A Darker View

A New Family Member

Meet Electra, the newest addition to the Cooper household. Today we came back from the Kona Humane Society with a kitten. As per household tradition the name is that of a star, 17 Tauri, one of the brightest in the Pleiades star cluster.

You may notice the photo is slightly blurred, much like an electron this kitten never stops moving. Getting a decent photo is proving challenging. I am going to have to break out a faster camera than my little G11. Perhaps a DSLR in high speed burst mode can do the job, then again, maybe not.

It has been three months since we buried Adhara, three months with an empty, cat-less house. There has been something missing around this place. No fur-face looking to curl up with you when you get comfortable. No begging eyes at your feet when breaking up a roast chicken.

Meanwhile this little flash of fur has been streaking all over the house. Finding the interesting places. In and out and under everything. There are things we humans need to put away, out of little paws reach. There are other places where kittens should not go, a couple of those have been found already. But then, some things are learned only through impact.

High speed, wood floor, and screen door… Thud.

Yeah, saw that one coming.

Eventually she might slow down. Maybe? Perhaps? Before midnight?

After years of living with two elderly and mostly sedentary cats, a kitten is a real change. It will take time for us to come to know one another, eventually we will learn the routine. No regrets, I am truly looking forward to having a cat around again.

Did I say cat? Make that cats, there will be two. A second little fellow has been selected, but he is not yet ready to come home, a little surgery awaits before we can go collect him and complete the family. I will have to introduce him in a later post.

A Dummy Battery Adapter for the Canon 20Da

Another quick project to solve a little equipment issue. I realized I had a problem the morning before I was planning to spend a night shooting astrophotos up on the mountain. The batteries for my 20Da are old and do not hold a charge, no way I was going to be able to use the camera through the night.

The Regulator Installed — The regulator circuit installed inside the battery shell and connected to the existing contacts

The camera is an older model that remains quite valuable to me as it has been adapted to shoot astrophotos. The 20Da model differed from the standard 20D in having live focus and a re-tuned red cutoff filter that allows the glowing red of nebulae to reach the sensor. After seven years I still use the camera regularly.

I have the AC power supply for the 20Da, this is what I have been using for some time now. Shooting astrophotos in the driveway allows access to AC power. For field use this will not do, I need to operate fully from battery power. The camera batteries that I do have for the camera are now at least six years old, and do not hold enough charge to last.

Without AC power available I needed something that could plug into one of my 12V field battery packs. I really did not want to cut up the existing AC power supply to create a version to be used with an external battery. Plus, Canon used odd, proprietary connectors on the supply. (I really hate it when they do that!) I can not even use parts of the AC supply without modification.

With only a few hours available I came up with a plan. A little digging showed I had all of the needed components on-hand. Off to the work bench!

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The Moon, Mars, Saturn and Spica

A nice conjunction of a crescent Moon, Mars, Saturn and the bright star Spica will grace the evening sky tonight. All four will be within 12° of each other. The two planets and the star will all be about 1st magnitude, with the Moon showing about 37% illuminated.

The same quartet will get together again next month, for an even tighter grouping.

Postcard from the Summit – Tertiary Tower

A Morning at Three Tables

With the south shores of Oahu denied us by rough conditions, we spent a day diving the north shore of the island. The specified rendezvous was a site known to local divers as Three Tables for a little shore diving. With an iPhone and Google Maps in hand, Deb and I drove across the island along unfamiliar roads to Oahu’s famous North Shore.

What greeted us was a pleasant surprise. A small, sandy beach fronted a very interesting cove. Parking was just above the beach, we would not need to carry the gear very far at all. The “Three Tables” were an obvious set of flat rocks just out from the beach.

There were quite a few divers already present, including a class just getting their certification. Our group just added to the party. Charles and Jeannie, who had been with us on the previous day’s aborted dive at the YO-257. Another visitor from Texas, Ray, joined us for the dive.

Leading the dive would be Gabe Scotti, the owner of Kaimana Divers. Christine would be his backup. While Gabe led off, Christine would play the caboose, riding herd on the group. It was a nice day to be diving, we chatted while setting up the gear. It was a relaxed, Hawaiian style morning.

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An Astronomy Discovery in the News

So a little telescope called Hubble takes a picture of a galaxy, a really distant galaxy over 10 billion lightyears away. Odd, it looks like this galaxy has gotten it’s act together and become a spiral galaxy, a lot earlier than we thought proper spiral galaxies would form. What do you do? Get some time on a bigger telescope and get some more data… Using Keck the OSIRIS spectrograph astronomers show that this is indeed a proper spiral galaxy, 10.7 billion light years away, which means 10.7 billion years in the past. The universe has just served up another surprise for astronomers, this is the sort of stuff we love.

HST/Keck false colour composite image of galaxy BX442. Credit: David Law; Dunlap Insitute for Astronomy & Astrophysics

Better yet, Keck gets a bit of good press for the discovery.

First spiral galaxy in early Universe stuns astronomers – BBC News

Earliest spiral galaxy found – CBC News

Astronomers find rare spiral galaxy in early Universe – The Sydney Morning Herald

Along with the sensible headlines there are those that play up the “This can’t be” angle of the discovery. For the most part the articles are fairly good, it is just the headlines that seem a little off, something to blame on the editors who write the headlines…

Hubble spots spiral galaxy that shouldn’t exist – Los Angeles Times

Astronomers Spot Ancient Spiral Galaxy From an Era When Spirals Should Not Exist – Popular Scince

Hubble spots rule-breaking spiral galaxy – 3 News

Headlines are always an issue in science reporting. Written by editors with a tendency to the excessive and sensational. Editors who often have little understanding of the science. We have seen what that can lead to, something that has been pleasantly rare with this latest discovery.

First Ancient Spiral Galaxy Discovered From 10.7 Billion Years Ago – Latinos Post

Is this the “first” spiral? We have no way of knowing. I have found no such quote from the astronomers involved with the discovery. The reason we study the early universe is that we do not know. This discovery shows that there could be others, perhaps even older.

There are other headlines, predictable headlines from the usual suspects. Every time science turns up some surprise, something that does not fit a simplistic view of the universe, those with an ideological agenda attempt to use the discovery to push their views… “Look at this! It disproves everything!!”, ” The scientists have it all wrong!!” Quite predictable…

Mystery galaxy could unravel Big Bang theory of creation – Catholic Online

And of course, scientists will need to look for other exceptions to the rule. If an inexplicable and significant number of premature spirals are found, then the Big Bang theory will need to be rewritten, or disposed of altogether, no matter how beloved it is today. After all, it is just a theory.

Yes, again you see the “It is Just a Theory” gambit, the creationists favorite canard. All a discovery like this proves is that the universe is a complex and fascinating place and that we still have much to learn.

“BX442 represents a link between early galaxies that are much more turbulent than the rotating spiral galaxies that we see around us. Indeed, this galaxy may highlight the importance of merger interactions at any cosmic epoch in creating grand design spiral structure.” – Alice Shapely of UCLA, co-discoverer of BX442

Postcard from Hawai’i – Waterlily

Postcard from Hawaii – Banana Smoothie

We gave away over half of them, still we have a bunch of bananas ripening in the kitchen. Bananas on cereal or just eaten plain, we are eating bananas. Our favorite treat is to make banana smoothies.

Today the recipe was three apple bananas, a cup of yoghurt with the fruit mix (blueberry and açaí), a small handful of frozen raspberries, a double handful of ice cubes, milk and a squirt of agave syrup, blend on high.

Sipping over the keyboard as I type this, I am not going to need much supper.

Postcard from the Summit – Snowing

Earliest Spiral Galaxy Surprises Astronomers

W. M. Keck press release…

In the beginning, galaxies were hot and clumpy – too hot to settle down and form grand spirals like the Milky Way and other galaxies seen in the nearby universe today. But astronomers have now been surprised by the discovery of a solitary grand design spiral galaxy in the early universe which could hold clues to how spirals start to take shape. The find was announced in a report in the July 19 edition of the journal Nature.

The ancient spiral, called BX442, was found by astronomers who first surveyed 300 distant galaxies using the Hubble Space Telescope, then followed up and confirmed using detailed observations and analyses from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

HST/Keck false colour composite image of galaxy BX442. Credit: David Law; Dunlap Insitute for Astronomy & Astrophysics

“As you go back in time to the early universe — about three billion years after the Big Bang; the light from this galaxy has been travelling to us for about 10.7 billion years —galaxies look really strange, clumpy and irregular, not symmetric” said astronomer Alice Shapley of UCLA. “The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks. Our first thought was, why is this one so different, and so beautiful?”

Not only was the spiral shape clearly visible, but by using Keck’s OSIRIS instrument (OH-Suppressing Infrared Imaging Spectrograph), astronomers were able to study different parts of BX442 and determine that it is, in fact, rotating and not just two unrelated disk galaxies along the same line of sight that give the appearance of being a single spiral galaxy.

“We first thought this could just be an illusion and that perhaps we were being led astray by the picture,” said Shapley, a coauthor on the Nature paper. “What we found when we took spectra of this galaxy is that the spiral arms do belong to this galaxy; it wasn’t an illusion. Not only does it look like a rotating spiral disk galaxy; it really is. We were blown away.”

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