omenti

smart 'scopes

I've been around telescopes since I was ten or eleven.  At first it was a very cheap 50mm refracting telescope my Merchant Marine uncle picked up on a trip to Japan.  It had a tripod but, along with its terrible optical quality, was ill-suited for looking at the night sky.  I loved looking at the moon with it.  The next step was discovering my Dad's 6x35 binoculars were much better suited to the task and, in with a dark sky Montana or Alberta sky, were great for looking at the Milky Way and star clusters.  And finally a homebrew eight inch Newtonian with an equatorial mount to compensate for the Earth's rotation. 

 

The eight inch was a standard size for amateur astronomy.  You usually had to grind your own mirror by hand and that was a good compromise of cost and not having to build a machine to do the grinding.  The tube was nearly six feet long (long story about a jumpy highway patrolman) and the mount was made of steel and concrete and weighed nearly as much as I did.  It would go into the back of the family station wagon for the ride to a good enough area.  It took about fifteen minutes to set up and align to the Earth's spin axis (the North Celestial Pole .. a point near Polaris).  Then you'd wait another fifteen minutes for the optics to temperature stabilize before using it.   Finding something to look at meant pulling out the Norton's Star Atlas and looking for nearby stars that you could see in the 50mm guide scope.  Centering the object usually meant it would be in the field of view of the main telescope.  The eyepiece was opposite the mirror (Newtonian reflector), meaning you had to be something of a contortionist for some areas of the sky.  

It was great fun. I knew the Northern Constellations and more than a few deep sky objects well and loved using it just for the beauty of the sky.  I tried some astrophotography, but the clock drive on the mount wasn't accurate enough for anything more than a two minute exposure.   There were issues with film and good amateur astrophotography was the domain of serious amateurs who had money and/or outstanding mechanical skills.

 

Times have changed.  Other than a few college 'scopes  I moved on to larger telescopes that weren't mine for doing science.  Everything's digital at the major observatories  and most of their operation is entrusted to dedicated staff.  The only time a real astronomer notices the beauty of the night sky is being outside the dome looking up at the Milky Way.  

 

Amateur astrophotography has also changed.  Everything's digital.  Usually one buys a computer-driven mount that points the optics to what you want to look at.   A special purpose digital camera is attached to a telescope and long exposures are taken either as a single long exposure (if you have a great mount)  or by taken hundreds of shorter (say 10 or 15 second) exposures and "stacking" them to create a final exposure. Getting good results usually takes at least $4k and some expertise.  

 

A years ago small  turnkey computational "smart" telescopes appeared.  Small enough to throw in the trunk of a car, they could be set up in a couple of minutes. They had small optics - 60 to 85 mm for the early units - but used the image stacking trick.  Control was usually through a smartphone and you could watch the image build as the exposures were stacked.   Pointing was extremely easy - select an object on a digital star chart and bingo.  Even though they weren't (aren't)  inexpensive - generally $2k to $5k - there were year-long waiting lists at first. 

 

Recently Celestron, one of the major amateur astronomy companies, announced what amounts to a second generation smart telescope.  The six inch main optics are much larger and, given the company, likely to be high quality. They've spent time working out the user interface and experience.  At $4k it costs about the same as the higher end first generation scopes.  It does some image processing on its own, but you can export RAW files and do your own if you prefer.  The removable camera suggests it's upgradable. - a quibble is there are newer and better image sensors from Sony that could have been used for not much more money.  That said it still looks very useable. 

 

I don't have the money, but if I had that to spend on something it would go for this rather than an Apple Vision Pro:-)  Here's a link to the product page.  I'd wait for trusted reviews in places like Sky and Telescope, but for someone looking to make nice images and an excuse to be out in dark areas at night, this could be just the ticket.  

It will be interesting to see what smart telescopes are like in five years!  My guess is six inch class with quality optics will be at this price point, but with better image sensors - probably monochrome with color filters that move in and out of position to generate full color images.   Somewhat smaller refractors are possible, but fast quality optics are much more expensive.   We'll probably see more sophisticated image processing on the iPhone or iPad in the field..  or you could use Photoshop with custom filters.    

 

 

some surprises

About 35 years ago well drillers came to the Bourakébougou in Mali in an attempt to find the water table so the village could enjoy a more reliable source of fresh water.   They had given up on a dry hole when one of the drillers felt a breeze coming out of it. Peering in, he discovered smoking can be bad for your health.  The explosion and fire didn't kill him, but left him with painful burns.  The fire burned for weeks without smoke and was bright enough to light up many of the surrounding fields at night.   Weeks passed before the well was finally capped.  

 

About twenty years ago an African oil company bought the rights to the area thinking it must be some kind of natural gas deposit.  That turned out to be partly correct.  Analysis showed the gas was 98% hydrogen. That, of course, seened impossible.  Hydrogen is rarely associated with fossil fuel deposits.  It didn't seem like enough for viable production at the time, but an old car engine was modified to run on hydrogen.  It turned a small generator which produced electricity for lighting the village.  The head of the oil company started Hydroma with the goal of finding profitable hydrogen wells.

 

You've probably seen hydrogen associated with a variety of colors.  Brown and black hydrogen is produced by coal gasification and results in the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide.  Grey hydrogen is made from natural gas using a steam reforming process that currently releases large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  Very dirty, but inexpensive and common ways to produce a clean burning gas.  Blue hydrogen is essentially grey hydrogen where most of the carbon dioxide is captured and stored.  Green hydrogen is produced using the technique you probably used in school when you were eight or nine - electrolysis.   It can be used as a storage mechanism for intermittent "green" power sources like wind and solar. There are a few other colors made from more obscure techniques, but the common thread is each technique recognizes that hydrogen is bound to some unrelated molecule and has to be split off.  Think of it was a battery of sorts.

 

There's a lot of hydrogen in the Universe - about 90% of regular matter or about 75% by mass. About 62% of the atoms that make up you - 9.5% by mass - happen to be hydrogen. When the Earth was formed, the gravitational pull wasn't strong enough to capture and hold any molecular hydrogen in the vicinity.  It had been assumed that small pockets could be trapped in the Earth, but these would be small. Bourakébougou was viewed as an unlikely exception.  It seemed likely hydrogen was produced in certain iron-rich rocks in the upper mantle where the temperature could be high enough to release hydrogen.¹  Entirely different locations than where one finds fossil fuels and therefore poorly explored.  

 

A few new mines have been found and characterized.  So far they're modest in size.  Current hydrogen demand is on the order of 100 million tons a year and these deposits are more on the order of tens of thousands of tons.   But recently geologists have projected the possibility of much larger amounts.  It isn't clear how much would be reachable or the cost, but there's excitement in what's being called gold hydrogen.

 

As a fuel, and gold hydrogen is a fuel, hydrogen has advantages and disadvantages.  Although hydrogen's energy density per unit mass is high, its  volumetric energy density is low making it impractical for current aviation technology.  It seems more useful for large transport - long distance trucks and ships as well as power plants, but green hydrogen as a battery may be more cost effective as well as being a natural battery for intermittent green energy sources.  Time will tell.   Gold hydrogen in potentially commercial quantities came as a surprise to me. 

 

The Universe is peppered with gravitationally assembled hydrogen fusion power plants - our Sun being the most familiar.  We use only the tiniest amount of the power that falls on the Earth and that, in turn, is only a tiny fraction of the star's power output. It's a question of capture, conversion and transmission.  We know how to do many of those things, but..

 

If you're lucky enough to be in the path of totality of the North American solar eclipse in about six weeks you might get a sense of the Sun's activity.  Up close it's much more dramatic. Here's a nice video showing 11 days looking out from a side mounted camera on the Parker Solar Probe - part of a mission of highly elliptical orbits that get closer and closer to the Sun.  A few months ago it came with 7.26 million kilometers of the Sun's surface and was trucking along at over 635,000 kilometers per hour at perigee - far and away the fastest probe humans have made. (it takes much more energy to move towards the Sun than away from it)   The video flies through a coronal mass ejection..  it's amazing stuff! (while I'm a fan of Beethoven, I think this is better appreciated without the music)

And finally the Seagull Nebula - a nearby cloud of mostly hydrogen.  It's too dim for our eyes, but is close enough to appear large in the sky.  It was one of the first things I looked for with the telescope I made as a teenager.  To see its real spender you need very long exposures - something unavailable to me in the day.  APOD is a wonderful site. 

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¹ There are a half dozen potential mechanisms.  This one, involving the mineral olivine, has been observed and is likely to be the most important.

 

music and a few teachers

A friend was wondering about the old Montana license plate I had when I was in grad school and as a postdoc.  As with many things there are stories - in this case, motorcycles, mistaken identity, license plate theft and vampires ..  but the real story involves 'why'.

 

I started as an undergrad at the University of Utah.  Gale Dick, my mentor, was one of those people who had to make a choice between music and science.  He went with physics, but continued as an amateur with Friday night music with friends.  His place was small, but had a large living room with a homemade harpsichord, his wife's piano and enough chairs for about a dozen people.  The first night I went was a revelation.  A music student from the U opened with a piece he was working on for his master's recital - Bach's E Major Violin Partita.  His playing wasn't close to the level of  Hilary Hahn  (the video is one she posted during the pandemic. Note the three Grammys behind her.)

It completely took me and I was a regular from then on.  It took me awhile to understand why Bach was so attractive - the symmetries and partly broken symmetries continue to delight and amaze.   A few weeks later about a couple of violinists, a cellist and a harpsichord player played Vivaldi's No.11 Op.3 'L'estro Armonico'.  Here's a delightful performance featuring the Balanas sisters.  The orchestra is modern and larger than Vivaldi would have used, but the sisters, not afraid of showmanship, are fun to watch.

 

Not only were they having great fun, but the structure lit something inside. I'm not a musician by any stretch of the imagination.  Growing up I was at church enough to learn how to read music from the hymnals and can "hear" single lines of music reading scores.  I found the score in the campus library and "listened" to the various parts, marveling how Vivaldi put them together. Some of you are musicians and/or have connections with music.  

 

Vivaldi was a priest, a beyond-prolific innovator and the teacher at a home for orphan girls. His teaching must have been wonderful as the concerts they gave became locally famous and a few of the girls became recognized as virtuosos when women weren't recognized.  He ran afoul of the Church and died in poverty.  Although he had a great influence on Bach, it took until the 20th century for his music to be rediscovered and, a few years ago the Church apologized. Studying some of his scores, and then those of other musicians, and more carefully listening started me down a path.

 

As a grad student at Stony Brook I went for the vanity plate for my VW Rabbit.  Stony Brook was only 40 miles from NYC and its music.  It also had  a growing music department and an excellent piano trio in residence. A cello student friend invited me to master classes with visiting greats where I felt the imposter syndrome and asked some really stupid questions afterwards, but it was part of an education.

 

Stony Brook had student recitals several times a week, but no concert series. Not having any idea what that entailed, a chemistry grad student and I decided we could start one.  The immediate problem was money.  The music department and the office of the provost basically laughed. Tom and I figured the graduate student association might be able to help out since the music school had about fifty grad students.  More laughter.  We ran for the graduate student senate and won two of the three positions.  We proposed allocating $15,000 of the $22,000 fund towards a concert series that grad students could attend for free.  It passed by a 2-1 vote.  We put together an eight concert series cleaning the hall before and after ourselves (with friends), acting as ticket agents and signing performers.  The first year went much more smoothly than it should have and we returned about $9,000 from ticket sales and $4,000 in donations to the graduate student union.   The next year the office of the provost provided the seed money and the season was slightly profitable (we didn't have to pay for the hall and the agency we were working with gave us a discount and more than a little guidance.   The third year - well - the music department took over for us with a manager when Tom and I had to step down given our thesis work.   The series continues to this day.  In theory I don't have to pay for tickets.

 

Since then there have been periods of connection with music of various types.  I still know so little, but it's an area of such rich enjoyment.  Like art, it's an essential source of connection for thinking a bit more broadly.

 

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An for an encore the Balanas sisters perform their violin and cello arrangement from Summer of the Four Seasons.  There's a delightful electricity between them.

 

 

improv and duets that skate the edge of the imposter syndrome

I've written about a wonderful set of idea sessions I had at Bell Labs and then AT&T Labs that had a ten year run.  After lunch on Fridays three of us would get together and talk.    Talking with others is important - there's something about organizing ideas into a stream of words for others.  All three of us were somewhat different and somewhat similar.  Two physicists - although from very different areas - and a mathematician. Often a fourth person would join.  Ideas were presented and talked about.   Thinking about these sessions brought out several points:

They were playful and enormous fun. We had a rule that we'd stop after four hours, but that only worked about half the time.

There was no sense of rank although one held a higher position in the company.  

It was allowed - our management didn't seem to mind. Perhaps because it generated a few good ideas.  I believe all of us thought we were getting away with something.

We had to explain ourselves clearly to the others.  Any one of us could easily "snow" the other two and generate the imposter syndrome.  We had a goal of making it clear enough that anyone with our common background would get it.

One of us (Norm Schryer for those who knew him) was an amazing listener and synthesizer.  I've never seen better.  He would listen to the discussion and at some point say "let me see if I understand this" and give synthesis that often was more in depth and clarity than the individual pieces.

The number of participants was small and we knew each other.  We didn't run into the sociological issues that render brainstorming somewhere between useless and counterproductive.  Since then I've come across several studies that look at ideal group size for generating new ideas in fields like math, physics, chemistry and biology...  It's rarely one and usually between two and four, falling fast as the group grows.

Expert visitors would show up by invitation or serendipity.  We all knew each other so it seemed like a natural extension.

Everyone could think on their feet and often in different ways.  It led to mutual respect.  We used quick approximations rather than accurate calculations to keep the flow up.  Often knowing something to a within a factor of two or even an order of magnitude is sufficient. 

We used yes and ...?  rather than well but...  Ideas, even obviously flawed ones, had to go around a few times by adding to them and learning a bit before attacking them.  It wasn't until I took Alan Alda's course on science communication that I realized this is core improv. 

We realized there are limits to the type of question this works for.  You learn that by experience. 

Even though the treats were less than desirable (Norm loved chocolate covered coffee beans), it was great fun.  I can't overstate the importance of fun.

I'm sure some, maybe a lot, of this is generally applicable.  So how to capture this lighting in a bottle?  I've had similar experiences one on one with some people working on specific problems.  That playfulness is central.  At one point I thought of my thesis advisor's requirement of being able to explain what you're doing to a smart high school student.  It's still a good idea and some of us have been successful spreading the idea.  Starting a few years ago videos with an expert explaining something about their speciality to four or five people at various degrees of sophistication.  Some of these are great. I encourage the practice, but the people tend to be great speakers and teachers. 

 

I'm not a gifted explainer or teacher, but I've found a useful variation that touches on some of the points in the old Bell Labs sessions.  When I'm working on something there are three or four friends in very different fields I talk to.  It forces me to communicate clearly enough for them .. the best way to do this is one on one and being able to see them or, if you really know them, hear their voice.  The rule is they have to call out when they can't follow.  As I learned in Norm's group there are limits, but I've seem in work on some rather abstract ideas.  Sometimes the greatest insight comes from chatting with someone with a very different background.  Here's the variation -  the person on the other end has to do the same with me with something they're working on.  Skate close as far as one can, but staying away from where the imposter syndrome causes the ice to shatter.  The basic improv rule of yes and ..?  is important.   I find myself using Norm's "let me see if I understand ..."       When it works you have a duet of two different instruments - it's wonderful!  I suspect this approach might work in a number of domains.