March 2009 - Utah-Astronomy - mailman.xmission.com

Re: [Utah-astronomy] Latest GLobal Temperature Data
by stormcrow60＠xmission.com 10 Mar '09

10 Mar '09

Hi Chuck, I suppose, first of all, that one has to believe in God, or have faith in God. Even if one does, faith and religion are not science. Jon

3 3

Fw: BYU Astronomical Society March 20th Star Party
by Richard Tenney 09 Mar '09

09 Mar '09

I'm leaving for Sweden on Thursday and won't return until the 24th, but I'd like to encourage all of you to come participate. This is a very fun group, and the turnout at the last one of these that I helped with was fabulous. -Rich --- On Sat, 3/7/09, Joshua Furner <joshua_furner(a)hotmail.com> wrote: > From: Joshua Furner <joshua_furner(a)hotmail.com> > Subject: BYU Astronomical Society March 20th Star Party > To: retenney(a)yahoo.com > Date: Saturday, March 7, 2009, 8:17 PM > This is Joshua Furner from the BYU Astronomical Society. > > > > We are having our closing star party for this semester on > March 20th (8-11pm) at the Big Springs park site. We would > like to extend an invitation to your Society members to join > us. > > > > We will be providing 6 telescopes, 10 pairs of binoculars > (for the live planetarium) hot chocolate, cookies as well as > an information table for fliers. There will be live > planetarium shows under the stars with 3-4 prepared > presentations. > > > > If you have any members who might bring a telescope or > would like to give a 20-30 min. green laser style star talk > please have them contact me. > > > > > > Thank you, > > > > Joshua > > > > > > Information can be found at > > > > http://www.physics.byu.edu/clubs/astrosoc/starparties.aspx > > > > _________________________________________________________________ > Windows Live™ Contacts: Organize your contact list. > http://windowslive.com/connect/post/marcusatmicrosoft.spaces.live.com-Blog-…

2 2

New M101 Image Posted
by Tyler Allred 09 Mar '09

09 Mar '09

Hi SLAS. I just posted a somewhat reduced version of my new M101 image to the SLAS gallery, at: http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=1235 Additional information about this huge spiral can be seen in the "Latest Images" section of my website, along with a full version and exposure details. Here is a link to my site: www.allred-astro.com <http://www.allred-astro.com/> Be sure to click a few times to get the full version. Cheers, Tyler _____________________________________________

4 3

Re: [Utah-astronomy] UT Offset is now 6 hours
by Jay Eads 09 Mar '09

09 Mar '09

Curse this "daylight silliness" as Patrick called it. In a real note it impacts students as they tend to stay up later and get less sleep so they are less attentive in the a.m. during class. I say stay on standard time. Of course there is no bias in my remark . . . . Thanks for the reminder though that UT offset is now 6 hours. Jay

1 0

Global room temperature energy
by Jerry Foote 09 Mar '09

09 Mar '09

Does anyone remember Pons & Fleischmann? Jerry Foote ScopeCraft, Inc. 4175 E. Red Cliffs Dr. Kanab, UT 84741 435-899-1255 jfoote(a)scopecraft.com

4 4

Patrick's 2nd HH data (long post)
by Jim Gibson 09 Mar '09

09 Mar '09

I gave Patrick’s 2nd batch of the HorseHead data a shot. http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=1173 ONLY READ ON IF you are interested in MaxIM DL and PhotoShop image processing. I will try to give full disclosure here. First of all, obviously Tyler is the target; in other words he has set the standard. So I downloaded a copy of his HH image processed data as contained in Patrick’s (his data) gallery site: http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=1025 . I used that image as a model just to look at and see if I could come close to it with Patrick’s 2nd batch of data. I used Joe’s way of processing as follows. 1 - I took each of the clear photos and subtracted the dark from it. 2 - Then I used a "remove bad pixel" feature of MaxIm DL to get rid of bad pixels, some of which were in more than one of the frames. The feature keeps a map of bad pixels so you can apply it to other views from the same session. 3 - Next I picked out the clear that seemed to show the best range and used an "equalize screen stretch" button to make all the clears about the same. 4 - I combined them using various methods to see which was the best. I think the best one turned out to be taking a medium of the images. 5 - I did the same sort of thing for the colors, except that one -- I think it was green -- had only one image so I didn't combine it with another green. 6 - Finally I Color Combined LRBG without playing with curves because it seemed about right as it was. My last operation was to adjust the brightness and contrast with MaxIm DL (Max). <End Joe’s Way> I did 3 additional things in Max before saving the image as a TIFF. If the image is saved in Max at that point and brought into PhotoShop (PS) then you have a black image. The image has to be stretched using curves and levels to see anything because of the way Max and PS approach things differently. So, I used Max to stretch the data first because when comparing the two I felt Max did a better job for the initial stretch than PS. Here is what I did. (I am going into detail because this is a learning thing. Also if there is a better way, maybe Tyler can set us straight.) 1 – In the Screen Stretch box I manually stretched the right had carrot as far to the right as I could without clipping any star data. 2 – In Max I selected menu item Process > Stretch and set these parameters Linear Only, Screen Stretch, and 16-bit and clicked OK. 3 – Again in Max I selected menu item Process > Stretch again and set these parameters Gamma (0.5), Max Pixel, and 16-bit and clicked OK. Then I saved the image as a TIFF for Photoshop. >From here on it gets fuzzy because I did a lot of playing around. In PS the image will still be a little dark. So Using Tyler’s image as a guide I used curves and levels in the RGB to bring up the contrast and brightness in moderate steps keeping an eye on the histogram to be sure I wasn’t clipping data. When you see the combing effect in the histogram you know you are stretching the data pretty far. The noise will also increase as you boost the brightness and contrast. When I got the image to about what Tyler’s brightness looked like then I went into the Blue level and just stretched it a bit to give the background a bit more of a blue hue than straight black. Now I checked Tyler’s image and noticed his stars were smaller than mine. Size matters, so I created a mask for just the big stars by : 1. Creating a duplicate image and doing a Hi-pass filter with threshold = 1 2. Did a Gaussian blur with threshold = 1 3. Went into Image > Adjust > Threshold and played with the slider till mostly the big stars were left. I cloned out anything I didn’t want till I had the mask I wanted. 4. Then I did a menu Select >All, then Edit > Copy. 5. In the original image I created a duplicate layer of the original image, then went to the channels tab and created a new channel. I pasted the mask into the new color channel. I then clicked on the eye of the RGB channel to reveal the image, then went back to the adjustment layer and clicked on it. From there I went to the menu items. I clicked on Select > Load Selection and lo-and-behold all my big stars were selected. 6. With the big stars selected I enlarged the image to get a closer look at the selection. The selection wasn’t big enough so I went to menu item Select > Mofiy > Expand and increased the size of the selection by 1 pixel. 7. Satisfied with the selection I went to menu Filter > Other > Minimum and it shrank the stars. If you look at some of the stars you will see a halo around them. I don’t have this process down perfect yet. I felt my image was looking pretty good at this point but Tyler’s image was much smoother. Being this close I had to go all the way, so I went out on the web and bought NeatImage as a plug-in to PS. Once I applied NeatImage I felt it smoothed out the noise very well and can give Tyler a run for his money. That may have sounded boastful but it was meant as a thank you for helping us overcome the huge learning curve in image processing. And no less thanks to Patrick and Joe and all of you who have added your input to help us fledglings along. Jim

14 33

UT Offset is now 6 hours
by Canopus56 09 Mar '09

09 Mar '09

00UT is at 6pm MDT; 06UT is at midnight MDT; 12UT is at 6AM MDT. - Kurt

1 0

Re: [Utah-astronomy] Global Warming - The Main Issues
by stormcrow60＠xmission.com 09 Mar '09

09 Mar '09

Hi All, Just a heads up. I just received this in my email box. Watch this program if you can. "As a long-time friend and trustee of Environmental Defense Fund, I was thrilled to hear last fall that The Discovery Channel was so taken with Fred Krupp's best-selling book Earth: The Sequel?The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming that they decided to make a television special out it. This new, one-hour Discovery show, also called Earth: the Sequel, will air for the first time on March 11 at 10pm Eastern" Jon

1 0

Runaway Greenhouse
by Dave Gary 09 Mar '09

09 Mar '09

A word on nomenclature. Runaway greenhouse could not occur for Earth as it has on Venus. Earth is not close enough to Sun, nor is it likely to be during the time humans inhabit this planet. No climatologist worth his salt has ever predicted runaway greenhouse for Earth. Also, concerning insolation (INcoming SOLar radiaTION) on Mars. First, data citing only regional observations of Martian polar ice phenomena can not be extrapolated to a "global" temperature scenario for Mars. Second, global mean temperature on Mars is very sensitive to the strength and duration of hemispheric dust storms. Mean temperatures between Martian years (687 days) can vary by many degrees. For example, Viking measurements in the 1970's show significant planet- wide cooling relative to current temperatures recorded by Mars Global Surveyor. This is due, primarily, to increased large-scale dust storms on Mars in the 1970's compared to global atmospheric dynamics at present. Insolation forcing during this period was not a significant factor for global climate temperature differences observed by Viking, nor is it significant now. Recently, changes in south polar ice cover are, most likely, a consequence of topographic forcing of regional atmospheric dynamics. The changes are not due to a "global warming" trend on Mars. Take the time to read Nature, vol. 435, 12 May 2005, pg. 184-188. Isn't it ironic that regional polar changes on Mars, instantly, signals "global warming" to some people while, at the same time, much more persuasive evidence in favor of man's contribution to Earth's global warming is, repeatedly, denied? Dave Gary

5 12

Frontiers of Science Lecture Series
by Rodger C. Fry 09 Mar '09

09 Mar '09

All, Robert B. Smith (UofU Geophysics Prof) will be speaking on "The Yellowstone Supervolcano" on March 18, 2009 7:30 PM. The location is Aline Wilmot Skaggs Biology Auditorium. It is open to the public and should be very interesting for those so inclined. For more info go to www.science.utah.edu Thank You, Rodger C. Fry Consulting Geologist

3 2