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Deep sky

My serious interest in photography started with astrophotography almost twenty-five years ago, in a pre-digital era, with an Olympus OM-1 camera and an 8″ Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. My wife and I, together with a bunch of friends and fellow graduate students, would bring the telescope to the top of a mountain above our campus and spend cold nights taking turns looking at faint smudges in the eyepiece. The astrophotography was exceedingly difficult, but the observational astronomy was fun in its own right, and it also lead me to terrestrial photography, first as a hobby, and later professionally.

Now I am getting back to astrophotography and discovering that it is an entirely new world, comparing to when I left it. Not that the objects in the sky changed much, but my ability to observe and photograph them has been brought to a different level by the developments in technology.

For my first comeback attempt, I selected M81, a.k.a. Bode’s Galaxy (on the left in the photo above). It’s a neat galaxy to photograph because of its brightness (apparent magnitude of 6.9) and the fact that it has a neighbouring galaxy – M82 (The Cigar Galaxy, on the right in the photo above) that fits nicely in the same field of view of a telescope (mine is an 81 mm refractor with a focal length of 478 mm, coupled with a full frame mirrorless camera). So you get to see two galaxies, one face-on and one from the edge, for the price of one. 

I made the image above by stacking forty-two 25-sec exposures taken at ISO 800. The telescope was on an equatorial mount, which provided tracking. No guiding was used in this shoot (hence the relatively short exposures). I actually shot more images on the previous night, when the wether was better, but I messed up the flat calibration frames (note to self: make sure the exposure is longer than 2 sec when shooting flats using a light panel to avoid banding). The photos below are closer crops on M81 and M82. 

Bode’s Galaxy is 96 light-years in diameter (about half the size of our Milky Way), and it contains more than 250 billion stars. Its light travelled for about 11.8 million years before I caught it in front of my house.

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Favourite things to do

Perfect Grade Gundam 00 Seven Sword G

Building plastic models is one of my favourite things to do. I wrote about it before, but I still sometimes think about why I enjoy it so much. It is probably because modelling is different from my typical work, where I sit at a computer and write papers or analyze data. Also, unlike pretty much any other job, there is no expectation of success. In other words, the process of building a model is autotelic, i.e. its value is in itself and not in the outcome.

On a somewhat related topic, I recently learned that the definition of the word “job” has been changing in the last couple of decades. While previously it universally meant “work done for money”, lately it has been returning to its original meaning of “a task” (e.g., “it’s my job to walk the dog in the morning”). In that sense, I think that even our hobbies could be loosely defined as “jobs”, even if their outcomes ultimately don’t have any monetary value or even a tangible benefit. 

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Skiing on Vancouver Island

We have just came back from the last skiing trip of the season, and coincidentally, I’ve finished sorting through the video footage from our first trip of this year (see below). The 2023-24 season at Mt. Washington started really slowly. During our first visit, just before Christmas of 2023, the was so little snow that we were constantly concerned that the resort would close. Only a couple of trails were open, and it was raining a lot. I didn’t even shoot any video because of the poor visibility. Still, we ended up skiing every day and enjoyed the change of scenery. 

During the second trip, which we took right after the New Year, the conditions improved a lot.

Take a look!

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Worm Moon penumbral eclipse

Worm Moon at the peak of the penumbral eclipse.

Tonight, I had a chance to photograph the full moon from my front yard. The March full moon is known as the Worm Moon, Crow Moon, Sap Moon, etc. I particularly like the poetic names given to it by the North American indigenous people: “the Eagle Moon” of the Cree or “the Windy Moon” of the Cherokee. In many cultures, it marks the day to balance one’s life and to celebrate the beginning of the new year.

Today’s Worm Moon is interesting from the astronomical perspective because at 0:14 local time (PDT) it was passing through the northern part of the Earth’s penumbral shadow, making it a penumbral lunar eclipse. The Moon darkened only slightly, even though 96% of it was in the penumbral shadow. 

I took a few shots about two hours before the peak eclipse (capturing some neat clouds in a composite image at the bottom), then again about an hour before the peak (the image below) and at the peak darkening (the image above) with a Sony a1 mirrorless camera and a 70-200 mm lens at 200 mm. The settings were: ISO 100, f10, 1/250 sec.

Worm Moon approximately 1 hour before the peak of the penumbral eclipse.
Composite image of the Worm Moon approximately 2 hours before the peak of the penumbral eclipse.
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Mercury

I took advantage of being at a very dark-sky location (Mt. Washington skiing resort on Vancouver Island) to observe the planet Mercury at it’s greatest Eastern elongation, right after the sunset. Being the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury is notoriously difficult to see. Today, it reached its widest separation of 18.7 degrees east of the Sun.

I walked outside of our chalet in the Alpine Village and could easily see the bright planet right above the tree tops, just as predicted by my astronomy app (see below). I didn’t have any camera besides my iPhone or even a tripod, but still was able to take the above hand-held photo, thanks to Apple’s magic of computational photography. 

There, Mercury is the bright dot in the lower right, just above the tree line. Well above it, on a nearly-vertical line, are the two brightest stars in the constellation of Aries, the Ram – the orange giant Hamal (“the lamb” in Arabic), whose diameter is 15 times the Sun’s, and slightly dimmer Sheratan below it. The brightest dot in the upper left of the picture is Jupiter.

Through a telescope, Mercury would have exhibited a half-illuminated waning phase, but I was happy enough to see it with the naked eye, on its best-looking day of the year and under some of the best local viewing conditions.

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Study skills

I’ve been listening to an audiobook called “Make It Stick” by Peter C. Brown et al. In the past, I’ve come across to references to this work on educational methodologies and underlying psychological principles in my work as a university professor. I even recorded a video note to my students on the so-called curve of forgetting (see below). This time, I stumbled upon a review of this book in the “Perpetual Chess” podcast and decided to listen to the entire thing. It certainly doesn’t disappoint in terms of the academic soundness of the presented ideas and a good mix of psychological principles and practical takeaways. As I listen to it, I am constantly tempted to ask my daughter to listen to some parts that relate to study skills in the hopes that she would be able to use these techniques for herself. I actually did so the other day and, in the spirit of what is argued in the book, even asked her to summarize what she learned in her own words. I probably used up quite a bit of my parenting credit with her, as she obliged. I am not sure if that was in any way productive, but for what it’s worth, here is my own summary of that part (advice for students) that we listened to together:

  1. Embrace the fact that effective learning is challenging. Self-quizzing as the main study technique is very effective.
  2. Practice, i.e. retrieving the learned information from memory, is most effective if it is spaced in time and interleaved. Spacing means that instead of long continuous practice sessions that immediately follow the introduction of the new material, we should allow some between the sessions in order to some amount of forgetting to take place. The effort of trying to recall the information makes it stick better. Interleaving means that several topics/subjects/skills are better studied together, rather than in blocks of similar examples/problems. This approach models real-life situations, where identification of the types of problems is necessary. Spacing and interleaving are so called “desirable difficulties“, and they subjectively do not feel as effective as massed practice. One needs to “trust the system”, though, to benefit from it.
  3. Elaboration is an effective technique for reflecting on the learned material. It means formulating the concepts in your own words and using analogies with already-familiar concepts (e.g., warming your hands on a cup of coffee as an example of thermal conduction).

One thing I noticed as a result of this exercise is that my “spaced repetition” video needs a footnote that it is not re-reading of the material that is beneficial, but self-quizzing of it.

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Quiet

Every time I travel and have a chance to live in a new place for an extended period of time, I appreciate how quiet our little cul-de-sac in Victoria is. During our last stay in Paris during my sabbatical, our apartment was on the ground floor, and the entrance from the street led directly to the living room, or séjour, as our Parisian friends called it. When people outside would sit on the steps leading to our door (I suppose, that was a convenient place to sit on the relatively lively street) and have a conversation, it would sound as if they were sitting inside and talking to us. As much as it was nice to have a chance to listen to some native French speakers, it made us appreciate the relative silence of our usual suburban living. Funny enough, the sound insulation in our Paris dwelling was so marginal that it worked, or rather didn’t, both ways. When my daughter or I would start playing violin (being very diligent students) the people outside would often leave, not because of our poor skills (I hope), but because the music would interfere with their conversation. Another evidence of the power of the music.

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Critical thinking

Yesterday, our daughter invited my wife and me to visit her after-school robotics club. I was quite impressed by how her teacher handled the problems that the students encountered while working on their codes and mechanical designs. When they reported a problem, he would ask a variation of this question: “What element do you think needs to be changed?” I think this question is incredibly powerful, because it simultaneously encourages the students to do two things: to critically analyze the current state of the project and to identify the next specific step in the solution.

For example, my daughter was writing a code for her Lego EV3-based robot to undergo a mission consisting of driving to a specific spot on the table while avoiding the specified boundaries, performing a 720-degree turn while keeping one wheel inside the target spot and returning back to the starting area. She had trouble with returning back to the base, but with the above prompt from the teacher was able to identify the problematic lite in her code – the robot was turning a bit too much during one of the turns on the way back – and to fix it. Another student was having an issue with the design of his robot – it was getting stuck on its way to the target spot. The same question helped him to realize that the wheels were catching on the base, and the solution was quickly found.

I would certainly like to borrow this question for my own use – in the interactions with my students in the courses I teach and in the lab, with my daughter (helping her to solve the problem at hand without offering a ready-made solution) and directed to myself as a means of teasing out a constructive way forward in whatever I do without being overly critical for the apparent failure of the current state of affairs (the question asks to think about one specific aspect to be changed, not the worthiness of the entire project).

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Handmade gifts

I’ve been thinking about how much we value things made for us by someone special. Two of such things are on top of the mind for me personally (probably because they are sitting on my desk right in front of me).

One is a small leather wallet made by a long-time friend, who is a wife of my shodo (Japanese calligraphy) teacher. She has always amazed me with her curiosity in learning various crafts and ability to execute them at a very high level and with tremendous attention to detail. There is also a 5 yen (go-en) coin that she put inside the wallet as a symbol of friendship, and which I always keep there.

Another special thing is a wooden caster for my coffee mug. It was made by my daughter about a year ago. She used a wood-burner to engrave a cute coded love message for me, which always makes me smile. Later, I tried to reciprocate in kind and made a desk decoration for my daughter with some of the things that were on my mind – symbols of ancient Greek cardinal virtues. Curiously, the word “cardinal” is derived from the Greek “cardo” – meaning “heart” or “hinge”. I particularly like a poetic interpretation that the practice of the cardinal virtues is the hinge on which hangs the door to the good life.

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Feeling nostalgic

I noticed that in many books mindfulness is described as an opposite of being disconnected from the present moment and being lost in thoughts about the past or the future. More specifically, what is meant there is ruminating on regrets about the past or worrying about the future. I am wondering, though, whether reminiscence about the past is necessary a negative thing. For example, mentally reliving a happy memory could potentially be a nice stress relief, if nothing else. There is also a potential argument for regrets in general sometimes serving as a useful learning tool.

But I wonder if a positive case could be made for something in between these two kinds of past-dwelling. For example, considering that the definition of nostalgia is “sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations,” I think that feeling nostalgic implies feeling happy and sad at the same time. I also wonder if then, by definition, every person has something to feel nostalgic about . After all, most people probably have something with happy personal associations that is now in the past.

What do I feel nostalgic about? I certainly don’t leave with the constant feeling of nostalgia, but if I dig for it, it would probably have to be the time when I practiced kendo, or, even earlier, aikido. I miss the sense of awe of participating in something so deeply rooted in a foreign and fascinating tradition and of being aware of the formative effect of the practice on my life.

These are the kinds of thoughts I am having when present moment awareness proves elusive.