large retailers are canceling manufacturer orders, resisting price increases and in some cases asking suppliers to provide discounts....Dollar General Corp., after years of citing high transportation costs as a drag on the business, said in December that falling transit prices could begin lifting the company in 2023.

The spirit of Christmas has truly returned this year.

I was mulling over Wednesday's post about whether we should call ourselves Americans—which is allegedly offensive to other residents of the Americas—and came up with this:

If not American, what do we put in the blank line at the bottom? "A US resident"? That's pretty awkward, no?

We are not the only country with this problem. What do the people of New Zealand call themselves? According to Wikipedia, the official demonym is New Zealanders. Does that mean they'd say "I am New Zealandish"?

Maybe, but even that avenue is cut off to us. "I am US-ish?" I don't think so. "I am a citizen of the US"? That sounds like you're a Roman centurion or something. "I'm from the US"? That might be doable.

But overall, I dunno. Assuming you buy this linguistic criticism in the first place, are there really any good solutions here?