Congratulations to the new and improved Trojan football team, which crushed the doughty Rice Owls on Saturday, 66-14. How did we do it coming off a 4-8 record last year? Easy! In the off season we bought ourselves a new coach, a new quarterback, and a few miscellaneous running backs and wide receivers via the transfer portal and promises of NIL riches. For starters, a new collective of rich donors called Student Body Right is raising money to provide every football player with “the equivalent of a base salary”—though only if they complete the "required charitable work." Wink, wink. Then there's the additional $15 million per year that USC itself is raising. And for finishers, there's all the money the actual NIL licensees will cough up in individual deals. USC football players should be rolling in dough before long.
Biden defined a group of Others without taking care to explain exactly who he was talking about. He kept describing the views and ambitions of "MAGA Republicans"—but who did he mean by that?
Was he talking about Republican leadership cadres? Was he talking about the Republican rank and file? Biden made little attempt to define who he was talking about.
Personally, I thought Biden's speech was fine. But I agree with Bob that it would have been better if Biden had focused more strongly on Republican leaders, not the rank-and-file.
Politically, this is useful because there's not much point in insulting a large group of voters. That gets you nowhere.
Factually, it's useful because it's true. The villains in this story are Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump. The institutions at fault are Fox News, the Heritage Foundation, and so forth. The pundits at fault are Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh and a cast of thousands of others. Then add to that all the less extreme conservative leaders who don't spread the worst of the twaddle but tolerate it from others because they're too cowardly to speak out against it.
This is where the hatred originates. I won't say that the Republican rank-and-file is made up entirely of good people—it's some and some, just like any other large group of humans—but they aren't fundamentally at fault for any of this. They're just following the lead of those with big megaphones and lots of power. The rest of us do much the same, and we're just lucky that our leaders aren't as repellent.
I headed out to a local semi-darkish spot in Trabuco Canyon last night, mostly to test my autoguiding software. Sadly, it continued not to work. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.
The sky in Trabuco Canyon is not great (it's still Orange County, which is swamped by the Los Angeles light dome) but it's better than my backyard. So I went ahead and took a couple of pictures as long as I was there. One of them didn't work at all and probably needs a darker sky and longer exposure times. The other is the Andromeda Galaxy. This was a quickie image, and not all that great. Still, progress is being made!
The small object at the top left is a dwarf elliptical galaxy (M110) that orbits Andromeda. The bright object at center right is a compact elliptical galaxy (M32) that's yet another satellite of Andromeda.
According to a new Wall Street Journal poll, the public has become more supportive of abortion since the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs ruling. Some groups have become way more supportive:
Abortion is a far more motivating issue for Democrats than Republicans. More than half of all voters said the Dobbs ruling made it more likely they'd vote in November, and of that, 77% were Democrats compared to only 8% who were Republicans.
Democrats were also more trusted to handle abortion policy, 48% to 27%. And big majorities opposed most bans on abortion:
62% opposed an abortion ban at 6 weeks of pregnancy that only included an exception for the health of the mother
57% opposed a ban at 15 weeks with an exception only for the health of the mother
77% opposed banning women who live in states where abortion is illegal from traveling to other states to get an abortion.
81% were against banning all abortions.
If Democrats can keep up this level of energy for another couple of months, it could make a serious dent in the current Republican lead. Just remember: The midterms aren't over until the pissed-off women sing.
A few days ago I promised to tell you all about my new astrophotography setup, and today's the day. Let's start with a picture:
The four main parts are:
OTA stands for Optical Tube Assembly—more commonly known as a "telescope." Mine is a Skywatcher ED100 apochromatic refractor. ED means "extra-low dispersion" and refers to a particularly high grade of optical glass. 100 is the diameter of the objective lens in millimeters. In the US, this size of telescope is usually referred to as a four-inch. Apochromatic is a lens design that's become very affordable in recent years. It focuses all three colors at precisely the same point and, in combination with the ED glass, produces unusually low chromatic aberration. (Mine is a doublet APO, which means the lens assembly contains two lenses. More expensive models are triplet APOs.) Finally, refractor just means that the telescope uses lenses rather than a mirror.
The focal length of the telescope is 900mm, which is a little longer than most people recommend for a beginner, but my goal is to take pictures of DSOs, or Deep Sky Objects, such as nebulae and galaxies, and for that I wanted a little more reach in the optics. The downside of this is that it has an aperture of f/9, which is fairly slow. This means that I have to take longer exposures than I would if I had a faster telescope.
The equatorial mount is a motor drive that moves the telescope in the opposite direction of the earth's rotation. This keeps objects in the same place even during long exposures of a minute or more.
My mount is a Skywatcher EQ6-R. This is a very nice mount, and it's more than I wanted. However, the EQ5 was out of stock everywhere, so I went ahead and got the EQ6 instead. I don't mind the extra cost too much, since I may very well need the better mount in the future, but damn, this thing is heavy. I have to break down and put together the entire setup whenever I go somewhere, and placing the mount on top of the tripod is the only part that's really a pain in the ass.
The optical train contains all the stuff that allows me to take pictures. More on that later.
The tripod is just a tripod. It's a big, super stable tripod, but there's nothing more to it.
So that's basically the whole setup. When I set it up for a shooting session, it goes like this:
Set up tripod facing more-or-less north. If necessary, level the tripod.
Place mount on tripod. Use a compass to get it closer to pointing north. Later on, software will be used to get the mount pointed precisely to the North Celestial Pole (NCP).
Attach OTA to mount. This is done via a dovetail mounting bracket.
Attach the optical train.
Attach power cables to my power supply and USB cables to my laptop.
Done!
Next up, here's a close-up of the optical train:
The drawtube is controlled by the focusing knobs and moves the optical train in and out. My telescope uses a Crayford style focuser, and it's not that great. I'm planning to replace it with a PrimeLuce Esatto 2" electric focuser.
The adapter transforms the M56 threads on the drawtube to M54, which everything else uses. The numbers are in millimeters.
The off-axis guider (OAG) is an Askar with a 10mm prism. The prism draws off a small bit of the image from the telescope and sends it up to the guide camera.
The guide camera is a ZWO ASI120MM-S. The S, apparently, means that it supports USB 3.0, which it turns out I need. I'm still not entirely sure why. In any case, equatorial mounts never compensate perfectly for the rotation of the earth, so a guide camera is used to lock onto a star and produce occasional pulses to keep the mount precisely on target.
The filter holder is just what it sounds like. There are lots of useful filters you can get, including simple light pollution filters, sun filters, moon filters, and so forth. However, the most common use of filters is to capture separate exposures of the various emission lines emitted by nebulae. These are called narrowband filters and the three most common are Ha (Hydrogen-Alpha), S-II (Sulfur-II), and O-III (Oxygen-III). The basic idea is to use a monochrome camera and then capture individual images with each of the filters. The final image is created via specialized software that puts the images together into a high-resolution color image.
At the moment, my filter holder is empty. I don't use it at all.
The camera is the heart of the optical train. Mine is a QHY 168c, a color camera that uses a Sony IMX071 APS-C CMOS sensor. This is a 16 megapixel sensor with 4.8um pixels. What makes it specially suited for astrophotography is the built in cooler, which cools the sensor by 30-40°C compared to the ambient temperature. This produces images with far less noise than an ordinary DSLR.
Finally, there's the software. This has improved massively over the past decade or two and now performs miracles. At the moment, the software I use is:
EQMOD to control the mount.
N.I.N.A. is my basic capture software. It connects to everything and controls polar alignment, image capture, camera control, platesolving, and a hundred other things that I don't use. Basically, NINA uses platesolving to figure out where the telescope is pointed and then syncs this information with the mount. After that, you can simply tell NINA what object you want to slew to (the Iris Nebula, for example, is NGC 7023) and NINA will move the scope to the exact coordinates of the object.
PHD2 is used for autoguiding. Pretty much everyone uses PHD2, so I figure I might as well too.
Astro Pixel Processor is currently my program of choice once I get home and need to create a final image. Generally speaking, the way modern astrophotography works is that you use long exposures and lots of images that get stacked together. My Iris Nebula image, for example, used 51 images of 60 seconds each. For better results, I would most likely capture a few hundred images of 2-3 minutes each. Or maybe combine some images of different exposure times. Sometimes it takes a bit of experimentation to figure out the right combination. In any case, APP produces far better stacked final images than any other program I've used (though I can't say that I've used an awful lot of them yet).
Photoshop is my choice for final touch-ups. APP produces pretty good images out of the gate, so I don't need to use Photoshop for much. But I'll usually do a little bit of stretching, as well as adding extra contrast since APP seems to produce generally grayish images.
And that's it! As of last night I believe that I've finally finished the first phase of my new hobby, which is just getting all the software to function. Not function well, just function. The only exception is that I'm still not sure I have autoguiding working. I may be able to find out tonight depending on the weather.
With that done, I can start to actually learn about astrophotography. That is, not just how to take a picture, but how to take better pictures. This is the part I've been looking forward to, and I expect it to occupy me for quite a long time.
I have no special reason for posting this. I just happened to run across yet another item fretting over the possibility of China becoming bigger than the US and what that would mean for the future of the galaxy. But come on. Sure, total GDP matters for the heft it allows you to throw around on the world stage, but the real measure of a nation's economy is GDP per capita. Here it is:
China has obviously grown very impressively on a percentage basis. Nevertheless, in absolute terms their GDP per capita has grown $10,800 since 1980 while ours has grown $28,800. Even if you're more bullish on China than I am¹ and assume they'll enjoy endless exponential growth while the US is stuck with linear growth—as shown in the chart—by 2055 China will still have less than half the per capita GDP that we have.
China is not a country to be taken lightly. But it's also not a country to panic over. They have a whole lot of catching up to do, and the odds are that they can't do it any time soon.
¹Reasons I'm not that bullish on China: (1) they have an aging population, (2) they are coming up on the middle-income trap, and (3) they are addicted to autocratic control of both their population and the economy. The most important of these is #3. In the long run, they'll lose out to free market capitalism and a free populace.
Back in the day, when dinosaurs trod the earth, our memes mostly came from YouTube and 4chan. Today, in our sleekly modern era, most of our memes come from Twitter and TikTok.
I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from this, so go at it in comments. Are today's memes better or worse than they used to be?
This is Charlie testing out our new area rug. He seems to approve, which is a good thing since we got it because the old rug had to be vacuumed practically every day to get rid of all the Charlie fur. We are hoping the new one hides the fur more effectively so we can return to a more normal weekly cleaning cycle.
A newly released property inventory from the Mar-a-Lago search indicates that the FBI found lots of classified documents. We already knew that. But they also found lots of folders marked classified but with no documents inside:
In Box No. 2, for example, taken from Trump’s office, there were 43 empty folders with classified banners; 28 empty folders labeled “Return to Staff Secretary/Military Aide”; 24 government documents marked confidential, secret or top secret; 99 news articles and other printed media; and 69 government documents or photos that were not classified.
It seems unlikely that even Donald Trump would take a bunch of empty folders from the White House as keepsakes or whatever. So what used to be in these empty folders?
There might be an innocent explanation. Maybe Trump took the documents out and put them somewhere else, where they've already been collected by either NARA or the FBI.
Maybe. But the most obvious explanation is that something happened to those documents. Trump could still have them. Or he might have destroyed them. Or he might have given them to someone.
As the Washington Post says, this is a developing story. And it's getting fishier with every passing day. Where are the missing documents?
The American economy gained 315,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 225,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate went up a bit to 3.7%.
This is an almost perfect jobs report. It's healthy enough that it means the economy continues to hum along, but it's weaker than recent jobs reports, which means the Fed doesn't have to get panicked about the economy overheating.
So what happened in August? In a nutshell, lots of new people entered the labor force. Some of this was due to population growth, but there were about 600,000 workers in addition to that, probably due to high school grads entering the job market. Of this total growth of nearly 800,000, about 450,000 of them were employed and 350,000 were unemployed, which is why both the unemployment rate and the labor force participation rate went up:
Wages went up 0.2% on an annualized basis. When you account for the -0.2% inflation rate in July, that means real wages went up 0.4%. Woo hoo. But it's better than going down, which is what wages have been doing lately.
