Category Archives: Arizona

Backyard Bounty

I wrote about buying a new telescope mount in my last post. I ordered a Losmandy GM811G mount from Losmandy in Burbank, California. I wanted this mount for a number of reasons. It’s a proven, reliable design. It’s made in the USA. It’s made from machined aluminum, brass and stainless steel with a minimum of plastic parts. Replacement parts are readily available and support from Losmandy is great. And, unlike the Asian products, it’s been refined over the last 30 years. The Asian gear is obsolete after a few years as they constantly introduce new models on a regular basis.

Having to justify the expense of this equipment to myself, I did a lot of background research on the company and found some interesting stories there. When we were full-time RVers, I always enjoyed meeting people around the country and especially enjoyed success stories from self-employed people that pulled themselves up with hard work and ingenuity. Scott Losmandy falls into that category.

Scott owns and operates a machine shop called Hollywood General Machining (HGM). Under the HGM banner, he has a company called Porta-Jib. Porta-Jib caters to cinematographers and Hollywood movie production companies. Scott designed a track system that is portable and Porta-Jib builds an assortment of carriages that ride on these rails. The carriages are used to smoothly transport movie cameras through the set to film a scene. Some carriages are built to allow the director to be seated or stand while the carriage is raised to different heights so the director can survey the set or the scene being played. Some have articulating arms that can extend or retract cameras to suit the scene. The company is successful and well-known in Hollywood.

Meanwhile, Scott is also an avid amateur astronomer. He was disatisfied with the quality and cost of commercially available telescope mounts. In the late 70s or early 80s, he designed and built one for himself. It wasn’t long before members of his astronomy club wanted to know if he would build one for them. This led to a contract with the Celestron Corporation for Scott to supply them with mounts which they marketed and distributed. He formed the Losmandy Astronomical Products company under HGM. He invented a mounting plate that was sturdier and more rigid than the existing products and he made it universal to fit a large number of telescopes on the market. Today, many companies offer that design and it’s called a Losmandy dovetail plate.

In the 1990s, Scott’s new company broke away from Celestron and he began marketing and distributing the mounts himself. He also has a retail store, most of his sales are online nowadays. He is hands-on and adjusts each mount himself before shipping. Between Porta-Jib and Losmandy Astronomical, Hollywood General Machining is kept busy making parts.

The covid era caused quite a disruption in many manufacturing sectors. Hollywood shut down and movie production stopped. This meant Porta-Jib saw orders fall to almost nothing. Meanwhile, people stuck at home entered hobbies in unprecedented numbers – including astronomy. Losmandy Astronomical Products sales soared to the point of having up to a six-month backlog of orders to fill. By catering to two separate client bases, HGM was able to not only stay afloat, but thrive. Porta-Jib is picking up steam once again and Losmandy has whittled down the lead time for telescope mounts to about four to six weeks. I’m hoping to get a call by the end of next week telling me my mount is shipping.

I’m continuing my astronomical education – I devote hours every day to study. I started with our solar system and planetary/lunar observation, then astrophotography. Then I started learning the constellations and objects in our galaxy (The Milky Way). I’ve even reached out to distant galaxies. The techniques, equipment and software for photographing our solar system versus deep space objects are completely different and require new skillsets. Donna keeps saying that I’ve put in enough hours over the last six months to earn an Associate’s Degree in astrophotography!

We’ve had a pretty miserable winter by Arizona standards with extended cold, wet periods and only short breaks with clear skies and pleasant temperatures. This puts a damper on my astrophotography opportunities, so when they arise I tend to take advantage. Guys up north don’t have much sympathy for us desert dwellers when we complain of cold nights with temperatures dropping to 40 degrees. But to me, these temps feel very cold and I’m freezing when I have to spend hours trying to capture an image of a celestial body.

Cloudy skies can make a spectacular sunset

This week I decided to try my hand at capturing a nebula. Nebulae are fascinating to me and can be very challenging to image. There are five types of nebulae – emission nebulae, reflection nebulae, dark nebulae, planetary nebulae and supernova remnants. The first three listed all have irregular shapes. The planetary and supernova remnants are usually spherical. Planetary nebulae don’t have anything to do with planets – it’s a reference to their shape.

A nebula is mostly made of gases. The predominant gas is hydrogen alpha (Ha) followed by Oxygen III (OIII). Then there are other gases like sulphur and so on. They usually contain a certain amount of space dust as well. The Ha component appears red while the OIII appears blue. Dust can be brownish to almost black – dark nebulae are mostly dust that’s so thick light doesn’t pass through.

Nebulae can be the birthplace of stars. The gases combine into helium and other compounds creating mass. The mass creates a gravitational pull and over a period of millions of years can compress into a star. Supernova remnants are remnants of a dying star. In the final phase of a star’s lifetime, it turns into a red giant or a red dwarf before finally exploding, scattering matter in a swirling ball.

I went for the Orion Nebula (M42) in the constellation Orion. It’s located just below the three stars making up Orion’s belt, in the center of the stars forming Orion’s sword. In dark skies, people with good eyesight can see this nebula as a dim smudge. Most people would mistake it for a dim star. M42 is a considered a good beginner’s target because it’s easy to locate, relatively bright and fairly large. It’s over 1300 light years away from Earth and about 24 light years wide. It’s estimated to be three million years old.

To capture this image, I ran a series of 105-second exposures. I made 50 exposures and kept 49 – I had to discard one because an airplane or satellite crossed in front of my telescope leaving a white streak of light. It took about two and half hours to capture about 86 minutes of data. Processing the data into an image took me several more hours. It’s not the best image of the Orion nebula I’ve seen, but for a beginner’s first attempt, I think it’s more than good enough.

Orion Nebula – Messier catalog number M42

This was taken behind our house with much light pollution and a bright moon. I used a narrow duo-band filter to block unwanted light while allowing Ha and OIII bandwidths to pass. The telescope was my WIlliam Optic Z73 with a ZWO ASI533MC Pro camera.

Donna has almost completely harvested her first growth from the raised vegetable garden bed. She harvested collard greens, broccoli and tomatoes and is ready for round two – more tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, green beans, lettuce, spinach and herbs. She’s also staying busy with tennis and golf and has really upped her tennis game. Later this month, she’ll be rated by the tennis club. The rating process is important – it will determine which league she’s qualified for and what groups she plays with. I’m still coaching my pickleball clinic on Thursdays and playing two or three days a week – weather permitting.

For Valentine’s Day, I bought Donna a special treat – a box of chocolate covered strawberries! She tries to avoid too many sweets, but who can resist chocolate covered strawberries?

Donna hasn’t let up on her culinary skills. She made a couple of new dishes that were home runs in February. First up is a Japanese curry chicken. This took me back to my childhood – my mom made this dish and it was always a favorite.

Then there was an excellent grilled shrimp and sides of garlicky collard greens and cheesy grits.

Another chicken favorite was this chicken marsala plate.

Chicken marsala with broccoli and fresh bread

Another excellent shrimp dish was this one – it’s called citrus skillet shrimp seasoned with fresh orange from our tree, shallots and jalapenos served with broccoli from our garden. Lots of homegrown bounty.

One more dish – grilled fennel-crusted rack of lamb served with grilled baby bok choy and sweet potato mash.

We’re expecting rain this afternoon with a high of only 57 degrees. The rain will continue overnight and into Thursday morning with the cool temperatures hanging around through Friday. By Sunday the forecast calls for 70 degrees. Yay!

Weaver’s Needle Viewpoint – Revisited

My last post neglected to mention Donna’s performance with the Viewpoint Concert Band. They had their January concert – the second of the season. The February concert will happen next Saturday afternoon. Donna is no longer the “new girl” on clarinet. There are a couple of musicians behind her now in the clarinet section. She’s also a board member for the band.

Donna’s raised garden bed is producing some fine veggies for us. Some of the broccoli bolted, but we’ll be able to harvest plenty. We have lots of fresh, yummy tomatoes. She’s thinking about her next round of plants now. The worm bins are thriving and I’m ready to start harvesting worm castings.

My astrophotography efforts are really improving at a rapid rate. Donna figures I spend about 50 hours per week studying – that might be an over-estimation, but there’s much to learn. I’ve made a few more trips up to the Weaver’s Needle Viewpoint to set up in darker skies. Light pollution puts a real damper on astrophotography efforts. It’s not impossible to capture good images from the city, but it’s a lot harder.

I took advantage of the darker skies at the Weaver’s Needle Viewpoint. It’s less than half an hour away from home, but it’s much darker. There is a scale for rating light pollution called the Bortle scale. It’s numbered from one to nine. Nine would be looking up from the center of a large metropolis with tons of artificial light. A Bortle one area would be absolute wilderness with no artificial light. Our home at Viewpoint is a Bortle seven area, while Weaver’s Needle Viewpoint is a Bortle five. I captured the Andromeda Galaxy again and made a big improvement over my first backyard attempt.

Andromeda is is the nearest galaxy to our Milky Way and is about 2.5 million light years away. It’s size is a mind-boggling 220,000 light years in diameter and it’s made up of an estimated trillion stars. The larger, brighter stars in the photo are from our galaxy and are much closer than Andromeda, whose stars appear as dust.

Donna accompanied me on my next trip to the viewpoint. She enjoyed a short hike toward the Needle while I was setting up, before it got dark. After dark the temperature dropped and she was too cold to stay outdoors, even with a blanket. She retreated to the Jeep and read her Kindle. Meanwhile, another astronomer showed up – his name is Marty. We compared notes and went about our business. I targeted the Pleiades star cluster (Seven Sisters or M45).

The first time I tried to capture Pleiades, I was pretty much clueless and approached it like I was imaging a planet. It was a failure.

Failed attempt at Pleiades – no color or nebulosity present

I’ve learned much and upgraded my equipment – both hardware and software. Deep sky objects cannot be captured with the same techniques used for planets. DSO requires accurate guiding to stay precisely on target during long exposures. My guiding software showed more error than I liked on the declination axis. I researched and learned how to tighten up the backlash in the geartrain and I made it better. I think the factory errs on the side of looseness to prevent any chance of binding.

Last Wednesday, I took another try at Pleiades and made a huge improvement.

You might find the term nebulosity unfamiliar. It’s derived from nebula (nebulae is plural). It’s an astronomy term for areas of space that emit or reflect light. They can be made up of gases, dust particles, ice crystals or any combination of these. They are precursers to star formation. Pleiades is about 440 light years away from earth.

In my last post, I mentioned the telescope mount is the most important piece of equipment – it’s more critical than even the telescope used. A poorly made or overloaded mount is a disaster that only leads to frustration and heartache. I learned this the hard way with my first gear purchase. Then I upgraded to a SkyWatcher HEQ5 German Equatorial Mount (GEM). I’ve been capturing deep sky images with my William Optics Z73 telescope and ZWO ASI533 cooled camera. This rig weighs about 10 pounds.

The HEQ5 mount is rated by Skywatcher at 30 pounds capacity. Most experienced astronomers say that is a stretch – okay for visual use, but for DSO images you shouldn’t exceed 20 pounds, 15 pounds is better. My AstroTech At115EDT with camera gear and guidescope push that limit.

So, I dove into the deep end again. I ordered a Losmandy GM811 GEM. It has a 50-pound capacity. Losmandy products are made in Burbank, California and are not mass produced like the Asian-sourced mounts that are most popular (due to price/value considerations). Scott Losmandy is the owner of the company and he, along with another technician or two build each mount by hand. I read that his company consists of five or six employees. They machine their own parts and assemble everything. It will take five or six weeks for my mount to be built – he always has a backlog of orders.

Scott is an avid astronomer and a retrograde lover of all things mechanical. He has a collection of old mechanical devices and he admires the ingenuity and quality of things built in the “old days”. He applies this thinking into the mounts he builds – no plastic, no castings – everything is machined from aluminum, brass or steel alloys. He does employ modern software for automated functions of the mount. His electronics and software are developed by a couple of guys in Germany.

Marty, the astronomer I met at Weaver’s Needle Viewpoint will buy my Skywatcher HEQ5 when my Losmandy mount arrives. Everyone will be happy!

Donna and I booked an AirBNB for two nights in May. It’s outside of Tucson and they have an observatory! They are good with me bringing my astrophotography gear to set up on their property. I’m looking forward to it.

Donna came up with a super idea for summer getaways when the valley heats up. She signed us up with Trusted Housesitters. It’s a website that lists housesitting opportunities. They charge an annual membership fee of $129 to background check and vet people for housesitting. They list houses for members looking for a housesitter and Donna peruses the listings to see what might be a fit for us. The people listing the house can look at our background from the bio we posted and decide if we would meet their needs.

Most of the time something like walking, feeding and caring for pets is involved. We don’t derive any income from it, but we have a free home to stay in and we can pick and choose where and when we want to do it. We just agreed to house sit in Prescott, Arizona in late June. Prescott will be much cooler than here in the valley. Additionally, this house is on a 12-acre property about 20 miles from town in a dark sky area. I will be bringing astronomy gear along!

Like most folks, we’ll be parked in front of the TV later today for the Super Bowl. I’m not real excited about it, but I hope it’s a competitive game. The weather has been nice – highs around 70. We should see upper 70s today, but another cold spell is forecast for next week, with warmer temps returning by next weekend.

A Big Step Forward

Daniel commented about the lack of photos in my last post. He was right – to paraphrase a boss I once worked for – “Too many words, not enough graphics.” Okay, here’s a recent photo of Donna’s raised vegetable garden.

Broccoli in the foreground, tomato plant in the back

This is a shot of the worm bin in the raised garden bed. When I feed the worms, I bury the kitchen scraps along with some used coffee grounds, ground egg shells and shredded cardboard. The used coffee filter is there to mark where I last buried the feed – it will eventually break down and be consumed just like the cardboard.

When I fluffed the soil and fed that bin yesterday, every handful of soil had dozens of juvenile worms. I have no doubt the population in this bed exceeds 1,000 worms now and it keeps growing.

I also mentioned the external worm bin I created out of fabric garden pots.

20-gallon fabric garden pot, doubled up and converted to a worm bin

I started with 600 red wigglers in this bin. It’s about five weeks behind the in-garden bin, but I saw several worms yesterday that appeared to be ready to drop cocoons. I think a population explosion is about to erupt in this bin.

Look closely and you can see a few worms lounging on the surface. Worms do not like sunlight – red wigglers usually hang around below the surface to a depth of six to eight inches. In another month or two I expect to start sifting a pound or more of worm casting garden fertilzer from this bin weekly.

I started discussing astrophotography equipment in my last post. Astronomy can be as simple as looking up at night and maybe sketching the constellations – or maybe using binoculars to look at the moon or planets. Once you get a proper telescope, there are many paths you might want to follow. Photographing the night sky can become a long, winding road with many potential potholes and expenses along the way.

Once I went down this rabbit hole, there was no turning back. The sky is the limit when it comes to equipment and costs. It doesn’t have to be super expensive, but be aware – it ain’t gonna be cheap!

The mount for your telescope is arguably the most important piece of equipment. It needs to be very solid, reliable and have the ability to track the apparent movement of the celestial objects. This is not too difficult with the moon or planets – they are large, bright objects and can be followed fairly easily with a simple altitude-azimuth type mount. You may have to make periodic manual corrections after a few minutes of tracking.

If you want to image deep sky objects (DSO) like star clusters, galaxies or nebulae, you need a more sophisticated mount. A German equatorial mount (GEM) is most often used. This type of mount needs to precisely aligned with the celestial pole – north pole in the northern hemisphere. This type of mount tracks in two directions, one called Right Ascension (RA) and the other is Declination. This allows the mount to compensate for the rotation of the earth as it tracks the apparent movement of objects in the sky. Stars appear to “rise” in the east and “set” in the west. In reality, they only appear that way due to the earth’s rotation. Additionally, their position in the sky will be different as the earth revolves around the sun, making seasonal star charts necessary.

I have a SkyWatcher HEQ5 Pro GEM mount. It has two electric stepper motors to adjust RA and declination respectively. It has an onboard control unit to point at objects in the night sky and track them. This works okay – it’s more than good enough for planets and the moon – but it requires some manual correction. It comes with a hand controller to direct the mount. To use this, I fitted my telescopes with a red dot aiming device that I aligned precisely with the telescope. That way, I could easily find the desired object in the red dot non-magnifying lens, then fine tune the telescope position. It’s a big sky up there and it’s easy to get lost trying to find an object through the small field of view of a telescope.

Trying to find and track DSO targets is much more difficult. In the light pollution found in any populated area, many targets cannot be seen with the naked eye. A red dot device is useless if you can’t even see the object. Upgrades are needed.

First, I ditched the hand controller and I bypassed the onboard control unit of my mount. I now control it with a laptop, ASCOM drivers and different software. I have a program called Cartes du Ciel (French for Sky Chart) that I use to find my target. The target coordinates are then imported to a program called NINA (nightime imaging and astronomy – think of the second “N” as an acronym for “and”, like Guns’N’Roses). NINA is my main software and it directs everything else. I set up a sequence in NINA and it connects to Cartes du Ciel, then activates a program called EQMod to control the mount and another program called PHD2 that handles the tracking calculations. Once these programs are properly configured and working together, I can get the ball rolling with a few key strokes.

But, it’s not so simple. Now, instead of a red dot finder, I have a guide scope mounted on the telescope. The guide scope is a mini-telescope, the one I use is an Altair 60mm ‘scope with a focal length of 225mm. I have a ZWO brand ASI120MM mini-camera on it. This ‘scope doesn’t need to be precisely aligned with the main telescope as long as it is rigidly mounted and moves with the main telescope tube with minimal flexure.

The mini-camera is connected to my laptop and PHD2 uses this camera to identifiy stars. I run through a calibration sequence that allows PHD2 to “learn” how to keep a target centered in the frame. This can take up to 30 minutes to complete. Once that calibration is done, I start NINA and it points the telescope to the target I imported from Cartes du Ciel. Once on target, PHD2 identifies up to nine nearby stars and “learns” where in the sky we are pointing. It tracks those stars to keep them in position in the guidescope, thus the main ‘scope stays in proper position to track the target. Through EQMod, it will send tiny pulses of electricity to the mount stepper motors to keep the ‘scope on target. It’s pretty amazing.

Once this is accomplished, NINA starts the imaging process. Deep Sky Objects are very far away and usually faint – if you can see them with the naked eye or even binoculars, they look like cloudy smudges in space. To resolve them into a usable imge, it takes a lot of time to collect enough light photons emitted by the object onto the camera sensor. We need long exposures usually taking anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes or more. This is why precise guiding is necessary. If we don’t remain aligned with the target, the apparent movement of stars across the sky from the earth’s rotation will make the stars turn from pinpoints into streaks across the image.

The next issue that arises with long exposure time is heat generated by the electronic sensor. As it heats up, anomolies start appearing – some hot pixels will develop and white spots can appear in what should be a dark area or color shifts will randomly appear. To avoid this, DSO cameras use thermo-electric cooling (TEC). This is usually done with a Peltier cooling device – it doesn’t use any gases or fluids, it totally electronic. My ZWO ASI533MC Pro camera has this type of cooling and I run it at 10 degrees fahrenheit. NINA monitors the sensor temperature and controls the TEC to maintain that temperature.

Planetary or lunar imaging is so simple by comparison, but it has its challenges as well. It took me about three months of continuous improvement before I had an image of Jupiter that I was satisfied with – it’s my header image for this blog now. I expect DSO to take at least a year before I can start recording useful images.

Friday night was the first time I got everything working as it should – all of the software calibrated and communicated together and the ‘scope found a target I couldn’t even see. I programmed a sequence of 50 exposures at 90 seconds each. In between each exposure, the software did something called dithering. This is where PHD2 moves the telescope a miniscule distance – the image shifts on the camera sensor by a few microns. This small movement allows correction of any hot pixels in the process, as they don’t continuously appear in the exact same spot of every frame. PHD2 then waits several seconds to make sure there’s no residual vibration in the ‘scope from the tiny movement, then it takes the next exposure. Some guys will run their ‘scope all night long to get the maximum amount of exposures to process into an image.

Processing the data acquired through the digital camera sensor requires another suite of software and it’s a whole ‘nother learning experience. I won’t get into that now, as I’m just beginning to learn.

Unfortunately, on Friday night, I wanted to check the status of my Bluetti power supply after a couple of hours. It provides portable power – 120-volt AC for my laptop. 12-volt DC for the ASI533MC cooled camera and several 5-volt DC USB ports. I pressed the wrong button and it cut off power, shutting my camera and USB connections off and killing my session after 23 of the planned 50 frames were shot. I was happy that I had everything working right up that point, but the lack of frames and exposure time meant the resulting image was poor. It lacked color and detail, but I felt like I made a big step forward and it will only get better from this point.

A weak image of the Andromeda Galaxy – 2.5 million light years from earth

If the forecast holds true, I think I’ll head out on Thursday or Friday to the Weaver’s Needle Viewpoint and try another shot at DSO from a darker area. I think I’ll use my AT 115EDT instead of the WO Z73 telescope. I have quick release mounts on both telescopes so I can switch the guide ‘scope and camera between them instead duplicating equipment.

I’m making progress on another front. It’s been three weeks since my gall bladder surgery and I’ve regained a lot of strength and stamina. The surgeon, Dr. Garner, warned me against doing anything strenuous or heavy lifting for four weeks. He said “Don’t do anything that makes you constrict your core or grunt.” I’m taking heed of that warning. Donna is helping me keep my strength up with her usual delicious, nutricious culinary skills.

Here is a rice bowl with salmon, cabbage, nori, cucumber and avocado drizzled with a sesame marinade as presented.

And here it is with everything tossed.

Fresh collard greens from the garden.

Collard greens saute in olive oil with garlic, chicken broth and apple cider vinegar. Served with grilled shrimp with chile and garlic and cheesy grits.

Grilled shrimp, cheesy grits and collard green saute

We’re looking forward to a visit from Alana and Kevin – they’re coming down from Washington next weekend. In March, my daughter Shauna, her husband Gabe and my granddaughter Petra will visit from Bermuda.

Hopefully, next time I’ll have a better DSO image to share.

Edit: After playing around with Astro Pixel Processor I was able to slightly improve the Andromeda image.

Dirt and Sky

My energy levels and activity have been fairly low lately. Recovering from surgery is taking longer than I expected – I guess that’s what happens as you age. A couple of times per day I find myself overcome with fatigue and need a short power nap – but I’m making progress.

Speaking of progress, Donna’s raised garden bed is producing some good looking vegetables. She has tomatoes ripening, broccoli that looks amazing and collard greens along with a nice basil plant. It’s taking a bit longer for the veggies to ripen than we expected – the unusually cold weather has had a hand in that.

While the garden is Donna’s project, I manage the worm farming. We have an in-bed worm bin in the garden. The worm bin has openings in the sides that allow the worms to come and go freely and travel throughout the garden. I feed the worms in the bin, so the majority of them reside there.

The composting worms are red wigglers and they create an ideal soil with organic, natural fertilizer. The worms require a diet of nitrogen-based material – this is derived from kitchen vegetable scraps, peat moss and manure. They also need carbon based nutrients – I provide this by adding shredded cardboard to their bin. That’s right, they convert kitchen waste and cardboard into ideal garden soil. As they consume these waste products, they leave behind worm castings – a polite descriptor for worm poo. It contains beneficial bacteria as well as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium – the NPK values you see on commercial fertilizers. Worm castings are natural, organic fertilizer that will not burn your garden plants – you can plant in 100% worm castings to great effect!

I started Donna’s in-bed worm bin with 300 red wigglers from Arizona Worm Farm. These worms dispersed – probably because her garden soil had so many nutrients they didn’t need to stay in the bin to feed. I added 300 more worms two weeks later and I feed the bin regularly.

Worm reproduction is interesting. Worms are hermaphrodites – that is they have both male and female reproductive organs. But it still takes two to tango. Once they’ve completed the dance, both participants are fertilized. They each produce cocoons that can hatch two to five worms. So, let’s say that one-third of the original 600 worms have an encounter – that’s 200 worms that will produce cocoons. Let’s say that two worms survive from each cocoon. Our 200 worms just produced 400 offspring. I think this represents a low estimate of the worms’ reproductive activity. For the past few weeks, every time I aerate the worm bin and add food, I find bunches of young worms. I have little doubt that Donna’s garden houses well over 1,000 worms now and the population will continue to grow.

Worm colonies are self regulating – that is, when the population reaches a saturation point where food and space become less than abundant, they slow or stop reproduction. Pretty handy.

Five weeks after I started the in-bed worm bin, I created a separate external worm bin. I used 20-gallon fabric pots called grow bags. I doubled two together for strength, added some garden soil mix, peat moss, perlite and cardboard. I started this bin with 600 red wigglers with the intention of creating a steady supply of worm castings for Donna’s potted plants and whatever else she grows.

Enough about worms – let’s talk astrophotography. When I decided to pursue astronomy last summer, I didn’t really know what I wanted from it. Like many beginners, I figured I should get as large a telescope as I could afford and skip past the beginners’ “toy” telescopes. I’ll have to delve into a few ‘scope dimensions to explain this, but I’ll skip the math equations.

My first scope was a Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector – it’s what’s known as a catadioptic telescope – often shorted to cat or just SCT (Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope). The Celestron NexStar 8SE I bought has a large objective (that’s the front lens opening on a refractor or the mirror size of a reflector type ‘scope) of 8-inches (203mm). It has a focal length of a whopping 2,032mm. Objective diameter and focal length are factors in determining how much magnification the ‘scope can provide.

I had a lot of fun looking at the moon and planets like Saturn and Jupiter. But I also found out that high levels of magnification also means unwanted atmospheric disturbances are also magnified. I soon discovered that I was most interested in taking photographs of the celestial objects rather than observing them through an eyepiece.

I bought a dedicated planetary astrophotography camera and captured a lucky image of Saturn. That really got me excited about astrophotography. I soon learned how lucky that image was. Most of the time, I couldn’t get the moon or planets in sharp enough focus as atmospheric conditions like temperature gradients and higher level winds (jet stream) made the image go in and out of focus.

The moon and planets are bright enough to capture with very short exposures. The trick was to get focused as sharp as possible, then start capturing frames with short exposure times – around 10 milliseconds or so. I would take 3,000 or more frames. Later, I sorted these frames by quality level in a software program, threw out the poor examples lacking detail and combined the best images in a stacking program. This yielded acceptable results, but they were still lacking.

There are a lot of great YouTube videos where experienced astrophotographers offer advice and tutorials. I learned that most of them agreed that starting out with a large, high magnification ‘scope would only lead to frustration. They almost universally agreed that a smaller refractor-type telescope would yield better results and even forgive some beginner errors. This allows far less frustration as you gain experience.

So, I found a small William Optics ZenithStar refractor with a 73mm objective and 430mm focal length. This was a treat for lunar photography, but a little small for planetary use. If you wanted to go past our solar system, it would excel at some nebulae and distant galaxy images – but I was still working on planetary photography.

Then I found my Goldilocks ‘scope – not too big and not so small. I bought an Astro-Tech 115EDT. This has an objective lens diamter of 115mm and a focal length of 805mm. I love this scope and also my W.O. Z73. I’ve become a refractor guy instead of a reflector ‘scope guy.

Here’s how the three ‘scopes fit my needs. The small W.O. Z73 with a focal length of 430mm works for lunar and deep-sky objects (DSO). The Astro-Tech 115EDT with a focal length of 805mm works for lunar and planetary – it will also be useful for DSO. The Celestron 8SE with a focal length of 2032mm is good for planetary and deep sky if the atmospheric conditions allow it.

But wait, there’s more. With the 115 EDT, I can use an accessory called a Barlow that effectively doubles the focal length from 805mm to 1610mm. Barlows have plusses and minuses, but I won’t delve into that here. It gives me enough magnification for great planetary images. With the 8SE, I can use another accessory called a focal reducer that effectively shortens the focal length. I have a 0.63 focal reducer for it that shortens the 2032mm focal length to 1280mm. So I have a lot of options now – focal lengths of 430mm, 805mm, 1280mm, 1610mm and 2032mm. That’s why I have three telescopes – and five focal length options.

A few weeks ago, I went to an area with less light pollution and tried to capture a deep-sky image of the Pleiades – a star cluster also called the Seven Sisters. My planetary experiences were no help here. DSO are a different game and have completely different requirements. Instead of short exposures of only milliseconds, you need long exposures – several minutes for each frame.

These long exposure create new difficulties and requirements to overcome them. Due to the earth constantly rotating, you must be able to accurately track the celestial position of your target. Otherwise, stars would go from pin-points to streaks across the image.

Digital cameras use sensor chips to convert photons of light into electrical impulses that can be recorded as data and later decoded into images. Astrophotography cameras typically use sensors developed by Sony Corporation and they are available in many configurations. My planetary camera uses a small chip size and doesn’t require cooling as the short exposure times don’t create much heat in the chipset. However, it doesn’t work well for long exposures as the chip overheats and creates noise in the image – that is, unwanted artifacts and false color or random white points in an otherwise black portion of the image.

Astrophotography cameras for DSO have cooled sensors. They usually have a thermo-electric (Peltier) cooling system that doesn’t use any liquid or gas cooling medium, it’s strictly electrical. This increases the size and weight of the camera not to mention the cost.

I went for it and bought a cooled DSO camera and a host of other accroutrements to begin DSO imaging. I run the cooling system of my ZWO ASI533MC deep sky astrophotography camera at a temperature of -12 celsius – that’s right, below freezing – it’s about 10 degrees fahrenheit.

This post has become too long-winded, so I’ll continue the DSO journey in another post. I think I’m ready for a nap now.

William Optics Z73 and tracking ‘scope set up for DSO imaging – I’ll go into the set up details in another post

Three Trips Over the Holiday

We’ve had a few activities outside of the daily norm here over the past two months – some good, others not so much. In chronological order, we get to start with the fun stuff.

Donna and I booked a flight out of Mesa Gateway Airport to Spokane, Washington on December 9th. We flew on Allegiant Air – they have a direct flight to and from Spokane out of Mesa, but you’re limited to only a couple of flights scheduled per week. Our best choice was to depart on Friday, December 9th and return on Monday, December 12th. Our reason for heading up to the snowy north country was the graduation of our granddaughter Lainey from Washington State University College of Nursing.

Like her mother, my oldest daughter Alana, Lainey earned her RN-BSN (Bachelor of Science in Nursing) Degree.

We picked up the rental car around 3:30pm and it seemed like we should have plenty of time to reach the Cowles Auditorium at Whitworth University for the convocation and pinning of nurses. But wait, this is the snowy north. The roads were treacherous, covered with snow and ice. A light snow was falling and it was dark. I chose an alternate route to avoid the inevitable rush hour traffic on the usual routes into north Spokane.

We had little traffic, but most of what we encountered was understandably moving along slowly. Occasionally, a testosterone-filled driver of a lifted four-wheel drive truck would blast past – disregarding the fact that he couldn’t stop that three-ton mass much quicker than anyone else. We made a shortcut crossing over a residential street from one main thoroughfare to another. Unfortunately, a clueless driver stopped in the middle of this narrow street at the top of a small rise. The car behind it made it worse when he went around her left side, slewed diagonally, stopping to block the rest of the roadway. Luckily, they were able to get the first car to the side of the road after several minutes. I wasn’t about to back down the short hill into a busy street to reroute.

We made it to the commencement and pinning just in time. From there, we drove to the east valley where Alana and her husband, Kevin had rented a large AirBnB home for the weekend. There were enough rooms for everyone, including Kevin’s son Kyle, his mother Donetta, Alana’s mother LuAnn and her husband Jerry and Lainey’s sister Gabi.

The actual WSU Commencement was scheduled for Saturday in Pullman, Washington. We woke to winter storm warnings and possible treacherous driving conditions on the way to Pullman. Lainey gave everyone a free pass and said she’d understand if anyone wanted to forego what was sure to be a two-hour-plus drive in bad conditions for a two-hour ceremony. Donna and I took the pass.

On Saturday night, we went out for a celebratory dinner at Twigs Bistro & Martini Bar. Our party numbered a baker’s dozen – I think we had a table of 13. The dinner was fun and the food was great. Back at the BnB, it was party time. I didn’t take any photos – don’t ask me why. I guess I’m out of the habit of making a record of our activities.

On Sunday morning, everyone packed up to head home. We checked in early at the Hampton Inn on the west side, near the airport. We couldn’t fly home until Monday due to the Allegiant Air schedule. It was worth the extra day to be able to fly out from and into Mesa Gateway. It was hassle-free and only a 15-minute drive from our place AND half the price of flying out of Phoenix Sky Harbor.

The next event was less pleasant. Donna’s parents live in Bennington, Vermont and are in their twilight years. Her mom had medical issues arise that resulted in brief hospital stay. When she came home, they needed assistance. Donna’s sister Sheila flew out for several days, then realized they weren’t ready to cope on their own. So Donna flew to Vermont on December 19th to take over with the intention of returning on Christmas Day.

Her parents’ needs exceeded her expectations and although Donna devoted 24/7 attention, her mom wasn’t improving. She made the decision to extend her stay until New Year’s Day. It was a good thing, because then her dad took a turn for the worse. They are both getting help every day now while Donna and her sisters try to arrange for them to move to assisted living. While Donna was working herself to exhaustion, I had nothing but time on my hands over the holidays.

On Thursday, December 22nd, I packed up my two refractor telescopes, mount and gear and headed up to the Weaver’s Needle Viewpoint and rest area to try my hand at deep-sky astrophotography from a darker, less light-polluted area. I failed miserably. Deep-sky astrophotography is a whole ‘nother world from planetary or lunar imaging. It requires different gear, software and techniques. For the next couple of weeks, the weather deteriorated so I spent the time studying the subject.

During the day, I would read articles and watch YouTube tutorials to try to figure out this hobby. Eventually, I had my ideas on what I needed as far as software and some hardware. I would study by day and in the evening I’d shop online, cocktail in hand. Most of the software I intended to use is available as freeware. However, you can’t do much in the way of hands-on learning with it unless you have the necessary hardware. I started spending money. I won’t go into the hardware details here – that’ll be another subject for another post.

I did buy a dedicated deep-sky astrophotography camera. I also needed a guide scope to accurately stay on target during long-frame exposures. This miniature telescope needs its own camera to track stars. It goes on and on. I took my time deciding on gear. I wanted to buy once, cry once, instead of just buying based on price only to have to upgrade later.

For a guide scope, I settled on the Altair 60mm guide scope with a focal length of 225mm. Again, I’ll go into more detail on this decision in another post. It was only available in England. I placed the order and was happy to see DHL delivered it within a week.

Altair 600mm guide scope with anodized aluminum mounting rings – Mont Blanc pen for scale

The guide scope will ride piggy-back on whichever primary scope I’m using at the time.

Donna returned on New Year’s Day after an uneventful travel day. I’m not sure if she was surprised to find I had added a bunch of new gear. She needed a few days of rest – she had been a 24/7 live-in caretaker for two weeks straight!

The last event I want to relate is somewhat bizarre and very unpleasant. On Sunday, January 8th, I woke up and thought it’s just another day. I had breakfast and coffee as usual and settled in front of the widescreen TV in the Arizona room for the last weekend of the NFL season.

Around 10:30am, I had a bloating sensation in my belly. It wasn’t very comfortable. By noon, my stomach was somewhat distended and I had no appetite. The bloating started to hurt a little. Later, my back ached as well as my lower ribcage and right shoulder. By dinner time, I knew something wasn’t right – it seemed like more than just indigestion.

When I went to bed at 9:30pm, I couldn’t get comfortable. If I lay flat on my back, the pain along my upper abdomen-lower rib cage was unbearable. Donna asked if I thought I needed to go to the ER and I said yes. I don’t take a trip to the ER lightly. My daughter Alana is an ER nurse and I’ve heard so many stories of people abusing the idea of medical emergency.

We went to Banner Baywood hospital which is only a few miles away from here. As I waited to check in, I couldn’t help overhearing the guy ahead of me. He was complaining of a persistent cough. When asked about when this condition started, he said, “About a month ago.” There you go – he’s been coughing for a month and instead of making an appointment to check it out during that time, he decides now it’s an emergency situation. I don’t know anything about his condition or final disposition, but it didn’t seem like a reasonable course of action to me.

After waiting for about 90 minutes – my pain level continuing to increase by the minute – I was called back for an EKG. I told them there was no way I could lie flat on my back without pain management. They made do with me propped up and suffering extreme pain in the upper right quadrant of my abdomen. Then I was sent back to wait some more.

Eventually I was called back to an exam room. A young female PA conducted the exam. She was very competent and quickly zeroed in on a possible gall bladder issue. She ordered an ultrasound and also chest x-ray to rule out other possibilities. Once they had the ultrasound results, things started moving. I was given pain injections while a treatment plan was developed. It’s a bit blurry in my mind, but the way I remember it, they gave me 50mcg of fentanyl before I had the ultrasound. This did nothing to dull the pain. I later read that 50mcg is a minimal dose for someone my size.

Later they switched to dilaudid, then morphine injections. They moved me to 6th floor and scheduled surgery. I met the surgeon, Dr. Garner around 8:30am. He was pushing to get me into the OR ASAP. I was in pre-op a little past 9am and in surgery by 10am. In pre-op, I told the anesthesiologist that transferring me to a supine position on the operating table would be more painful than I could bear. He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll see to it so you won’t feel a thing.” He was right. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in recovery.

Dr. Garner was concerned that an open-type surgery would be required to sucessfully remove my gall bladder, but he told me he would do his best laproscopically first. He managed to succeed. He found what he suspected. The ultrasound revealed a thickening of the perimeter walls of the gall bladder. This indicates infection and possible gangrene. He said the gall bladder had many gall stones and the walls were dangerously gangrenous. He told me that certain infections can create necrosis and gangrene within 24 to 48 hours! I hadn’t had any previous symptoms that I recognized.

In hindsight, I may have had referred pain in my right shoulder and back during pickleball over the past couple of weeks, but who would associate that with gall stones and gall bladder infection? Dr. Garner told me that life-threatening sepsis was a real possibility if the surgery hadn’t taken place in time. I didn’t have any time to spare!

I spent the next two nights at Banner Baywood Hospital. I give the nursing staff a huge thank you! They were awesome – competent and attentive to my needs. Dr. Garner was great as well. The other doctors I have to say weren’t so impressive. They assign what they call a “hospitalist” to each patient. However, my hospitalist was a different doctor each day that spent about 30 seconds looking at my chart, listening to my lungs (which the nurses did several times a day) and then moving on to the next patient. In the old days, we would have what was called an attending physician that was more in-tune with the patients on his rounds. It seemed to me the hospitalist was more concerned in keeping the hospital out of trouble than really taking care of the patient.

I’ve been resting and taking scheduled antibiotics and pain mangement since I returned home on Wednesday, January 11th. They gave me a presciption for oxycodone, but I’ve avoided using it. I haven’t had good experiences with that drug. I’m managing pain with a cocktail of tylenol (500mg) and ibuprofen (2 x 200 mg tablets) every six hours. The tylenol knocks back the pain and combining it with ibuprofen fights inflammation and further relieves pain. I learned this at the hospital and it’s surprisingly effective.

I took the last of the antibiotic today and am gald to put that behind me. I’m still battling bouts of fatigue as I recover and type this – I’m feeling rather dull-witted at the moment. Tomorrow I have a follow-up with Dr. Garner and he’ll remove the drain tube from my abdomen which I’ve had since the surgery. From there, with any luck, I’ll be back up to speed in a couple of weeks.

It’s raining here today and probably will continue through the night. It should clear up by tomorrow afternoon. It has been an unusually wet winter to date – we’re more than a tenth of an inch above normal for the entire month and we’re only halfway through it. It doesn’t look like we’ll see 70 degrees for the remainder of the month, but I can’t complain about high 60s in January.

Disaster Averted

We had a near disaster with this site. For the past month or so, I’ve been receiving notifications several times per day telling me that the site is unresponsive or offline followed by another notification saying the site is back up and running. A couple of weeks ago, I tried to log into the site and kept getting a database error. Donna looked into the site back-ups in WordPress and Jetpack, but the site no longer existed!

Donna did some research and found several other people complaining of the same issues with their sites on our host provider which is Bluehost. She contacted Bluehost every day for three days and got the same response every time – she was told they had server issues and no time frame for resolution of the problem! I thought all was lost.

This morning, Donna found the site back up and running – no explanation for it, but we’re thankful we didn’t lose nine years of archived posts. Actually, I’ve been struggling a bit with thoughts for posts. We aren’t on the road, so I can’t write about new adventures across the country. We’ve settled into life at Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort. It seems so ordinary.

Take our basic transportation for example. When we first became full-time Rvers, we had a Kymco scooter for our daily driver. We used it to go shopping and sightseeing. Later we upgraded to a Can-Am Spyder three-wheeled vehicle. It was a fun and sporty ride, but it also had limitations. We followed that with a 1972 MG Midget. Now we had four wheels under us and far fewer limitations. We needed to trailer the Midget behind our motorhome to have a vehicle as we moved about.

Later, we sold the trailer and bought a Nissan Frontier pickup truck which we towed behind the coach. This gave us a reasonably comfortable ride with no concerns over weather conditions – and it was easy to hook up.

Now that we no longer have a need to tow a vehicle, I replaced the truck with a SUV – a Jeep Compass. This feels like a luxury car to us after eight years of compromise with vehicles that would fit our nomadic needs. I like the amenities the Compass offers and I like the styling as well.

My friend, Peter Swingle, posted a picture of a poster that really made me think twice about modern styling. Compact SUVs are ubiquitous and they all look so similar, it seems that automotive styling is dead. Looking at the poster, I had to wonder if the form has followed function to a logical conclusion and there’s no place for innovation, or are we just stuck in a copy cat world. Bicycles come to mind – the bicycle frame settled into a basic format that’s been relatively unchanged for a hundred years – the odd recumbent type here and there notwithstanding.

Not much innovation here – photo from Peter Swingle’s Facebook post

So, we’ve become quite ordinary. We no longer live an extraordinary life on the road with less-than-mainstream transportation. We are right in there among the average American – although we still have the Midget. That leaves me struggling for topics to post about.

That’s not to say we’ve retired to the rocking chair on the patio. We are still very active. Donna plays tennis on a regular basis, she joined the women’s golf league, she plays clarinet in the Viewpoint Concert Band and she volunteers with the Residents of Viewpoint Association. In her spare time, she helps elderly residents and also does some pet-sitting.

I have fewer activities, but stay occupied. I play pickleball several times per week and coach a pickleball clinic every Thursday. My main interest lately has been astronomy and I’ve been on a steep learning curve. It’s hard to start this hobby – there are so many considerations with regard to equipment and deciding what you really want to see. I did some research, but was still woefully unprepared. Many experienced astronomers recommend joining a club and finding a mentor.

I joined the East Valley Astronomy Club, but I’m not all that gregarious and I’m not the type to get too involved with club activities. When I started out, I thought I knew what I wanted. I went for a reflector-type of telescope – a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope (SCT) to be precise. A SCT passes light through a glass lens at the front called a corrector. The light travels to a primary mirror at the other end of the ‘scope where it’s reflected and aimed at another mirror in the center of the corrector plate back at the front of the ‘scope. This secondary mirror reflects the light again and precisely aims it through a hole in the center of the primary mirror at the back of the ‘scope where it is focused into the eyepiece.

Utilizing this mirror arrangement allows the light path to be “folded,” creating long focal lengths in a compact package. Just right for someone with limited space. While I was researching, I kept reading that aperture is king. The bigger the opening at the objective end of the ‘scope, the more light it can gather and the greater magnification and detail possible. So, I figured if bigger is better, I needed as large a SCT as I could afford. I bought a Celestion NexStar 8 SE. This has an objective diameter of eight inches – 203mm. The effective focal length is 2032mm. Magnification of up to 400x is possible.

I soon realized that my interest wasn’t just in observing the night sky, I wanted to photograph it. Astrophotography brings a new set of equipment considerations and lots of learning. It didn’t take me long to figure out that looking at the planets and stars was one thing, capturing images was something else all together. I learned about atmospheric disturbances and “seeing” conditions. Bigger might be better, but greater magnification also means atmospheric disturbances are magnified as well and most of the time, I couldn’t use the magnification available in the eight-inch SCT.

Then I learned about things like field of view and other things to consider when capturing images of the night sky. I went in the opposite direction and bought a small refractor-type telescope. Refractors are the oldest telescope design and are what most people think of when you say telescope. I found a good deal on a used William Optics Zenithstar 73. This has a 73mm (2-7/8″) objective lens and a focal length of 430mm. It’s lightweight and compact. I found it very easy to operate and perfect for lunar photography. It provides excellent views of the moon, even when it’s full. I learned to love the ease-of-use of refractor telescopes and the clear, high-contrast images this ‘scope provided. But, its short focal length restricts the magnification and getting planetary images wasn’t so great – even if I doubled the native magnification with a 2x barlow lens.

So, I had a big ‘scope – the SCT – and a little ‘scope – the Z73. Then I found my Goldilocks ‘scope. I bought an Astro-Tech AT115EDT refractor. This has a objective diameter of 115mm (4-1/2″) and a focal length of 805mm. With a 2x barlow, I can have a focal length of 1610mm and planetary imaging works well.

So, why have three telescopes? They are all different and excel at different things. I think I’m set now. The Z73 with it’s short focal length is great for the moon. The AT115EDT can be used at its native 805mm focal length for great moon close-ups or at 1610mm with a 2x barlow for planets. The SCT can be used at its native 2032mm focal length when conditions allow for planets and star clusters or nebulas or I can use a focal reducer to drop it down to 1280mm. These three ‘scopes cover a lot of possibilities and I think I’ll be using them for years to come. Here are a few of my astrophotography attempts.

37% Waxing Crescent moon – Taken with William Optics Z73 Refractor telescope

Southern Highlands of the Moon – Taken with Astro-Tech AT115EDT

The photo above taken with the AT115EDT shows Mare Nectaris – the smooth dark area in the upper right. Ancient astronomers thought these smooth dark areas were water – thus the name Mare (latin for sea). They are actually large basalt fields from volcanic activity millions of years ago. Near the center of the photo, left of Mare Nectaris, you can see a vertical squiggly line that veers off to the right. This is the Altai Scarp – a mountainous ridge with peaks ranging from 10,000 to 13,000 feet above the surrounding terrain!

Jupiter – taken with Astro-Tech AT115EDT with 2x Barlow Lens – One of Jupiter’s Moons can be seen on the right

I have a long way to go with astrophotography, but it keeps me up at night and out of trouble. I plan to keep learning and progressing with it.

Last month, I had three malignant squamous cell lesions removed from my face and head. The dermatologist was concerned about a number of actinic keratosis (pre-cancer) spots on my head. This is the result of years in the sun, starting very early in life. He felt that developing cancers was inevitable and we’d be playing “Whack-a-mole,” trying to keep ahead of it. He recommended photodynamic therapy (PDT). This involves a chemo treatment that sensitizes the skin to light waves. Then, a concentrated amount of light is focused on the affected area. The result is like a sunburn and for the next several days you have to stay out of the sun while the dead skin cells are sloughed off of the affected area. Once that happens, it’s like you have new, smooth skin instead of the dry, rough actinic keratosis.

I went for it once the areas where he removed the squamous cell cancer healed. It involved a technician “painting” a compound on my head, temples and ears. Then I had to wait for two hours before my head was positioned inside a special light box with blue flourescent lights. I think I was in there for 1,020 seconds – 17 minutes. After a few days of recovery, my dome is smooth again and hopefully no cancers develop.

Last Friday, Donna and I flew out of Mesa Gateway Airport to Spokane, Washington. We went there to attend the graduation ceremony for our granddaughter, Lainey. Lainey graduated from Washington State University School of Nursing with a RN-BSN degree. She is following her mother’s footsteps and will work in the ICU at Deaconess Hospital in Spokane. Congrats, Lainey!

While we were there over the weekend, my ex-wife’s niece, Julie, visited. I haven’t seen Julie since she was a little girl. She told me she read this blog and she inspired me to write another post. She gave me what was probably the most positive compliment ever – she said she feels a little smarter after reading this blog! With that, I’ll sign off.

Arizona Worm Farm

I guess Donna wasn’t busy enough with her activities which include Tennis Club, Pickleball Club, golf, Viewpoint Concert Band and her work providing dog walking and companion care for some elderly residents here at Viewpoint Golf Resort. So, she took up another hobby.

She built a raised garden bed from a kit made by a company called Vego. She did most of the work herself with only a little assistance from me. She used quarter-inch mesh screen to line the bottom of the bed – this will prevent critters like gophers or moles from entering the bed. The she filled the bottom with garden waste – broken branches, leaves and other plant matter. This was mainly just filler to take up space without spending money on soil.

From there, she needed a higher quality garden mix to provide the proper consistency and mix of nutrients for her plants. For that, she bought some garden mix from Home Depot and then wanted to improve upon that. I found a place in south Phoenix called Arizona Worm Farm that was just the ticket.

Arizona Worm Farm is an interesting place and a great story of entrepreneurship. About five years ago a guy named Zack Brooks bought ten acres of land that was formerly a cotton field. He had a vision of running a farm that would be a zero-waste, self-sustaining enterprise that would provide sustenance for up to 10 families. That grew into a successful worm production facility that creates compost and soil enriched with worm castings as well as fruits and vegetables.

He developed relationships with various businesses that had a need to dispose of organic waste material. He gets wood chips from landscapers that would otherwise get sent to landfills. He gets vegetables that are past their sell-by date that would normally be thrown out as garbage. He also gets things like melon rinds, carrot tops and other vegetable matter from companies that process vegetables into pre-cut vegetable packages. Finally, he has sources for horse manure from reputable stables that only feed pesticide- and herbicide-free material to their horses. He raises chickens and uses chicken manure as well.

The materials are combined and used as feed for worms, which in turn, provide the worm castings – a polite term for worm poop. This is a very nutrient-rich plant food. He sells about 60,000 worms locally to gardeners per week as well. We went to the worm farm on a Saturday morning to take a class called Gardening 101 which was led by the garden manager and head grower, Leslie. It was 90 minutes well-spent. Donna took copious notes. The cost of the class was $25 and included me as Donna’s guest. It also included a half gallon box of worm castings and four vegetable starts.

Leslie leading the Gardening 101 class at Arizona Worm Farm

The transformation of an abandoned cotton field into a garden and desert oasis in just five years is amazing. The ten acres have about two acres taken up by various buildings and the rest is either dedicated to compost rows or gardens with fruits and vegetables.

Donna bought compost along with about 300 red wiggler (sometimes called red wriggler) worms. She finished filling her raised bed on Sunday and it has an in-ground compost tub which is a worm feeding station. We keep vegetable scraps in a container in the kitchen which we will transfer weekly or so into the compost tub and mix it with paper, cardboard and leaves. The worms will digest this stuff and transform it into plant nutrients. I find the whole concept amazing. I’ve watched several You Tube videos describing the process.

Garden bed with compost tub in the center

Arizona Worm Farm red wigglers in compost tub

The worms can move freely in and out of the in-ground compost tub through holes in the sides. They will travel about in the raised bed, aerating the soil and depositing nutrients. They return to the compost tub to feed.

I cut a water dripper hose to the right length to fit the bed and we set it up on a timer. When the timer detects sunrise, it runs the dripper for 15 minutes to deeply and gently water the raised bed. In about six to eight weeks, we should have fresh tomatoes. Donna already has basil ready to harvest and she has sugar snap peas started along with a few other vegetables. She has marigolds in the corners of the bed to keep pests away. This should keep Donna busy.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to work at learning astrophotography. Tuesday I made another attempt at Jupiter, but atmospheric conditions had layers of wind and temperature gradients that made it very difficult to get a sharp image. I tried a different approach. I used the William Optics Z73 refractor. It has a focal length of 430mm and much lower magnification than my Celestron 8SE which has a focal length of 2032mm. I used a 2X barlow on the Z73 to double the focal length and thus the magnifaction to try to capture Saturn and Jupiter. The results were still unsatisfactory. The only thing I can do is keep trying and hope for better conditions as the weather cools.

I turned my attention to the moon. I removed the 2X barlow and used the Z73 at its native focal length. By using the maximum sensor area of the ZWO ASI678 astrophotography camera, I could just fit the entire surface of the moon in the image. I photographed the moon on successive nights – I’m amazed at the changes in the moon view that occur in 24 hours.

The moon is waning – there is less surface area illuminated each day. I had a better exposure balance on the second night – I’m learning.

This is a detail view of the upper portion seen in the photo above

In the detail view above, the upper left has the craters Hercules and Atlas. Hercules is about 44 miles in diameter and Atlas is about 54 miles. Below them is the upper portion of Mare Serenitatis. Ancient astronomers named the dark, smooth surfaces of the moon mare (plural is marie), Latin for sea. They mistook the dark, smooth appearance as water. Actually they are large basaltic plains, the result of volcanic activity on the moon long ago. On the right side of the picture is the terminator – the name for the line where the illumination stops and the remainder of the surface is hidden in shadow. That is the Taurus mountain range right at the terminator.

I should mention the feature near the bottom right of the full moon picture. It’s the crater called Tycho with what appears to be rays radiating from it. These rays are formed by the ejecta created when an object collided with the moon forming the crater. We only see the rays on relatively young craters. As they age, the space environment with space dust and heavy doses of radiation darken the rays until we no longer see them. Meteors or asteroids collide violently with the moons surface – there isn’t an atmosphere there to create friction to slow them down or burn them up. The crater Tycho is relatively young – it was created around 100 million years ago!

Donna prepared a new recipe for chicken thighs called One-pan chicken thighs with coconut creamed corn. This recipe is a keeper for sure.

Sticking with the chicken thigh theme, she made another new recipe with boneless chicken thighs called skillet chicken with turmeric and orange. Served with steamed rice and sauteed spinach, it was delicious.

Skillet chicken with turmeric and orange

The weather has cooled in the last week – daily highs are upper 80s to low 90s. This is making outdoor pickleball a little later in the morning possible. Unfortunately, most of the pickleballers here in the park stiil want to start at the crack of sunrise. My astronomy sessions and early morning pickleball are at odds with each other – one has me up late, the other demands early rising. I enjoy outdoor pickleball more than the indoor game. I can see the ball better, it doesn’t skid on the floor and the level of play here at Viewpoint is generally higher than the recreation center.

We’re looking at a rainy weekend with thunderstorms possible. Donna turned off her automatic drip irrigation last night. It’s starting to rain as I type this.

Buying, Selling and Trading

It’s been nearly a month since I added a post, so here are a few lines and pictures. In my last post, I went over my woes with the Celestron NexStar telescope mount. I’m happy to report the Sky Watcher HEQ5 Pro I replaced it with has been great. It’s a little harder to set up, but it tracks targets nicely and is very sturdy. I found a buyer for my old mount and shipped it off.

I used the Sky Watcher with the Celestron 8SE SCT telescope to image Jupiter. Jupiter is a harder target than I thought it would be. In fact, astrophotography as a whole is a lot harder to learn than I thought it would be. I’m not getting the detail I would like. There are many steps involved to capture a succesful image.

First you need to achieve focus on a distant object – hundreds of thousands of miles away. Then you have to find the right combination of gain and exposure time for your camera – kind of like setting aperture and shutter speed on a conventional camera. The rotation of the earth and the orbit of the object come into play – the target doesn’t just sit in the center of the frame. What we do is basically shoot a video recording where we can adjust the frame rate of the video and set the number of frames we want to record. I control the camera with a small laptop running a program called SharpCap, developed by a British astronomer.

Once you have accomplished that, the raw image needs to processed. There are some really smart guys that have developed software specifically for this. They are astronomy enthusiasts and many offer their programs as free-ware for amateur, non-commercial use. I use three of these programs to process my images.

The first is called PIPP – planetary image pre-processor. This program takes the individual frames and aligns them so the image is centered in every frame. I typically shoot 2,500 frames or so at a time.

Next I use AutoStakkert – a program written by a Dutch astronomer – to sort each frame by quality of the image. Then I choose how many frames I want to keep by rejecting all below a certain quality threshold. Autostakkert then “stacks” or combines these frames into an image. This is called “lucky imaging,” because we are lucky to get a percentage of frames with a sharp image, largely unaffected by atmospheric conditions.

The output from Autostakkert is then opened in RegiStax 6 for sharpening, de-noise and color adjustment. I may use Photoshop for a final touch up. Here are few pictures – crude compared to professional and many amateur results, but I’m learning and will get better at it.

I bought a another telescope – I found it on the classified ad section of a site called CloudyNights. This is a completely different approach than my Celestron 8SE Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector. This one is a refractor type telescope – one of the oldest telescope designs. It’s simple and well-made with high-quality optics.

It’s from a company called William Optics and it’s model is ZenithStar 73. It has a 73mm objective lens, 430mm focal length and it’s relatively fast at f5.9. I mentioned quality optics – the objective lens in this telescope is ground from a material called FPL 53 optical glass. FPL 53 is made from a synthetic fluorite crystal grown in a lab by a Japanese company called Ohara. FPL 53 is a desirable material for telescope lenses.

When used visually with an eyepiece I can see the entire surface of the moon with this ‘scope and it is less affected by atmospheric conditions than the larger Celestron. More magnification requires a stable atmosphere for sharp images. The astrophotography camera I use increases the magnification of the image with this ‘scope though. Here’s a moon shot I took Saturday night.

I described this astrophotography session as a near disaster on Facebook. I think considering the real disaster that was hurricane Ian, my description is a bit of an over-reach. Here’s what happened.

I set up my mount and telescope behind our back deck, adjacent to the golf course behind our place. I use a small card table for a couple of small cases with some of the gear I use and also place a small notebook computer on it to record the image. My plan was to take a shot of the moon, then move to Saturn and finish the night with Jupiter. I wanted to try the Z73 ‘scope on the planets just to see what I could get with it.

After I captured the image above, I programmed the mount for Saturn. While the ‘scope was slewing toward Saturn, I heard water sprinklers start up. Oh no! The golf course decided to start watering at 8:30pm – I’d never seen them water much past 7pm before. I closed the notebook computer and ran it over to our deck, then went back for the rest of the gear. Donna was out and she started grabbing things as well. We weren’t quick enough – the sprinklers got us and my gear briefly before we could get everything out of range.

I’ll have to rethink my telescope set-up position for future sessions. This is not so easy – I thought I found the perfect spot to get clear views of most of the sky. Well, that’s probably more about astronomy than you ever wanted to know.

Donna went to Vermont for eight days, beginning on September 13th, to visit her parents. While she was away I decided to make another change. We’ve been using our 2015 Nissan Frontier for daily transportation. When I bought this truck, it was intended to be towed behind our motorhome as we traveled about. For this reason, I bought a used work truck with a manual transmission and no frills.

We won’t be towing behind a motorhome now, so why drive a beater and shift gears manually? I looked around for something more comfortable that we could live with. The best solution would be a company lease car – as a Volkswagen retiree, I have lease car privileges that allow me to select a new VW on a very favorable 12-month lease. However, in the current state of things, new cars are in very short supply and lease car choices are extremely limited.

I found a nearly showroom condition 2019 Jeep Compass with all of the bells and whistles and only 36,000 miles on the clock. So, we went from a manual transmission, noisy truck with manual roll-up windows to a loaded compact SUV with power everything. Of course, this means electronic control modules galore and lots of potential for things to malfunction, but you only live once. I traded our truck and put a dent in my savings as I don’t like to finance anything – we are debt-free other than the lease on our park model home lot at Viewpoint Golf Resort.

Donna returned from Vermont on the 20th, so I’m back to eating like a king. Here’s a dinner plate she made. The main dish is parmesan crusted tilapia with cauliflower penne pasta and steamed spinach on the side.

We’re past the monsoon season and humidity levels are back to a more normal range of 10-25%. The triple-digit heat is behind us as well with the forecast calling for low 90s and mid-to-high 80s for the rest of the month.

Night Sky

We’ve completely transitioned from the RV lifestyle to full-time residents of Viewpoint Golf Resort. Viewpoint is a gated community for people 55 years old and older. It’s a very active community with two golf courses, a tennis club, pickleball club, four swimming pools and various hobby clubs such as woodworking with a fully equipped wood shop.

Viewpoint occupies over three hundred acres of land in east Mesa, Arizona and I’ve been told there are more than 3,000 park model homes. There’s always something to do here, although activity slows down during the hot summer months.

Donna keeps busy with tennis, golf and pickleball. She also works in the community as a companion caregiver to elderly residents. We were playing indoor pickleball at the air conditioned Red Mountain Recreation Center, but they closed for remodeling for the last three weeks and will re-open next Monday. So, I haven’t been very active lately.

We took an Allegiant Air flight out of Mesa Gateway airport to San Diego on July 22 and spent five days in La Jolla while Donna dog-sat for her sister, Sheila. Flying out of the small Gateway airport was a treat. I don’t think there were more than 400 people in the whole place! San Diego was a nice break from the heat and it’s always nice to be by the ocean. We met up with Gary Stemple at Offshore Grill and Tavern and Rick Miller was with him. I think the last time I saw Rick was 1974. We had fun catching up over a few beers, then I dropped Rick off at the airport for his return flight to Florida.

Donna and I hit the beaches and took a drive up the coast for lunch in Oceanside. We also played pickleball in Pacific Beach and Ocean Beach and saw some of our pickleball friends that we last played with three years ago. Time flies. The flight back to Mesa had us in the air for under an hour and the drive from Gateway airport to Viewpoint was about 15 minutes. Nice!

Last week, Donna and I drove up to Canyon Lake and met up with some of her tennis club friends. Tom had his pontoon boat on the lake and we cruised across the lake and up the Salt River to a point just below the Apache Lake dam.

The northeast end of Canyon Lake at the mouth of the Salt River

We saw Desert Big Horn sheep on this bluff

We saw a group of four Desert Big Horn sheep across the river from where we stopped by the dam. I couldn’t get a good picture of them though.

With too much time on my hands, I’ve taken up a new hobby. Someone once told me that hobbies were my hobby. I always like to learn new stuff and can really get lost in new ventures. I went through a couple of photography phases when I was younger and sold event photos. Later, when my kids were in high school, I took sports photos of the high school sports team – many were published in a local newspaper called the Arlington Times.

I also have an affinity for science – I really enjoy electronics and ham radio. So I kind of combined the two interests and took up astronomy. My longer term goal is to pursue astrophotography. It’s a steep learning curve though and I can see myself chasing this subject for years to come.

After reading up on the subject, I bought a Celestron NexStar 8SE telescope. This is a reflector ‘scope – a catadioptric Schmidt-Cassegrain to be precise. Reflector type ‘scopes were invented by Isaac Newton and utilize one or more mirrors to reflect the light path. This allows a longer focal length in a more compact package than a traditional refractor type ‘scope.

The NexStar 8SE came with a computerized electronic mount, known as an Alt-Az mount. This mount slews the ‘scope in two directions – altitude (vertically up and down) and azimuth (horizontally right and left). You can program the amount by pointing it to guide stars and it triangulates the position and then you can select from a list of targets and it will automatically slew to the target. Some fine adjustment is required to center the target, but it really simplifies things.

Celstron NexStar 8SE telescope and mount

The 8SE has an aperture of 8 inches – about 203 millimeters. The focal length is 2032 millimeters. It reaches that length by “folding” the light path back and forth before sending it to the diagonal and eyepiece.

I had a budget in mind as I embarked on this hobby, but I soon found out that it’s hard to stay within the confines of a budget when you don’t have enough experience. I soon went down the rabbit hole and upgraded a lot of the equipment. I bought upgraded eyepieces, a higher quality diagonal, a 9×50 finder scope and an electronic focuser.

Then the mount started acting up. I found excessive play in the altitude axis. I opened up the housing and found a defective bearing.

Defective bearing on drive axle for altitude adjustment

I sent the photo above to Woodland Hills Camera and Telescope where I bought the unit. They, in turn, contacted Celestron and they sent me a return authorization and shipping label. I sent it to them for repairs.

Meanwhile, I did more research on this mount and found some disappointing information. Generally speaking, you should limit the weight of the telescope and accessories to about 80% of the mount maximum for visual use and only 50% of maximum for astrophotography. The mount Celestron supplies with 8SE has a maximum weight rating of just 12 pounds. The ‘scope itself weighs that much before you add eyepieces, finder scope, electronic focuser or any other accessories. It was overloaded with my set-up. Lesson learned.

I bought a new mount. This time I went with a Sky-Watcher HEQ5 German Equitorial mount. It’s rated for 30 pounds. This design points the ‘scope along two axes – they’re called right ascension and declination. It’s more complicated and hard to describe. Suffice to say it allows the mount to compensate for the rotation of the earth and keep the target centered and prevent background stars from turning into streaks across the image. This is important for astrophotography.

When I started down this rabbit hole, I was mainly interested in visual astronomy. With my assortment of eyepieces, I can vary the magnification level from around 80X up to about 400X. I used 400X to view Saturn under excellent viewing conditions and could clearly see the rings of Saturn with a sharply defined Cassini Gap.

Atmospheric conditions – astronomers call it seeing conditions – are often the limiting factor to what you can see or photograph in the sky. When bands of turbulent air move across your vision, it creates distortions like the heat waves you can see rising from hot pavement. This is what makes the stars appear to “twinkle” in the night sky and can wreak havoc for astrophotographers. High levels of magnification increase this effect.

I used my Samsung Galaxy S22 to snap a photo of the moon through the eyepiece and it wasn’t too bad. This piqued my interest in astrophotography. I bought a dedicated astrophotography camera. There are many to choose from and it’s another learning experience.

With the long focal length of my ‘scope and the sensor size of my camera, I have too much magnification. Even with a focal reducer, which drops the focal length to 1280 millimeters, I get 400X magnification. This makes seeing conditions limit how sharp my photos are. Seeing conditions haven’t been too good lately. Soon though, when the temperatures drop a bit, it’ll improve. Here are a couple of moon shots somewhat spoiled by poor seeing conditions.

I’ll discuss the processing of astrophotography images another time, as it will be long-winded and this is long enough.

Here are a few dinner plates to close this post.

Wild King salmon with garlic smashed potato and asparagus

Filet mignon with crash hot potatoes and cut green beans

I bought a whole USDA Prime beef tenderloin and cut it into a dozen filet mignons and about a pound of beef tips. Spendy, but it’s delicious.

Donna is heading off to Vermont to visit her parents on Tuesday. Once again it’ll be just me and Ozark the cat for a week.

Beating the Heat

I know I said my last post would probably be the end, but old habits die hard. So, I’ll add a quick update. We’ve really settled in to the Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort lifestyle. The summer months can be a bit tough in central Arizona, but we’re adapting. The pickleballers here play very early in the morning to beat the heat.

I don’t like playing pickleball before 6am. By the time I’ve loosened up and feel like I’m starting to play well, they’re quitting for the day. Donna found indoor pickleball a couple of miles away from us at the Red Mountain Multigenerational Center. It’s air-conditioned! We paid the $4 daily fee and played a few times to try it out. Then I found out that my Medicare Part G supplemental medical policy through Untied Health has a provision called Renew Active. The Multigenerational Center participates in this program, so I get a free membership and can go there anytime for free! This will be our summertime pickleball place – Donna and I have been a successful team winning most of our matches there.

Another way we’ve embraced the Viewpoint lifestyle is through another purchase we made. We’ve joined the majority of residents here by buying a golf car for convenient travel inside the park. They’re especially useful in the summer – it’s too hot to walk or bike in the afternoons and a regular car isn’t convenient. I’ve always called them golf carts, but now I’m told they are referred to as “golf cars,” I think this is because many are street legal low speed vehicles – most people here don’t use them for golf! We bought a Yamaha G19 electric golf car. It is a pre-owned unit that was always stored indoors by only one previous owner up in Fountain Hills.

It’s well-equipped with full lights including turn signals, brake lights and flashers. It has the optional horn. It also has a folding, two-piece windshield. It’s powered with a 48-volt electric motor powered by six 8-cell, deep cycle Trojan batteries. Batteries for these things are a big deal – they’re expensive to replace and are something to consider when shopping for a used golf car.

The first time I charged the batteries, I monitored the voltage. Typically these are charged with “smart chargers” that use a three-stage charging algorithm. They start with a high, constant current charge and build voltage as it charges – this is called the bulk charging stage. At a pre-determined voltage point, it switches to a constant voltage as current slowly drops as the internal resistance of the battery goes up – this is the absorption stage. Finally it reaches a point of nearly 100% charge and goes into the finish stage which is low current and lower voltage than the second stage.

I found the original charger that came with the golf car had a problem. It wouldn’t complete the second charging stage – it would set an error and quit charging with the batteries at about a 90% state of charge.

Original Yamaha charger – old technology

The original Yamaha charger is built with an old-school design with heavy components – it weighs about 35 pounds. I shopped online and decided to replace it with a 48-volt charger from a company based in Minnesota called Formcharge.

Formcharge 48-volt charger – newer technology

The Formcharge charger is built with more modern components and technology. It weighs about seven pounds and charges the battery bank perfectly. It further refines the three-stage charging with a seven-step algorithm. Trojan battery says a 100% charge of a 48-volt battery bank should show an open circuit voltage of 50.93 volts when resting at full charge. My volt-meter doesn’t read in hundredths of a volt, only tenths, but it bounces between 50.9 and 51 volts after charging with the Formcharge. Just right.

We don’t have room in the carport with our Nissan Frontier and MG Midget already in there, so we have to store the golf car out front. I bought a cover for it to avoid sun damage as well as water damage from rain.

Yesterday we beat the heat by going to a matinee at the AMC Superstition East movie theater. This facility features 12 small theaters which seat about 44 people each. The seats are roomy electric recliners – a very comfortable experience. We saw Top Gun Maverick. It was entertaining, but there were too many holes in the storyline for me.

Our granddaughter Gabi up in Washington injured her knee playing volleyball and had surgery to replace her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). This is a major surgery and the recovery time is long. On Monday, Donna will be celebrating Independence Day by flying up to Everett, Washington to keep Gabi company until the 15th. I’ll be here keeping Ozark the cat company.

I haven’t taken many dinner plate pictures lately, but there’s one I’d like to mention. A couple of weeks ago, Donna grilled salmon. We had about half of the filet left over. Donna often makes salmon patties, but she usually makes them from canned salmon. This time, she flaked the left over salmon and mixed it with red onion, celery, capers and few other ingredients before coating it with wheat panko bread crumbs. It was excellent, definitely superior to making it from canned salmon.

We’ve had triple-digit heat for several weeks now. The swamp cooler has been effective and it’s keeping the Arizona room about 25 degrees cooler than the outside ambient temperature. This morning, I replaced the batting in the cooler to increase its efficiency. The long-range forecast calls for daily highs between 100 and 109 degrees. We’re in the monsoon season here, so high winds, heavy thundershowers and flash flooding are possibilities at any time.

Flying The Koop

…from real estate to wheel estate and back again

Category Archives: Arizona

Backyard Bounty

Weaver’s Needle Viewpoint – Revisited

A Big Step Forward

Dirt and Sky

Three Trips Over the Holiday

Disaster Averted

Arizona Worm Farm

Buying, Selling and Trading

Night Sky

Beating the Heat

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