Just published! Well, three years ago.

I recently learned that my 2001 photograph of the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory was published as a full-page chapter heading in the 2009 educational book Eyes on the Skies: 400 Years of Telescopic Discovery by Govert Schilling and Lars Lindberg Christensen.

The photograph was taken at sunset on Kodak Elite Chrome 200 slide film with my Canonet QL17 GIII. Given that the book used a vertical crop from the horizontal frame, I’m quite satisfied with the quality of the image in print.

The reader may wonder how I just came to realize that my photograph was published three years ago.

My God, It’s Full of Planets | 28 | 2.8 | #22

Venus and Jupiter in my pothole

Lyric of the day: Unit conversion edition

Kris Allen, Live Like We're Dying:

We only got
86,400 seconds in a day to
Turn it all around or to throw it all away
We gotta tell 'em that we love 'em
While we got the chance to say
Gotta live like we're dying

Familiarity with this song will be a boon to freshman astronomy majors. Now we just need a song about 202,265 arcseconds in a radian.

Frontiers in Space: Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories

I recently won an eBay auction for a vintage publication of the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories, Frontiers in Space. This black-and-white 48-page volume was one that I had not come across in previous auctions, and I have not found any information about it online. There is no date or copyright notice in the book, just a statement that “Additional copies of this book can be ordered from the Bookstore, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, 65 cents postpaid.” Since it seems to be an unusual book, I have scanned the book to PDF and made it available here, for educational and research purposes.

Frontiers in Space (38 MB PDF)

The book covers the general operating principles of a research telescope of the first half of the 20th century, including mount design and the movement of the telescopes; the use of photography for imaging and spectroscopy; and the various focal configurations (prime focus, Cassegrain, Coudé, Schmidt cameras). The histories of George Ellery Hale, Mount Wilson, and Palomar are presented, including the discovery of the expanding universe (with Edwin Hubble's name nowhere to be seen). A “night's work” for an observer is described, and the book concludes with an overview of the hot research topics of the day.

The book likely dates from soon after the completion of the Hale Telescope in 1948. There are numerous historical details up to that time, but little mention of events that followed.

The PDF was made searchable using the excellent WatchOCR software, which I described in detail yesterday. Final bleg: Can anyone point me to some free software that will let me adjust the logical page numbers in the PDF so that they match the page numbers in the original?

Word of the Day: Apodizing

Via PC Gaming Tips, “An apodizing phase plate coronagraph for VLT/NACO”:

Abstract: We describe a coronagraphic optic for use with CONICA at the VLT that provides suppression of diffraction from 1.8 to 7 lambda/D at 4.05 microns, an optimal wavelength for direct imaging of cool extrasolar planets. The optic is designed to provide 10 magnitudes of contrast at 0.2 arcseconds, over a D-shaped region in the image plane, without the need for any focal plane occulting mask.

Apodizing, of course, means “if you take cool extrasolar planet pictures with our coronagraph, they’re sure to end up on APOD.”

10 Things I’ve Done That You Probably Have Not

Based on John Scalzi's list, with the same caveats.

1. Skipped an art history lecture to have ice cream with Whit Diffie.
2. Been run off the sidewalk by Stephen Hawking. I have no idea how he got a license to drive that chair.
3. Seen the aurora borealis and Omega Centauri from the same place.
4. Helped a town clean up after a tornado.
5. Put an endangered Whooping Crane in a headlock.
6. Attended the U.S. Space Academy (“Space Camp”).
7. Appeared on the Discovery Channel.
8. Been administered Immunoglobulin G.
9. Watched a SpaceShipOne launch from the back yard. On my birthday.
10. Drove my car stupid fast on an abandoned WW2 airstrip, with grass growing through the pavement and cattle wandering across the course.

My 15 minutes: Extreme Hawaii

Here's a special treat for the weekend... my 2001 Discovery Channel performance on Extreme Hawaii, filmed at W. M. Keck Observatory. Watch it before the lawyers find it.

Things to watch for:

• Me yawning
• My alarmingly low blood oxygen level
• A computer display showing the telescope at "horizon stow" ostensibly in the middle of the observing session
• Non-dairy creamer
• My "Transitions" lenses that were never quite clear no matter how dark it was

All science reporting is required to have a substantial misrepresentation of what's going on. In this case, we visited the Mauna Kea summit during the day, but conducted the nighttime observations from Keck HQ in Waimea, at about 2,500 feet above sea level. BTW, the observations documented in the show resulted in New Observations of the Interstellar Medium in the Lyman Break Galaxy MS 1512-cB58.

The rest of the show included a guy who pokes a stick into molten lava and spins it around to make vases and another guy who surfs waves taller than my house, but I didn't think they were quite extreme enough to hang with the astronomers.

Basic Instructions on Brian May, Ph.D.

One of my favorite web comics, Scott Meyer’s Basic Instructions, just covered a topic near and dear to my heart:

(Click through for the full comic.)

When I was in graduate school, around 2003, Wal Sargent came into our office, and the following dialog ensued:

The fate of the ENTIRE UNIVERSE rests on tonight’s Penn State game.

That is all.

1. 
   seanmcarroll @plutokiller, a friendly wager? Penn State wins today, Pluto is a planet again. Alabama wins, I admit there's only one universe. 11 Sep 2010 from web
2. 
   plutokiller @seanmcarroll I'm in. If its a tie, neither Pluto nor the Universe exist. 11 Sep 2010 from Seesmic for Android in reply to seanmcarroll
3. 
   seanmcarroll @plutokiller If it's a tie, Pluto is ITS OWN UNIVERSE. 11 Sep 2010 from Twitterrific in reply to plutokiller

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