Pete Curtis
A software architect, endurance athlete, and musician living in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA.
This is my own humble place to share the things I enjoy.
contact (at) petestuff (dot) org
Today was the first day of events at the 2009 Laramie Daze! After the relaxing hike up Medicine Bow Peak in the morning, I hit Laramie for lunch and wi-fi and headed up to the map called Plains of Despair for the 3-4 PM start window. Course geekery below.
The next morning, I got a 7 AM start and headed west out of the Black Hills and across the open expanses of eastern Wyoming. At Lance Creek, I headed off into a maze of gravel roads going west to hit the freeway at Douglas. All the land was still open range, with frequent cattle guards, but the view was open and much less unnerving than the confines of the Black Hills. The roads were even in pretty good shape, and I made good time to reach the freeway near Douglas. I wanted to visit an interesting spot mentioned in the gazetteer - Ayres Natural Bridge.
From Hermosa on the east edge of the Black Hills, it's an easy drive west up to Sylvan Lake. It was about 2 PM, and I was planning to do my usual Harney Peak trail hike/run to start getting acclimated to exertion at elevation - which I will have plenty of over the next two weeks. Immediately after entering Custer State Park, we all had to stop for about a dozen pronghorn that wanted to cross the road. I stopped in at the Needles area and climbed around with my camera a bit. There were three climbers atop the spire just on the west side of the tunnel. I was too late to see them climb, but found a good vantage point to watch them rappel down the back side. (I actually went over the tunnel and bouldered up to the narrow top of a rock to get this photo.)
A few quickies from the first day of the Wyoming/Colorado trip.
I haven't posted for a while because I've was too busy relaxing at the cabin, then the North Shore. Still a few notable things, though.
Monday through Wednesday at Savanna Lake we had beautiful clear skies. Tom had brought the 8-inch Newtonian and I used it to spot a bunch of objects I'd never identified before (due to lack of a sufficient 'scope) - M57 (the Ring Nebula), M101, M27 (the Dumbbell Nebula), M15, M2, Uranus, Neptune, M11, and even the Helix Nebula low on the horizon - faint, but unmistakable. We were also able to see the dusty speckling of the brightest individual stars in M13 - an exciting addition to the usual "fuzz spot" sighting. The field-glass objects like M8, M31, M33, and the Perseus Double Cluster were spectacular. One of the things that really made things easier was Tom's green pen laser - after a short consultation of the start charts and a look through the 10x80s to fix the starfield in memory, I was able to lay the laser against the barrel of the 'scope and position it to within a fraction of a degree of even very faint objects, in most cases within the FOV of the 25mm (48x) eyepiece.
One thought that struck me during one of those nights is that a sky map is, you know, a map. And my memory for maps seemed to apply, whether it's on the earth or beyond.
It rained all day Wednesday and Thursday, though. On Friday, we packed up and headed for Grand Marais. It had cleared up again, and on Friday night I went out to Artist's Point after midnight with the tripod and camera. I gathered a bunch of time exposures at ISO 800, but none were enough to turn into photos, even when stacked. The signal-to-noise ratio was just too low. Individual bright stars weren't a problem, but I wanted to get the Milky Way as it descended into the horizon over Lake Superior, and there wasn't enough distinction between the Sagittarius star cloud (M24) and sensor noise. One interesting point is that I managed to capture orange light from not one, but two towns on the other side of the lake that was utterly invisible to the human eye. Unfortunately, it only confounded the image further. I'm guessing the layer of humidity lying over the lake probably contributed to the scattering that caused these horizon effects.
So after a nice relaxing time, I'm leaving again at the end of the week for Laramie Daze. I'll be posting about the courses, both here and on Attackpoint, and without a portable scanner I'll have to make do with photos of the course maps. That should do. Then, on to Colorado!
I'm a couple days late on this one, but that's OK. Those of you with some interest in astronomy have no doubt heard about the recent launch of the Kepler spacecraft, which was designed to systemically detect and catalog the variety of extrasolar planetary systems. The launch went well; "first light" was a success, and as a bit of a warmup exercise, Kepler then gathered its first real science data by measuring the light curve of an already-known exoplanetary system called HAT-P-7. And what a measurement is was! On August 6th, the Kepler team called a press conference to announce the results:
It's amazing how much detail this shows, considering that HAT-P-7 is around 1,000 light years away.
This lightning photography is hard to do well.
A fitting post, for the middle of summer.
Recently I've been thinking about ideas that push the boundaries of what we - modern, 21st century Western-culture latte-drinking cell-phone-carrying TV-gossiping fashion-obsessed bipedal hairless apes - are willing to think of as "normal". I think there are some gaps between the world we think we live in, and the world we could actually be living in, even assuming it's still subject to constraints about what we believe to be historically, and physically, possible.
Here's an example - one day I started to ponder the following question: Could a species with intelligence comparable (or better) than humans have evolved at another point in earth's long history? That doesn't fit into the world view I'm talking about, but it certainly isn't a scentifically untenable hypothesis.
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