Chasing Comets... (Just one, really...)

TL;DR: Anam and I missed shooting the comet NEOWISE in 2020 on our first attempt (on a weekend) due to clouds and the monsoon in general. Led to a crazy roadtrip on a weekday night in the following week and finally capturing the comet - some of my self-proclaimed best astro work. See photos below.

P.S.: Just like my innovation with Pre-Scripts, TL;DR here means you are "Too Lazy; Didn't Read" :)

2020 did have a silver lining - all the time spent with loved ones was not something any one of us imagined. It was fun to work from home - with all your favorite TV shows or movies playing in the background (if you're wondering, that is my usual work-flow - I like having some familiar show/movie playing in the background - helps me keep focused, I guess - feel free to share more WFH tips and tricks in the comments :))

Like I have mentioned in my recent post, I started a photography hobby sometime in 2018 (around my birthday, when I made my parents gift me a semi-pro camera - Sony A6000). Now, photography has its ups and downs - making time for shoots amidst a busy work schedule and home life can be a challenge, but of course, the satisfaction of taking and publishing (read as posting on Instagram - @artbymunaf) the photo is a rush (the likes and comments help, obviously). This post is about one of our (my and Anam's) most tiring experiences with my laborious hobby - there are several of these stories, which I plan to share going forward.

Living in Southern Arizona has its perks for a photographer - especially the astro-inclined ones. Part of the reason I got into astrophotography was visits to this observatory - Kitts Peak and reading about the dark sky locations nearby. Having spent most of 2019 driving around Arizona, Utah, and California for some of the best dark skies and making some investment in equipment like a star tracker (allows you to take longer exposures for light objects in the night sky by compensating for the Earth's rotation - that was a mouthful!), 2020 offered very few travelling opportunities, what with travel restrictions, hectic work, and school.

July 2020 rolled around as normally as you can imagine - we had all been stuck at home for a few months already and I was itching to get out and shoot some more night skies (having already captured some Milky Way shots that I loved). That was about when the Comet NEOWISE started showing up in our night skies - seeing NEOWISE behind basically all the landmarks in the world wasn't helping with the lockdown syndrome. As luck would have it, Tucson has a monsoon season which decided to start around this time as well. In terms of things that disappoint astrophotographers the most, it goes - full moon, light pollution, cloudy skies, in no particular order. After waiting a few weeks for the skies to clear near home, I decided to take things into my own hands and drive around in search of dark and clear skies.

It all started Saturday, the 18th of July - as I was keeping an eye on RADAR weather maps for the past few weeks, I noticed that there was a chance (yes, just a 20% chance) that there would be clear skies at Picacho State Park (about a 50 minute drive from home). This was my cue to load up the car with all of my gear and some snacks to spend the night at Picacho State Park - we were all excited and reached there around 7pm (an hour and a half before sunset). Getting there was easy enough. After paying for the park entry with basically all the quarters in the car, we settled at a picnic area with some shade and a view in the direction of where NEOWISE was, it was now time to wait. The view from this spot had a few saguaro cacti and the highway (I-10) which I was already planning in terms of composing the shot with the comet (high hopes, I know). This is where we settled down and waited for darkness to arrive so I could do polar alignment (I was going all the way with my gear - NEOWISE was likely a once-in-a-lifetime thing). That is when the clouds started rolling in - it wasn't properly dark yet, so I was still cautiously optimistic. I did make use of the sunset colors and the subjects around to get some nice deserty shots like this one.. I know, the clouds here seem flimsy, but, trust me, it almost seemed like they knew where the comet was and were trying to hide it!

Anyway, after several hours of waiting there (NEOWISE would already set by 10pm or so - about an hour and a half after sunset) and not seeing event a faint glimpse of the comet (either with our eyes or the cameras'), we decided to call it quits for the night. This of course, wasn't our first rodeo - I have had several such experiences with clouds, equipment failures, and in one instance, Coyotes (this is a long story and warrants its own post). By 9:30 or 10pm, we packed up our gear and headed back home. As disappointing as it was, I was more determined to capture the comet in the next few days.

Thankfully, from a work standpoint, I had completed a tape-out a couple of months back and was working on new projects which kept me occupied during the workday, but affording some time off in the evenings. Anam hadn't started grad school yet, so we were okay with trying something out on a weekday. The weather forecasts weren't looking promising - and NEOWISE was going away real fast! Desperate times call for desperate measures, as they say, so I expanded my weather map radius to a couple of hours away from home. I did not want to go and stay at a hotel (it was still the early-ish COVID days, so we did not want to risk it), so it had to be a there-and-back trip.

A small note about dark sky spots in general - they are usually isolated with very few people frequenting them. This makes them a bit - for want of a better word - creepy, to say the least. They are invariably away from cities and off the beaten path. Now, I have come to terms with having astrophotography for a hobby, but Anam is still getting used to the isolated nights under the dark night skies.

Back to Wednesday, July 22nd. After extensive research (read Google maps and weather searches), I had a plan in my head - to use a small rest area on I-8 (actually just a pull-out from the highway, called (aptly, I might add), Table top Roadside Tables - about 90 minutes from home to finally capture NEOWISE. Being ever the engineer, I did have a psuedo-back-up plan (which is what ended up being). We started from home about 5:30pm after work to allow for dinner and petrol breaks. Picked up dinner from our favorite Italian place and off we were! Here's a map for reference, in case you are interested:

The skies did not look promising where we were, yet. Even as we were reaching the first planned spot (the roadside tables), cloud cover was about 50% of the sky (very scientific data here, from the driver's seat) and mostly still covering N/NW (where NEOWISE should be visible). As we approached the pullout on to the "road-side" tables, the cloud cover did reduce, but N/NW was still covered. The pullout was but just a glorified parking lot - presumably for highway drivers to park and rest for a few hours if needed. There was enough room for setting up our gear, but then, clouds. There was one truck parked there, but nothing else - it was also open to the highway without any separators. I pulled out my trusty cloud cover app and noticed that there was no way the N/NW cloud cover was going away anytime soon. Time for decisions had arrived. We knew I would beat myself up if I don't get another chance in the next couple of days to capture NEOWISE. We had already spent a couple of hours into this pursuit, so we figured, what is another 4-5 hours?

This is where the back-up plan comes in - to drive all the way to Dateland, AZ - which is a total of about 2.5 hours from home (one way). Thus started our adventure - to the hospitable sounding "Sentinel Rest Area, Westbound". This one was a fully equipped rest area in its own right - with amenities like rest rooms, concrete cabanas with benches (for resting, presumably), and vending machines. There was also excellent lighting for the night - which made us feel safer. The deal with Anam and I is to always listen to our guts - if it doesn't feel right, we don't pitch our gear there. This place felt OK, there was some activity - several trucks parked and resting and several cars and drivers using the amenities. The best thing was, the cabanas faced N/NW. After appropriate amount of stretching and resting, we started to setup the gear around 9pm. Timing was really perfect - the moon was new, so the chances of NEOWISE capture looked great!

We picked the cabana farthest away from the parking area (but still in line-of-sight, to feel safe), and started setup. Facing N/NW is great for polar alignment AND capturing NEOWISE, so, the setup was up and running in a few minutes! In preparation for this night, I had watched all YouTube videos I could find on capture tips and processing ideas as well. Especially useful was this chap called Peter Zelinka (excellent channel for astro gear) and I ended up using his suggested flow. I can give a long-winded description of the photos, but a picture speaks a 1000 words, so:

And a photo of gear (I will do a post about the gear someday..):

Once I had my fill of the comet, we stayed there until about 10:40pm and started the long and arduous journey back home. Reached home around 3am and the first thing I did was to copy the photos from the SD card to my computer - I was NOT going to tempt fate and risk losing these RAW photos. Once copied, we just crashed and fell asleep.

The next morning, we were up and running by 9am, but caught up with sleep after work. The editing had to wait for next night when I followed the tutorials to the "T" and got these photos and posted them. This took a few hours, but, boy, was it worth it!

All in all - a great late night roadtrip to the best of Americana - the rest areas and highways that define this country. The infrastructure that allows people like me to go nuts and make these trips is something I am always amazed by!

We did survive this ordeal, but I told Anam that I should probably look for a less arduous hobby. Glad she was up to being a partner in crime with my nuts hobbies! :)

Do see me on my pages on Facebook and Instagram @artbymunaf (of course, I'm gonna shamelessly plug my pages - what'd you expect!? :P)

Freelosophy

DISCLAIMER: This post is a kind-of eulogy for everything in the software world that is free and open-source. And hence, I'm sure, it is understood I'm not being paid by FOSS or someone... :D


"...that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." - Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863


"Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone." - Eric Raymond, 1997


"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" - Linus Torvalds, 1996






If you're wondering why I'm blabbering about all these oldies here and now (Lincoln was old, Raymond and Torvalds, on the other hand, not so much...), you must not have been in touch with me or at he very least, my FB profile and status updates. I've been in touch with one of the most important sensations I have ever been into. By the way, this is the first post I'm typing on my laptop. I always wanted to do this - be free! Free as in freedom. Freedom from finding software that can serve all my purposes and yet, be free (this time, as in cost :P). Freedom from figuratively looking over the shoulder all the time trying to see if someone knows that you are actually using pirated software. In this aspect, India is very much ahead than probably any other nation in the world. Let me put this into perspective - pick up like 20 computer users in India, 19 of them use any of the versions of Windows. And of those 19, about 10 still use Windows XP. Of those 10 people, about 8 have never spent a buck (literally) on the Windows software they use or most of the times, not even for any other compatible software that they need to use on their machines like, for instance, Photoshop, MS Office, Matlab et al. OK, what is this post about? You might've guessed it - Linux.

First things first : It costs you only the time it takes to download it. Almost every version (a Linux version is called a Distro, short for distribution.) comes free. being true Indians as we all are, we like to get things for free.On the other hand, we have a never ending paranoia. Why is he giving this thing to us for free? It is probably defective, probably sub-standard. I had the similar doubts about Linux back in December '09. Did you know that, linux is probably the most standarized of all the operating systems available? Virtually every big corporation (and I'm talking real BIG) uses one of the Linux distributions - Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Mandriva et. al. (Most likely Red Hat, though.)


Why did I venture into this? I've been asked this a lot - at least ever since I started rallying about Linux and especially Ubuntu to any living soul I know :D. OK, why? Back in December, I was planning on buying a laptop and had started researching for a good one (and so far, I have found it). What I found common with all brands was - laptops with Windows cost a considerable amount more than those without the same. It was during that period that I learnt a lot (a LOT) about things like processor architectures, OS architectures and other technical things. The irony is that - I was supposed to have known them for like 3 subjects that I took and yet, I found the fun in those subjects. Mostly because, knowing things is different from learning them (for like an exam or for an assignment). So, i thought, what other options do I have - for an Operating System. I wanted it to be cheap and or once in my life, I wanted it to be legal. On my desktop, I use a shared (between friends and all) version of Windows XP, which incidentally, cost me nothing :). I wanted my laptop to be totally free (except for the hardware, of course) and yet, legal, cutting-edge, and reasonably user-friendly. That was when I stumbled upon Linux. I pored over thousands of lines of reports, bench-mark tests, and technical details and ended up choosing Ubuntu, especially because it was just about a CD's size and of course, meant for personal users.


Now that I've answered the obvious question, another question. Linux is free, huh? What if it's all a conspiracy and all they want is your personal data and corrupt it all. (Trust me, I've been actually asked this.) Let's face it guys, you are not the center of the universe. No one is out there to get you, let alone all the silly things that make up your data. No one simply cares. And even if they do, Linux is at the very least as safe as the other options you have. Viruses, on the other hand, are a totally different issue. They are not aimed personally at anyone, no? Well, this next thing is not so much because of Linux's (come to think of it, any *NIX), omnipotence, but because of the smaller user-base of the *NIX OSes. There are practically (I can't emphasize this enough) no wild viruses for Linux - as of now, at least. That certainly is one less thing to worry about, don't you think?


True, Linux comes with a learning curve, a very long one at that. I've been using Linux for about 2+ years now, and yet, learn at least one new thing every week - try to beat that with Windows. And, I'm not even talking about any software, just the OS by itself.


Well, I'll leave you to figure out the rest of Linux. If you are at all into technology, I suggest you start using Linux - not great for games, but the thrill of learning something so pure...unbeatable!!


An excellent article I read about the differences in philosophies is here...do go through it and of course hit the Distro websites.




Ubuntu - My personal favorite
CentOS - My second favorite, just a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux - Stability
Fedora - Just a cutting edge version of Red Hat
Distrowatch - Reading material on all the Distributions


"...the Linux philosophy is "laugh in the face of danger". Oops. Wrong one. "Do it yourself". That's it." 

- Linus Torvalds, 1996

Cheers!!


P.S.: Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons.

Outta Time...

Finally, I seem to have gotten over this "writer's block" of mine...Thing is, I don't have many things on my mind as of now - with my GRE done. I'm a bit free to waste as much time as I like to :). Time... Something which eludes my mind even now. The perception of time is different for wach of us, as it is pretty much evident! Time is the thing we all crave for, right? Come exam time and we hear people say, "Hell , if I had just one week more, I probably would have topped the exams." and when it comes to assignments, no one just gets enough (time, I mean...). Well, what is time? Now, I'd better not get started on this, because, I'd be lost in all the un-intelligible equations of the Theory of Relativity, but still, I'll give it a shot...

Time is... Hard to do this, really, face the question and you'll see it for yourself. You might say time is seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades,centuries, millenia, yada yada, but all these are simply units to measure time, something - I might add - we don't understand. I like the concept of Quantum Mechanics about the Multiverses... Every event we do moves us into a new multiverse and all the infinite number of multiverses co-exist (don't ask me where...). Some of us, like me for instance (no bragging), seem to have a completely slow frame of time where, we (I haven't met many like me...) seem to have all the time in the world. It takes little time to do things which others take longer(now, here, the means of measurement is the standard one...). So, seems like we all live in different timelines but yet share the same space in the space-time continuum. Fine, enough technicalities, I'll jump into the real thing now...

They say Time is Money. Wouldn't that mean everyone of us is so rich?? I beg to differ on this issue... It's akin to comparing apples to oranges. Money (I have some insightful perspectives on that, which I'll be sharing shortly...) is the complete anti-thesis of time in my view. If you care about money, you can't respect the fact that, you have time and if you respect time, you don't care about money. Of course, everyone has the right to do what they like with their time, it's the stealing I'm not comfortable about... Hell, you go throw all your own time down the drain, I don't care, but you have no right to someone else's time. I'm sure most would agree to this. I simply mean that, you cannot waste others' time. Well, this happens to me a lot, of course, I'm always at the recieving end (I recieve the abuse, not others' time, mind you...). No, I'm not pointing at someone in particular and yes, I hate it when people do that. Seriously, if I ever get a chance to do that, trust me, I'm gonna pass. I can't do something to others that I hate so much myself. Fine, I'm sure got my point through.

Bottom Line : (nice idea na?) Do what you want to do with your own time, don't waste others'.

P.S. : A GRE score doesn't change a person. I'm still what I was (almost, that is..), and please stop treating me like an Alien (no offense, of course, it's just that, it's freaking me out...).

Stay Cool!!

Why do I hurry?? :)

Well, I had a practical exam today. And as always, mine was the last number to be called in for the day. Usually, what happens is, the batches divided to perform experiments overlap, so that, the overall time spent in the lab for the day decreases substantially. Today, however, the exam was conducted as per the actual schedule, which meant I had to wait for about 2 hours more than what I usually do. 

Naturally for me, I was not so comfy about waiting all the time. People around me, my classmates of course, were in some different world, trying to remember all the stuff for the exam at the last moment. I, eventually, was the only one in a hurry to enter the lab and get done with the exam. 

Then, a friend of mine asked me: "Why are you always in a hurry, dude??".

I was not expecting such a question from him, actually. He paused his preparation for a moment and explained to me the following things:

• I always finish my exams long before the prescribed time.
• I cannot wait to enter the theatre when the usher doesn't allow people to enter still.
• I always hurry to the labs, even when it is just to practice

Then I decided, let's discuss this. I hurry because I hate wasting time, period. I hate to wait to get into exam hall, even to get out of the same. Simple thing, guys, I like to finish things as fast as possible, who doesn't?? I faced some glares from people about it, 

"How can you perceive exams as waste of time??". was the question. I said, 

"Well, look at it this way, I don't give a damn about the grades I get, only as long as I'm enjoying the exam."

After this conversation, we were called in for the exam and it went well.

Then I started thinking, does this habit of mine - hurry - have any serious consequence in my life?? The answer, I'm not clear yet, is may be, a yes.

Here I am, trying to save time and getting grades I get now (my classmates are well aware of my grades.), and at the other end, people try to "utilise" all the time available and getting better grades :) (Not that I care about it...).

Besides that, I never found anything wrong with it. It actually makes you stand apart from the crowd :).

So, I decided, I'm going to hurry wherever and whenever possible for the rest of my life and keep rocking.

Gotta hurry guys, Keep Hurrying up!!