Freezing Time

On Thanksgiving morning, my sons Mike and David set up a sound-activated flash trigger and invited me to use my camera to capture one of the angles of a light bulb breaking.  It was a significant transformation for that common household item.  A fraction of a second before hitting the ground, it looked like this:



Upon impact, it became a blur of glass and white dust.  Well, to the camera it wasn't a blur thanks to modern flash units.  There is a lot of detail that can be captured in a burst of light lasting only 0.00003 second (1/30,000) -- things that you just can't see with the naked eye.  For example, the white inner coating of the light bulb disperses in a dusty cloud amid flying shards of glass:



Where did my kids get the crazy idea to photograph a light bulb breaking?  Maybe it's genetic.  When I was in college, I experimented with shooting "freeze photos," i.e. isolating an instant of time using a flash unit.  For example, here is a light bulb I broke with a hammer, captured on old-fashioned film one summer between school years:



Maybe I'll post some of my other college-days "freeze photos" in a later blog entry.

In the meantime, it's nice to know that the high-speed photography genes have been passed on to the next generation!  With a modern digital SLR and sensor-based electronic flash triggering equipment, who knows what kind of fantastic images will get captured?  :-)

Metallic HDR

This is an HDR shot of Two Jack Lake near Banff, Canada. In order to show the sunlight glinting off the water at the same time as the fall colors in the foreground, it was necessary to employ the magic of Photomatix's HDR image processing.  It was able to compress my camera's 14-bit-per-pixel-color dynamic brightness range down to the 8-bit-per-pixel-color of standard displays and printing systems.  The result most closely matches what I saw with my own eyes; I was able to observe the scene with both the sun's reflection and the fall leaves at the same time.  Indeed, that is the goal of HDR.

But it still wasn't quite right.  When I looked at the actual sunlight reflection, my eyes had to adjust -- I could sense that there was extra brightness there.  I was squinting slightly since it was, after all, very bright.



Some day, screens will break out of the legacy 8-bit-per-pixel-color and display a higher dynamic range.  They will glow so brightly that you'll need to squint when faced with reflected sunlight.

Metallic printing paper gives us a preview.  I'm currently looking at an 8x10 print of the photo above, in a nice matted frame.  Each mini-sun from the lake wavelets is glowing out at me.  It's even bright enough to inspire slight squinting.  The print reflects ambient light -- white is still white, yellow is still yellow -- but it jumps out at the viewer.  So, things that are full-on-white in the photo (RGB 127,127,127) are actually brighter-than-white.  (This is an option from Mpix, the photo service I use for "nice" prints to be framed, etc.)

It's not perfect of course, since you have to be standing in just the right place to see the effect.  But it's a little hint of what might come in the future with High Dynamic Range displays.

Green Sky in the Morning

It was about 4:00 in the morning on Saturday when my cell phone sounded the alert for a possible geomagnetic storm brewing (courtesy of spaceweather.com).  Kathy and I were vacationing in Banff, Canada, and I could see some reddish clouds in the sky, nicely reflecting the town's lights.  Stars were visible, yet no auroras.  But wait -- the clouds in the northeast were silhouetted, indicating that something was lighting up the sky behind them.  Perhaps the coming dawn?  No, it was much too early for that in Banff; sunrise would not be until 8:03am.  Eventually the effect brightened and it became obvious that this was indeed an aurora -- the Northern Lights.

It did not look much like the spectacular images in the astronomy web sites -- usually taken from Alaska or other high latitude regions, without clouds in the way.  But it was the first time Kathy and I had seen them at all, so the view was amazing enough for us!

One thing you may not know is that the picture-book photographs of auroras are all time exposures -- mine was 6 seconds at f/4 with ISO 6400.  So, like for most nighttime sky views, photography enhances our ability to see and appreciate the Northern Lights.

Family, Fun, and Physics

This is my grandson John, throwing a rock into the water of Fern Ridge Lake near Eugene. We're talking a big rock, as you can see here:



Big rocks make big splashes, which fascinated John -- but not nearly as much as they fascinated me when I enlarged a portion of the 1/1500 sec shot.



So much is visible in that frozen instant of time (0.0007 sec.)!  The rock itself is continuing to push down into the water after expelling a window-thin sheet of water upward.  Through the "window glass," you can see a secondary shock wave getting sent backward.  But my favorite feature of the brief apparition is a set of concentric rings on the sheet itself, caused by water droplets striking it like pebbles dropped in a pond. (Click on the image to see this better.)

Grandson John did not need any photographic enlargements to be entertained however.  He kept it up all the way to sunset, splash after splash:



It was a glorious afternoon -- we enjoyed family, a gorgeous sunset, and Physics.

Herbert the Snail

This is "Herbert the Snail."  At least, that's what I named him.  Some of you may remember listening to The Music Machine tape (yes, I mean cassette tape) with your kids in the car -- or, as a kid in the car.  One of the memorable songs was Patience (Herbert the Snail).  Click here to listen to the line from the song that inspired this photo.  It starts with Herbert singing in slow snail-speak, "Have patience, have patience, don't be in such a hurry...."

Indeed, snails don't hurry.  Kathy and I came across Herbert while we were walking around the lake in Vernonia last Saturday.  He had just emerged from a shadow, and was ponderously making his way across a patch of sunlight on the lakeside path:



I wanted to get to know Herbert better, so I took some photos at his eye level.  He stretched one of his eye spots to the fullest to greet me -- or or maybe he was just looking for obstacles.  (It's hard to read a snail's emotions.)



In any case, Herbert provided a vivid example of being unhurried -- a trait it would be good for us all to consider in the midst of our fast-paced lives.  :-)

Venus Transit Bookends

There are hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of Venus Transit photos blanketing the web right now.  Many of them look almost exactly the same, showing the Sun with the black disk of Venus amid a pattern of sunspots that will be long-remembered.  (See the previous blog posting for my contribution to this same-ness.)  But when clouds and foreground are added, suddenly everyone's photo is different.  The photo above is one of my contributions to this variety -- as the Sun dipped lower in the sky, there were some clouds to add interesting pixels to the image.

From San Francisco, the Transit started at 3:06 pm and continued until the Sun dipped below the horizon at 8:44 pm with the transit still in progress.  The next two photos represent the bookends of my experience -- the Venusian ingress on the front end and a picturesque sunset on the back end.





You may have noticed that in the last photo above, the image of Venus has been elongated vertically.  Of course, this is due to the distortion of the Sun's setting image as its light rays slog through layer upon layer of atmosphere at the tail end of its 93 million mile journey to my camera lens.

Throughout the transit, there were also various non-Venus scenes that presented themselves near my San Francisco Cliff House location.  To see all 9 images, see my associated Flickr set (slideshow).

All in all, June 5, 2012 was a very memorable day!  :-)

Dark Venus

Tuesday I was in San Francisco gazing at the Sun through solar-filtered binoculars -- then it happened. The planet Venus crossed in front of our star.

For almost seven hours, the brightest planet in the sky went dark -- a jet-black disk against the bright Sun. This was the last time it will do so until December of 2117. No one alive today will get to view the next Venus Transit.

Altogether, I shot about 450 pictures of the event; my first -- and last -- attempt at Venus Transit photography. In the coming days and/or weeks, I'll share some more of the photos. But for now, the image that is burned in my mind is the one above: Dark Venus gliding in front of the Bright Star.

Crescent Sun

On Sunday in Eugene, we were treated to a partial solar eclipse where 85% of the Sun's disk was covered by the Moon gliding in front of it. Of course this is Oregon, and our clouds decided they wanted a piece of the action too.  In many parts of the state (e.g. Portland), the event was invisible except for a few glimpses of the Sun through thick clouds.  Fortunately, the Eugene clouds were thin enough to reveal the Crescent Sun throughout much of the eclipse.

At 6:23pm, the coverage reached its peak of 85.4%.  Here is what it looked like, exposed for the crescent through some non-picturesque clouds:



Unless you were hiding from news outlets in the days leading up to Sunday's eclipse, you know this was an annular type, which means the Moon is too far away to completely cover the Sun -- but still tries its best anyway. The result is a "ring of fire" during the few minutes that the Moon's disk appears completely inside the Sun's disk. Unfortunately for my photographic ambitions, I was not in the path of annularity this time -- but as you can see, it was fairly close.

On August 21, 2017, we will get a total solar eclipse, revealing the beautifully delicate solar corona.  The west-to-east path of totality will include McMinnville in the north to Alsea in the south.  I viewed the previous total eclipse that graced the contiguous United States in 1979, and I can assure you it will be worth your effort to see the next one in 2017 .  :-)

Venus Says Goodbye to Sisters

The Oregon clouds finally cleared and I was able to capture Venus and the Pleiades in the same shot. Of course, photographers who were graced with clear skies earlier this week obtained much better photos, since Venus glided right through the famous star group also called the "Seven Sisters."

Oh well; it was still a gorgeous view tonight, even as Lady Venus said goodbye to the Sisters. :-)

March of the Snowflakes

Last Thursday, we had a surprise March snowstorm in the "banana belt" of Tualatin. Certainly, these winter camellia blossoms did not expect it.

Maisy, on the other hand, took it well in stride:



Two days later, it was a balmy spring day. The only tangible memory of snow was photographs, an occasional not-yet-fully-melted snowman, and some trees damaged by the heavy wet snow which combined gravitational forces with spring blossoms.

All in all, March is living up to its reputation as a month of unsettled weather. And, it only has a few days left to go "out like a lamb." :-)

Jupiter and Venus, Shoulder-to-Shoulder

Two bright dots in the sky, very close to each other. Perhaps you saw the Jupiter and Venus Show after sunset last week (Tuesday for this shot). Maybe you even trained your binoculars on the conjunction, and observed that both planets could fit into the same field of view. If your binoculars were on a tripod, or you had one of the fancy new Image Stabilized models, you would have seen three or four tiny pinpricks of light next to Jupiter. Of course, those were moons of Jupiter.



What was fun about this scene was seeing five planetary bodies in the same view (click on the image for a bigger view; click here for full-resolution):



FWIW, the 13-frame stack was shot at 0.5 seconds, f/5.6, 300mm (480mm equivalent), ISO 800. Stacking was done using Registax v5 with three alignment points.

In this 2010 posting, I showed a scene with Jupiter and its moons, our Moon, and Uranus off to the side. That one was admittedly more picturesque. But today's blog entry is about the two brightest planets getting so close in the sky that they were posing for a side-by-side photo. On Thursday, March 15 the planets were even closer, but the Oregon cloudscape denied me the privilege of seeing it. In May, the two planets are scheduled for another shoulder-to-shoulder photo-op; maybe then. :-)

Update, 26-Sep-2014: Click here for my posting two years later when Venus and Jupiter finally posed close enough for a shot that nicely shows the two planets with Jupiter's moons.

Collinear Planets

Jupiter and Venus are now the brightest objects in the sky. Until, that is, the crescent Moon makes an appearance, as happened this evening. The thing that made the scene expecially photogenic was the collinear arrangement -- three planetary bodies arrayed in a straight line. It was so gorgeous I couldn't resist a quick pre-dinner astrophotography session. The shot was one second at f/4, using ISO 400.

About a minute later, Luna snuggled under her blanket of horizon clouds and disappeared.

Hunting for the Nebula

Here is the bottom half of the familiar winter constellation of Orion -- "The Hunter." This arrangement of stars is home to one of the most famous celestial objects outside the planets: the Orion Nebula. It's hard to see when you are just gazing up at the Orion constellation. But if you know where to look (the middle "star" of Orion's sword), you can see a faint fuzzy patch.

Thanks to modern digital camera sensors, it's possible to gather enough light in two seconds at f/4 with ISO 1600 that the nebula now pops out of the constellation's mugshot above. Here is a close-up:



Of course, fancy star-tracking equipment can generate much nicer views of the Orion Nebula. But I'm happy that I was able to capture what I did, using a regular DSLR, a zoom lens set at 70mm, and a sturdy tripod.

It also helped to have a super-dark moonless sky at Black Butte in Central Oregon, where Kathy and I spent last weekend. :-)