Month: January 2023

Astronomy week continues!

I've developed something like a schedule for my astrophotography: Once a month, when the moon starts to cooperate, I head out to Palomar Mountain to do some test runs that give me an idea of which settings (mainly exposure time) work best on my chosen target. Then, a week later, I head out to the desert to (hopefully) make my final images. Then I wait three weeks for the moon to go back down before I go out again.

This month's project was not the C2022 comet, which I showed yesterday. That was just a bonus target that I had to do right away before it disappeared. My real target was M42, the Orion nebula, the biggest and most spectacular nebula in the sky. That makes it ideal for a beginner.

I have three images below. The bottom one was taken at Palomar Mountain on a night that featured both a bright moon and some equipment failures. As a result, I got only one usable frame from a stack of 60-second exposures. That's way too short an exposure time, and the single frame lacks detail. But it's surprisingly good anyway, and as a bonus it gives the best approximation of a Klingon bird of prey.

The middle image was taken from two stacks of images made at Palomar Mountain on a moonless night a week later. The main part of the image was created from a stack of 240-second exposures, while the bright center was made from a stack of 7-second exposures. At home I composited those together to get good detail across the whole image. Overall, it turned out well. I wouldn't have minded if it were my final image.

But there's more juice to be squeezed out of this onion. The top image is the best of all. It was made from a big stack of 300-second exposures (35 images total) while the bright center was made from an enormous stack of 5-second exposures (500 images total). The shorter exposure on the second stack keeps the center from being blown out, which erases all the detail. I composited that onto the main image and, finally, for the semicircular formation just to the right of center, I copied the version from my set of 7-second exposures the previous week. Altogether, then, it's a three-part composite.

The longer exposure along with the extremely dark sky provides better visibility of both the surrounding gases and the other nearby nebulas. The formation just a little to the right of the center is M43, De Mairan's Nebula, while the large blue formation farther to the right is NGC 1977, the Running Man nebula. (The black dust lanes in the center supposedly look a little bit like a running man. I'd say it looks more like Edvard Munch's "Scream.")

You'll notice that Orion only barely fits in the top image. I don't mind this. I deliberately bought a telescope with a long focal length even though I knew there would be three or four objects that only barely fit the frame. But for all the other objects in the universe, which are much smaller, that's not a problem and the longer focal length will give me much better magnification and detail.

(But in the middle picture everything fits fine! What's the deal? This is actually due to an equipment failure the night I took the picture. When I was all done I decided I should re-aim the scope and take another dozen shots. I ended up re-aiming inaccurately, but I knew my software could easily correct that. It did, but the result was sort of like a composite, with a good deal more horizontal room. It also has more vertical headroom, but that's only because it shows less of the nebula.)

According to the ever-watchful BLS, here are the states that made the biggest improvements in unemployment over the course of 2022:

Only four states had higher unemployment at the end of 2022 compared to the end of 2021: Arkansas, Nebraska, Indiana, and Oklahoma.

Yesterday the marketing department at Mars Inc. discontinued the use of their animated M&Ms characters because, um, Tucker Carlson said they were fat lesbians now? Or something. It's not really explainable without sounding like an idiot yourself.

But now there's this:

Fox News is MAD that "woke" Xbox is changing its power saving mode

Earhardt: "Xbox has also announced that they're going woke because of climate change"

Failla: "They're trying to recruit your kids into climate politics at an earlier age"

E: "They're going after the kids" pic.twitter.com/8Vvd5j02SA

— Lis Power (@LisPower1) January 24, 2023

I'll confess that I didn't quite believe this at first. I mean, it's Twitter, right? People are always exaggerating.

So I clicked on the video. Not only is the tweet correct, but Lis went easy on them. The Fox folks are literally outraged that Microsoft has added an auto-off setting to the Xbox, something that half the tech appliances in America have. My printer goes to sleep after an hour. My computer sleeps after 20 minutes. My phone sleeps after five minutes. This is a feature so common that my only surprise is that the Xbox didn't already have it.

And apparently it's all part of a conspiracy that started with gas stoves, moved on to coffee, and now is infesting video games.

Wait. Coffee? Dear Lord, I must have missed something. What have liberals done to coffee?

POSTSCRIPT: Just to make things clear, the new feature on the Xbox is that you can set it to shut off completely instead of merely going to sleep. This is what's destroying America's youth.

Now it's Mike Pence's turn in the barrel:

A lawyer for former vice president Mike Pence, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, found what they called “a small number” of documents bearing classified markings during a search of Pence’s Indiana home, according to letters to the National Archives.

Search Obama's house! Do it now! I'll bet he's got, like, a million classified documents or something.

Kylie Jenner wore a faux lion head to Paris Fashion Week and got a thumbs-up from PETA:

In a statement to DailyMail.com, PETA President Ingrid Newkirk praised Jenner and Shayk for possibly making a statement against trophy hunting....Newkirk also urged the fashion stars to give up using wool products, which PETA says leads to the abuse and injury of sheep, and silk, which results in silkworms being killed in many instances.

Silkworms?

Dan McLaughlin got caught recently by a speed camera and then, a few days later, received a citation in the mail. Normally, that would just be one of those things:

What is obnoxious, however, is that the pretext for this particular ticket is “speeding in a school zone” even though it was based on a camera observation at 10 a.m. on the Sunday morning of a three-day weekend. A machine using an empty school as a justification for a ticket no decent police officer would write is a fine emblem of Hochul’s New York.

And it is the result of a specific decision made by the governor when she signed a bill last June to allow school-zone cameras to operate 24/7, entirely without regard to whether the school is open or occupied by humans.

Finally, left and right can come together. I've never gotten a ticket like this, but I do drive by our local elementary school regularly. It has a big sign that says the school zone speed limit is 25 mph "when children are present." But most people seem unaware of that qualifier and creep along regardless of whether any children are within a thousand yards.

I know, I know: boo hoo. I'm not going to get any sympathy for having to slow down for a couple hundred yards once or twice a day.

Nonetheless, this definitely makes my top thousand list of annoying things. So there.

Today is astronomy week. First up is our newest comet, C/2022 E3, aka "The Green Comet."

Comet photography is tricky. Normal subjects, like galaxies or a nebulas, don't move across the field of stars, so you can tell your scope to guide based on star positions and everything will be fine. But if you do that with a comet, the stars will be sharp but the comet will be blurred due to its own motion.

The bottom picture is from a stack of 60-second test exposures at Palomar Mountain that were guided on the star field. You can see some artifacts in the core of the comet as a result of that.

The middle picture was taken last night in the desert. It's from a stack of 300-second exposures that were guided on the comet but then integrated by the software based on the star field. As you can see, it doesn't represent the comet accurately at all.

The top picture is the final and best image. It's from the same stack of images, but this time the software integrated the stack based on the comet's position in each frame. As a result, you can see lots of star movement in the background, which I toned down in order to put the focus on the comet. Thanks to the 300-second exposures, you get a good view of the dust tail (broad haze), the ion tail (long, thin streak), and the small antitail at the bottom.

Even in the best picture the comet is blurry, of course. This is because it's just a small core emitting vast clouds of gas and dust, and that would be inherently blurry even if you were riding along right beside it.

I don't remember who pointed me to this, but here's a short excerpt from a 2022 survey done by Populace, an education think tank, about what people expect of K-12 education:

Only a third of Americans have college degrees, so I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that "prepare a meal" ranks higher than "prepare kids for college." However, it is a surprise (to me) that college prep turns out to rank #47 overall—a gigantic drop from the previous year. What's more, this is in spite of the fact that the average prediction from survey-takers is that other people rank it #3.

In any case, if this survey is accurate at all it's cause for despair. Everything is important, and certain things are especially important to certain people. But overall? The only things on the list that should have made the top five are #2 and #4. And #2 is so vague and conventional that I have my doubts about that too.¹

But I'll take it anyway. Here's my top five:

• Students can demonstrate mastery of basic reading, writing, and arithmetic—especially reading.
• Students are prepared for college, a job, or a career.
• Students are regularly tested to measure mastery of subject areas.
• Students develop the ability to routinely do work they don't necessarily want to do—without going nuts or becoming unemployed and homeless.
• Students develop the ability to think critically and ask appropriate questions.

What about you?

¹And call me a cynic, but I'd say the actual behavior of most Americans puts the lie to any suggestion that they really value critical thinking.

Here's an incarceration chart from my buddy Rick Nevin:

It looks like incarceration rates went down in both 2020 and 2021, and indeed they did. Between 2019 and 2021 the prison incarceration rate for ages 18-19 declined from 1.07% to 0.84% to 0.55%. For the entire age cohort of 18-24 year-olds, prison incarceration rates went down from 4.0% to 3.2% to 2.7%.

The incarceration rate for ages 18-24, including both jail and prisons, also went down between 2020 and 2021—from 6.5% to 6.2%.¹

Rick has more data here. Note that he and I are showing different things. He focuses mostly on male crime and shows it over the long term. My stats are for everyone and focus just on 2020 and 2021, since those are the years when crime supposedly exploded among the young.

But it didn't. The murder rate exploded among the young, and that's obviously a problem. But when it comes to overall violent and property crime, the incarceration data is yet another data point indicating that it continued to go down.

POSTSCRIPT: Stats for the prison population are available at the BJS site for 2019, 2020, and 2021. Stats for the jail population in 2020 and 2021 are available here. Check my arithmetic!

¹I don't have a figure for 2019-2020 because jail rates by age are inexplicably not available before 2020.

You've probably heard that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has banned the new AP African American test because it is "inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value." No further explanation or detail was provided, so nobody knows precisely what this means.

However, if you're curious about which sections of the test probably offend DeSantis, here's a very short summary of several sections from Unit 4 of the class curriculum:

I don't know much about these subjects, nor am I familiar with most of the authors who are recommended reading. However, other people do, and this is likely the battleground they'll be fighting on.