Retractable Landing Gear

With a son who is a pilot for Mission Aviation Fellowship in Haiti, I tend to notice small aircraft -- even when they are biological in nature. David flies fixed landing gear planes like the Cessna 207 -- the wheels stay put even in flight. Most of the fancier aircraft have retractable landing gear, where the wheels fold up into the aircraft's fusilage after take-off. The reason, of course, is to reduce the air drag by streamlining the body.

The Red-Tailed Hawk is a "fancy aircraft," complete with retractable landing gear. Until I looked closely at my photos from Sunriver on October 16, I didn't realize how nicely the mechanism worked.

Here is the "big picture" sequence that we normally see from the ground:













Now, here are close-ups of the "landing gear" for this magnificent avian during take-off:









Of course, this characteristic is not unique to the Red-Tailed Hawk. All birds have a fusilage streamlining feature, showing once again that many of our modern "innovations" (like retractable landing gear) were actually invented long ago. :-)

By the way, if you like these photos, feel free to peruse all 16 scenic photos from Sunriver on my Flickr site.

Another Blue Planet

Much is said about how Earth is the "Blue Planet." There is even a well-known nature mini-series by that name. But Earth is not the only "blue planet" in our solar system. Another is Uranus. In the photo above, you can see the tiny blue fleck of Uranus to the upper left of Jupiter and its moons -- it was exposed specifically to reveal Uranus' color. (Click on the image for a better look.) Here is a close-up:




BTW, this makes seven -- the number of planets I have photographed. According to "Mary's Violet Eyes Make Joey Stay Up Nights -- Phooey!", I only have two left: Neptune and Pluto. Oh yeah, that's right: Pluto has been robbed of its planetary status. But I still think of it as a planet. How else could we give voice to Joey's crush on Mary? :-)

Moon, Uranus, Jupiter's Moons; Single Exposure

This is a single-exposure photo showing the Moon, Uranus, and Jupiter with three of its moons. (Click on the image for a better view.) I had been trying for awhile to get Jupiter's moons and our Moon in the same shot with the same exposure, and the clouds finally cooperated Wednesday night (9/22/2010). This time there was a bonus: Uranus.

Here is an annotated version:



I have taken prior photos using clouds to filter the Moon's overwhelming light for a single-exposure shot, e.g. this one for the Moon and Mars. However, today's blog entry is unique in that it shows two planets (Uranus and Jupiter with its moons) together with our Moon where you can see surface features rather than being completely blown out.

Exposure was 0.5 seconds, f/5.6, ISO 800 using a Canon 400D DSLR with a 70-300 zoom lens set to 135mm. Post-processing of the RAW image was done with Digital Photo Professional v3.8.

The full-resolution version can be downloaded from my Flickr page. Or, get it directly from here.

The legendary Oregon winter clouds will soon obscure most skyward sights, but this time the clouds did me a great favor, providing a Celestial Neutral Density Filter. :-)

Interrupted Sunset

While camping at Crater Lake with my family early this month, I was shooting a picturesque sunset. All of a sudden, something took a bite out of the Sun. Out of the distant haze, there appeared a hill that was invisible until the Sun started sliding behind it

When we got home and I examined the detailed 1:1 view, I noticed that the hill had cilia-like "hairs." Of course, these were the trees on the hill's perimeter:



For some reason, the surprise interruption to a "normal" sunset progression struck my fancy -- and I had the crazy notion that some of you might like it too. :-)

Tax Day Conjunction

On April 15th -- Tax Day -- the planets Venus and Mercury were visited by a very young crescent Moon. Only 3% of the Moon's visible area was sunlit, providing the picturesque view above. Although technically in a shadow, the rest of the Moon was still nicely illuminated by earthshine.

Underneath the Moon is the relatively tiny dot representing the innermost planet Mercury -- normally so close to the Sun that we can't see it. Here is a zoomed-up view that shows both earthshine and Mercury more clearly:



By the way, a "3% Moon" is very thin. Here is a close-up view of the Moon that evening, exposed for the crescent:



The next day, the planets were too far apart to make an interesting group picture. However, the still-young crescent Moon (7% this time) wandered near the Pleiades -- a cluster of seven bright stars often mistaken for the Little Dipper. While I was taking the shot, another traveling light joined the picture -- an airliner on its way to PDX.



It's great to see the sky again -- two days in a row! -- now that the Oregon rainy season is drawing to a close. :-)

Space Station Revealed (Somewhat)

In Galileo and the Space Station, I wrote a whimsical blog entry about what Galileo would see if he pointed one of his early telescopes at the International Space Station (ISS) as it sailed overhead -- a mysterious moving sky object brighter than Venus. To review, this is what he would have seen:



But one of Galileo's later telescopes, providing a bit more magnification, would have shown something like the opening photo above, taken last Friday. (I achieved "a bit more magnification" by using David's camera with my telephoto lens. David's DSLR has a higher resolution than mine.)

It's really strange to think that there were five men inside as the ISS silently traversed the sky that night. Perhaps one of them was looking down on the lights of Portland as I took the photo. (FWIW, they were: Jeffrey Williams, Oleg Kotov, T.J. Creamer, Maxim Suraev and Soichi Noguchi.)

I will never get to be one of the few humans that travel into space. Well, unless someone gives me $200,000 for a ticket on Scaled Composites' SpaceShipTwo, which is anticipated to start space tourism flights in 2011. However, my kids or grandkids may get to travel into space. SpaceShipTwo flights are expected to come down to $20,000 as the volume increases, and there are several other space tourism competitors that could drive the price down significantly more. Someday, we may see something like this: "Grand Prize for the best essay: a trip into space!"

So who knows? I may get to see the day where a family member crosses the Kármán Line. :-)

Astrophotography With a Camera and Telescope

In a pair of postings awhile back (Jupiter and His Minions and Astrophotography With a Camera and Tripod, I said, One of these days, I'll mate my camera to a telescope, and then I'll be a "real" amateur astrophotographer.

Well, I guess that day has finally arrived. The photo above is a full-frame view of the Moon, shot through my telescope.

In contrast, here is the equivalent full-frame shot taken at maximum zoom with my longest telephoto lens:



But the difference is most noticeable when we zoom in on some detail:



The telephoto "detail" is not very usable, as you can see. In contrast, the telescopic shot's detail looks like this:



Of course, a "true" amateur astrophotographer will get results that are much sharper. And indeed, my later shots will improve, once I get an official camera mount and can then do image stacking. (This "Proof of Concept" was taken by pointing my camera into the telescope's viewfinder, hand-held.)

In any case, I'm happy with the results of this casual Proof of Concept! I see much potential for future astrophotos. :-)