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)

Confessions of a Blog-a-holic a.k.a. Biopsy of a blog

Another day, another post. Sometimes I wonder why I do this. I could be doing a lot of better (for me) things like preparing for my semester exams or may be for CAT or doing my application processing work (seriously, it's getting no where, please pray for me...). Anyway, it feels a lot guilty doing this (yes, I have a conscience too :P...). I'd like to share my feelings about maintaining a blog, something I've never expressed to most people, I guess.

For knowing why I blog, you might want to refer to my previous post (again, I show the insensitivity of a *whatever* and assume that you have no better job to do... :P). So, if you are planning to start a blog yourself, you'd better read this post first...

So, the first consequence of having a blog (I'd rather list this, makes me feel better...)

• Knowledge: You expect people to know the fact that you have a blog. (This totally got to me at the beginning, but then, one gets used to being ignored...) You stop mentioning your blog to anyone after about a couple of weeks and then forget it yourself too. This is when a blogger needs to be very patient and keep on writing. You know what they say : "Every blog has its day!" (If you didn't get the joke, remember that, "Every dog has its day :P").
• Condescension: Look it up if you don't know what it means. (The purpose of the sentence is to demonstrate the point...). Anyway, it is important to get through this stage, as it may lead to alienation of people and then you start getting depressed and one thing leads to another; it's a vicious circle see, and might lead to bad things.
• Requests: You start asking your friends to read your blog, but then, most of them are either busy or too self-centered and narcissistic to be able to do this and you even give up on them.
• Acceptance: This is when you lose all hope and decide that you are just another good for nothing blogger who cannot do a damn to the world around you. But then, if you are strong at heart, you keep on blogging in some silly hope that someday, someone will go through your blog and praise your effort.
• Doubt: There comes a stage when you wish you had a dollar for every post that never left the scribble pad, you'd be a 100-aire (forming new words shows creativity on your blog :P). And then you realize: what is important is not the number of posts but the the quality of those that matters.
• Guilt: You get addicted to your blog. This is the stage this blog is currently in. You start seeing this as a big waste of time and is interfering with your other works. I am not able to be so articulate when it comes to writing about this thing itself.

Well, I cannot surmise as to the next steps but will try to keep you updated about the changes. :) Anyway, all the best to anyone who's planning on starting a blog!!

Good Night!! :D

D.I.Y.!!

Fine, I'm back... Not that I'm cool with spending time this way during my exams, but this seems far  more enjoyable than my preparation :).

So, what's this all about? DIY stands for Do It Yourself, as most of you might have guessed. This according to me is the philosophy of our generation. Everyday, we face people who complain about, well, everything. Be it the pollution, the traffic or the education system in our case :). But, what are we doing to change it? Let's be honest, virtually nothing. And why? because we are lazy? No, sir, that's because we've been brought up that way. As Mahatma Gandhi rightly puts,

"We need to be the change we wish to see in the world."

Let me put it this way, we prefer complaining, hemming and hawing (That reminds me of Who Moved my Cheese by Dr.Spencer Johnson), to doing something towards changing the things that irritate, or rather cause discomfort to, us. 

Why is it that, in our social setting (guys, I'm talking purely about India), the first thing we are taught is to "adjust". 

If someone is irritating you, just get along with it, don't punch him in the nose. Control your emotions blah blah.. 

If you find that something wrong is going on around you, ignore it, "It's none of your business!". 

Now, that phrase strikes me to be odd. C'mon guys, if it's happening around me, it damn well is my business, me being the quintessential citizen I try to be :). Don't you think it is the concern for everyone of us? So, where's this fit in with "DIY"? Simple guys, you might as well have gotten the point by now, don't depend on others. If you got something to get done, try and do it yourself. The instrumental word here being try, as opposed to do. If you don't like people using plastic bags, initiate the movement, start using paper or cloth bags, I'm sure you can get the drift..

Instead of saying, "Something has to be done about it.", we could use the more optimistic "I/We gotta do something about it.". Sounds loads better to me anyways. Then there's this common issue of people commenting us. Seriously, guys, we are more sophisticated than that, as in, we don't need to acknowledge the comments so long as we believe in what we are doing.

Let's not digress...

So, DIY is the cult among people of our generation. The reasons? Simple, we prefer being independent, we like to try new things, we like "getting our hands dirty". Then there also is the massive ego of ours :), if an expert can do it, why can't I? Well, worth mention here is my belief that an amateur can be more creative and successful in any field than the professionals. Simple logic, a professional is taught all the rules of working and the human mind is such, that once you know the result of some mistake, we presume it to be true, without ever trying to test for the truth. A person who is self taught can definitely view things in excellent perspective, as compared to a person who's been taught. Also, there's this satisfactory feeling you get after you have accomplished something by yourself. You actually feel on top of the world. Your mind becomes freeeeeee, you don't need to depend on others. So, essentially, it's important to try and DIY (sounds poetic, eh? :)). Now, I know this gotta end now - not DIY, but this post. :)

Adieu,

Try and DIY :) :)