I felt fine, always did. I wasn’t running to the bathroom two or three times a night. My doctor never felt anything. I have no family history of prostate [...]]]> Here’s the deal: All along, this whole “prostate cancer” thing seemed to me like a gigantic fraud. Well not fraud, but maybe “surreal.” That all changed yesterday.

I felt fine, always did. I wasn’t running to the bathroom two or three times a night. My doctor never felt anything. I have no family history of prostate cancer. It was just a blood test, an imprecise secondary indicator, that suggested a biopsy.

Okay, I believed the biopsy, but still it all seemed abstract.

So I had the surgery. Sure, take it out. I don’t really need it. But I want to know.

This is why I picked surgery over radiation. The radiation therapy is known to be effective, but it’s still all abstract, not real.

Yesterday I went in to have my staples and catheter removed. (Yay!) (Anyone who is facing this procedure and wants to know more about it, I’m happy to share in a private exchange.) Meanwhile my nurse practitioner delivered the pathology report, and I asked her for a printed copy.

I’ll post all of the relevant parts below, followed by a few word interpretations.

Here is the pathology report:

Collected: 1/19/2010
Received: 1/20/2010
Signed Out: 1/21/2010

————————————————————————–

FINAL PATHOLOGIC DIAGNOSIS

PROSTATE, ROBOT-ASSISTED LAPAROSCOPIOC[sic] PROSTATECTOMY:

1. PROSTATIC ADENOCARCINOMA, GLEASON SCORE 6 (3+3).
2. MAXIMUM TUMOR DIMENSION IS ESTIMATED AT 1 CM.
3. THE TUMOR INVOLVES THE GLAND IN A BILATERAL FASHION AND EXTENDS FROM THE APEX TO THE PROXIMAL PORTION OF THE GLAND.
4. VASCULAR INVASION IS NOT IDENTIFIED.
5. PERINEURAL INVASION IS NOT IDENTIFIED.
6. THE TUMOR IS CONFINED TO THE PROSTATE.
7. THE SEMINAL VESICALS ARE NOT INVOLVED BY TUMOR.
8. SURGICAL MARGINS OF RESECTION ARE FREE OF TUMOR.
9. HIGH GRADE PROSTATIC INTRAEPITHELIAL NEOPLASIA IS PRESENT.
10. THE NON-NEOPLASTIC PROSTATE SHOWS HYPERTROPHIC CHANGES.
11. TNM STAGE: II (PT2C NX MX).

Report Electronically Signed by
STEVEN R. MCLAREN D.O.
Date Signed out: 01/21/10

————————————————————————–

MICROSCOPIC DESCRIPTION
A microscopic examination is performed.

CLINICAL HISTORY

CLINICAL HISTORY (REQUIRED): Prostate Cancer

GROSS DESCRIPTION
The specimen consists of a radial prostatectomy specimen weighing 42 grams. The prostate itself measures 3 x 4.5 x 4 cm. Attached to the specimen is the left seminal fesicle, which measures 3 x 1.5 x 1.2 cm with the contiguous vas deferens measuring 0.7 cm in length and 0.3 cm in diameter. The right seminal vesicle measures 4 x 1.5 x 1 cm with the contiguous right vas deferens measuring 0.6 cm in length and 0.3 in cm in diameter.[sic] The outer surface of the specimen is inked and the gland is serially sectioned. Sectioning of the gland reveals nodular tan-gray cut surfaces.

CASSETTE SUMMARY:.
[Inventory of slices omitted]
[End of meaningful report]

Item 9 is interesting, “High Grade Prostatic Intraepithelial Neoplasia” is also referred to in the industry by its shorthand HGPIN.

I believe this is shorthand for a common cell formation detected under microscope. Neoplasia is literally “new growth.” And intraepithelial means “within the layer of cells that forms the surface or lining of an organ.” It’s an abnormal mass of cells that are known to sometimes morph into cancer.

Finding HGPIN, aside from the tumor, is significant in that it adds to the diagnosis, and provides another data point in the statistical link between HGPIN and a cancerous tumor. Nice for me is that it’s fully contained within the gland, “intraepithelial.”

Following on with item 10, non-neoplastic would then refer to everything that isn’t “new growth,” all the non-tumor parts of the prostate. Hypertrophy is the increase in the volume of an organ or tissue due to the enlargement of its component cells. It’s just evidence that my prostate was getting bigger. That’s what they do.

Item 11 is meaningful too, and puts the cancer into a statistical class. TNM is short for “Tumor, Node, Metastasis.” Stage II says the tumor has not spread outside the prostate. The overall stage is then followed by T, N, and M numbers. T2C means the tumor is found in both lobes. (I suspect the qualifier PT2C means this is a prostate cancer specific designation.) NX and MX mean the lymph node and metastasis stages could not be determined. That makes sense, since the lab is handling a disconnected prostate gland in vitro.

I’m sure that an industry professional might correct some of my interpretation to be more specific, but I think I have the gist of the report.

And I like what I see.

The short version is that I was diagnosed with a small but clinically significant prostate cancer in September, and will [...]]]> With Jane’s encouragement, I thought I would write this blog entry. I want to keep my friends and family up to date, and for the most part they are the only ones reading this blog anyway.

The short version is that I was diagnosed with a small but clinically significant prostate cancer in September, and will have RP surgery (Radical Prostatectomy) using robotics on January 19. I’ll be at Kaiser’s West L.A. Medical Center for one night, then recovering at home for about three weeks. Within a few months, the expectation is that I’ll be pretty much back to normal for the duration.

For those of you who really want all the details, how this came about, and what decisions were involved, I’ll go into it all below. For lots of people this comes under the category of “too much information,” and you are certainly excused without prejudice.

It all started with a routine physical back in June. A blood test then revealed an elevated PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) level. 3.5 is considered significant, and mine was 3.6. My previous test 18 months earlier was around 1.something.

One positive test is not a result, so my doctor ordered a retest, which had a count of 4.1. That called for a referral to the urologist.

The urologist meeting came in September. Prostate cancer is so slow-growing that one has the luxury of dealing with it deliberately. After reviewing my chart, he scheduled a biopsy, which we did the following week or so.

(In discussing the process with other men who’ve been through it, the biopsy seems to be the most unpleasant part. I called Jane after mine and said, “I need a drink.” We met at Traxx Union Station shortly after.)

The biopsy took fourteen “cores” (yes think of core samples) which were examined visually under a microscope. One sample was 30% cancer cells, and one was 10%.

Interestingly there are absolutely no symptoms at this stage of the cancer. I feel great, have no urinary troubles, and no other symptoms of any kind.

In this instance, I must recommend my experience with Kaiser Permanente. They take advantage of having a vast and closely-tied medical staff, combined with the best Electronic Medical Record system in the business. The efficiency and accuracy is very confidence inspiring.

The question after diagnosis becomes the choice of treatment. Interestingly, because prostate cancer grows so slowly, new treatment studies can’t know their effectiveness for 15-20 years. The accepted treatment these days is either RP (surgical removal of the prostate) or radiation treatment.

My urologist scheduled me for a type of seminar session in which Jane and I would meet with specialists from each of the different treatment options to discuss the matter. In one morning we discussed the options with surgeons and radiation oncologists.

(For men closer to 70 than 50, another possibility is “no treatment.” Prostate cancer is really slow growing. Indeed most men will have prostate cancer when they die, but it will be something else that killed them.)

Which treatment to pursue was really a no-brainer. Surgery and radiation treatment are about equally effective. The big advantage of the surgery is that they get to actually examine and analyze the cancer in vivo. They get to take it out and send it to a lab for analysis or  research. The surgeon can see without any doubt if it has spread beyond the prostate and if any follow-up treatment is required. All of those advantages disappear with the somewhat blind radiation treatment.

The modern robotic surgery technique is fascinating. The doctor sits in a corner watching high-def video and manipulating the tiny robotic instruments. I’ll spend one night in the hospital and head home the next day.

I get to spend ten days at home with a catheter, and another couple of weeks recuperating. They taught me an exercise regimen to restore tone to the pelvic floor muscle, so I’ll be doing those.

I decided to do one other bit of preparation before going in. I had already joined Weight Watchers, and have been sticking with it to drop another five pounds of weight or so. I also hired a personal trainer to try and be in decent physical shape. I managed to make progress in both areas over the past three months. These are not part of the official protocol for surgery prep, but to me they just made a lot of sense.

This Friday, Jane and I are going to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary in Las Vegas at the Venetian. We’re going to have a splendid vacation weekend. I’ll turn 53 on my birthday on Monday, January 18, but won’t get to eat any solid food that day. It’s okay, we’ll celebrate plenty the day before.

A lot of men are going through this now, or will be in the future. Prostate cancer is the most common cancer, but not the most common killer. Don’t put off the routine physicals; this thing has no symptoms until it starts to become a serious problem.

At my stage of the game, I can treat it as an inconvenience. Throughout everything leading up to this, I’ve lost no sleep, had no serious worries. Bridge players learn to do the best they can with the cards they hold, and it doesn’t hurt to have a top-notch partner across the table from you.

Update: This lolcat went by today on ICanHasCheezburger:

Jane and I were by ourselves for the dark sky weekend of November 14, 2009. We set up at our usual spot at Chuckwalla Bench. Unlike the past two months, this night featured a cold air mass [...]]]>

Photo from Feb. 2009 of the Astro-Physics Traveler getting ready for a night of imaging at Chuckwalla Bench

Jane and I were by ourselves for the dark sky weekend of November 14, 2009. We set up at our usual spot at Chuckwalla Bench. Unlike the past two months, this night featured a cold air mass that required bundling up well. It also implied that the seeing from our desert location might not be perfect.

Jane brought her 12.5-inch Litebox dobsonian, and I opted for the 4-inch Traveler refractor (seen in my heading photo).

The night turned out to be beautiful. The seeing was good, and we were able to enjoy a few early Leonid and Taurid meteors as well. My goal was to try getting more exposure minutes on some classic targets, and try to get some piggyback constellation photos as well.

M33 and Triangulum region

Triangulum, Aries, and Andromeda, piggyback naked-eye resolution

The famous Pinwheel Galaxy, M33, was a difficult object for me when I started out in astronomy with a classic 8-inch Celestron SCT. The face-on spiral is enormous in the sky, covering almost as much area as the nearby Great Andromeda Galaxy. But its surface brightness is low, so with a little magnification it’s possible to look right through the galaxy without seeing it. I later learned that it sometimes shows up better in binoculars than a telescope.

If you click on the naked-eye resolution photo nearby, you can find M33 as a faint smudge just to the left of center. M31 the Andromeda Galaxy bright core is in the upper left.

The three bright stars of Triangulum are in the lower third, just left of center. The bright stars of Aries are also in the lower third, to the right of center. (Might be fun to use Flickr’s photo tagging feature to highlight the features.

M33 the Pinwheel Galaxy

Again “click to embiggen” as Phil Plait would say. This image is a stack of four 15-minute exposures with the AP Traveler and the SBIG ST-4000XCM one-shot color CCD camera. I love seeing the famous red star-birth regions sprinkled through the arms of this nearby galaxy.

In terms of technique, I used a Bahtinov focusing mask for the first time. It saved a lot of time in finding and maintaining focus. Autoguiding worked perfectly. It felt really good to have confidence to take long sub-exposures and stack them in Photoshop. This was my first true one-hour image, and the first I’m proud to have seen at full resolution.

Auriga and IC 405

Piggyback view of Auriga, naked-eye resolution

Auriga was one of the first constellations I identified and recognized on my own as a new astronomer, so I’m always delighted to see it again.

In the piggyback shot, the bright Auriga stars form a squashed pentagon slightly left of center. The right-most star doubles as part of Taurus. North is to the left, and the brightest star there is Capella. In the full-resolution image you can see the Milky Way open clusters M36, M37, M38, and I think that’s M35 in Gemini in the lower right.

Jane was enjoying touring through targets in this part of the sky, and spent some time attempting to see visually the difficult target IC 405, the Flaming Star Nebula. (Her companion post on the subject is coming soon.) I was intrigued as well, and took 30-minutes of exposure time on IC 405. It’s not visible in the piggyback view, but is found in Auriga near the upper center of the picture.

IC 405 the Flaming Star Nebula

I wasn’t familiar with this target, and the 30-minutes of data here shows only the brightest areas of this faint nebula. Longer exposures and a Hydrogen-alpha filter will show the nebulosity extending out to the left and curling up like a huge comma. This was a really fun target, and I’m looking forward to Jane’s discussion of it.

Orion, the Flame and the Horseshoe

Orion, piggyback naked-eye resolution

Finally I wanted to see if my little 4-inch refractor could possibly do justice to one of the most popular astrophotography targets. Here in my naked-eye resolution piggyback photo is the Orion constellation, with its famous bright star-birth nebula near the dead center of the photo.

The target I had in mind wasn’t the Orion nebula itself, but two very different nebulae near the left-most belt star Alnitak (Zeta Orionis). Just to the left of Alnitak is a bright yellowish nebula called the Flame. In a telescope it shows a lot of detail, looking almost like tire tracks. The full-resolution picture of the constellation has just a hint of the flame. If you already know it’s there, you might be able to see it.

For my piggyback photos I used my Canon 20D digital SLR camera, mounted on top of the AP Traveler. I shot 5-minute exposures, and tried to subtract a 5-minute dark frame, which doesn’t seem to make much difference.  The camera does leave behind a reddish glow which I’ve removed in Photoshop.

Just below Alnitak is the Horsehead nebula, also known as Barnard 33. Seeing the Horsehead visually is a fun and difficult project, requiring really good transparency and a fairly large telescope. Jane observed it visually in her 12.5-inch.

The Flame and the Horsehead in Orion

I never dreamed the image would turn out this nicely. The big white bright blob just above center is Alnitak. In the lower right is Sigma Orionis, one of my favorite multiple star systems. Of course the bright Flame is just left of Alnitak, and dark nebula B33 is just below center.

Just as with M33, this image is made up of four 15-minute exposures. The telescope is a 105mm f/6 Astro-Physics Traveler, with an SBIG ST-4000XCM one-shot color CCD camera. The mount is the AP Mach-1 GTO on wooden tripod, and I did autoguiding and image capture with Software Bisque’s CCDSoft. I used SBIG’s CCDOps software to process the Bayer-matrix one-shot color pixels out to luminence and RGB components, combined the L and RGB components in Photoshop, then stacked the four color images for the final photo.

It was another perfect new moon Saturday for a trip to our favorite spot in the Colorado Desert out I-10.

Yes this is a very full Grand Caravan!

Jane and I happily took out [...]]]> Full photo album of setting up and astrophotos here at the Whiteoaks Photo Album.

Update: Here’s Jane’s version of the same evening.

It was another perfect new moon Saturday for a trip to our favorite spot in the Colorado Desert out I-10.

Yes this is a very full Grand Caravan!

Jane and I happily took out all the seats of the old Grand Caravan and filled it with telescopes and gear. We brought her 17.5-inch Litebox dob, and our AP180EDT f/9 refractor.

Jane has been indulging my dabbling in astrophotography lately. I’ve been delighted that Jane is using some of my astrophotos for the What’s Up podcast, lucky that she wants imperfect images that are closer to what one might actually see in an amateur telescope.

This 180mm f/9 refractor should be an outstanding astrograph; it’s certainly an amazing visual astronomy instrument. I dabbled with it a little last year in Anza Borrego, knowing I needed to learn a lot of operating technique to get some good results. I solved a few mechanical problems then, and ran into autoguiding calibration later. Those lessons served me well, even though it’s almost a year later.

Early in the evening was Jupiter time, and we all spent some time soaking up the gorgeous views through a binoviewer in steady seeing. 300x on Jupiter showed lots of detail in the bands, including a nice red barge in the North Equatorial Belt, and nice little disks and color on the moons.

I’m going to take a few paragraphs to talk shop, gadgets, problems, and solutions.

Setting up the AP180, all ready to take flats, except there's no known focus position!

My camera is an SBIG ST-4000XCM single-shot color CCD camera which perfectly suits my recreational needs. The big AP180 is mounted on an older 900QMD mount, a simple but stable platform without GOTO electronics or servos.

The 900QMD mount comes with digital encoders on the R.A. and Dec axes, but having spent several years using this telescope for primarily lunar and planetary observing, those encoders went unused for the life of the mount.

The R.A. axis encoder is removable so you can use a polar alignment scope, and the encoder shaft has a slip fit into a metal sleeve when it’s in place. Last year I discovered that this mechanical connection slips very easily, rendering the encoder useless.

The trick I settled on, which worked again tonight, was to cut a little piece of rubber band and push it into the fitting to serve as a tightener.

Jane aligns the Telrad on her 17.5-inch Litebox

To use the digital encoders for pointing, I acquired a BBox from JMI, connected that to a USB-Serial adapter, and used Software Bisque’s TheSky 6 to serve as my controller. I’ve learned by experience (at Fremont Peak observatory) that the alignment doesn’t need to be 100% perfect. I’ve learned the trick of syncing the software and encoders to a bright star near my target, then doing an accurate short slew to my actual target.

(One problem I haven’t quite solved yet is play in the polar scope. I haven’t figured out how to tighten the polar scope in position, in the correct orientation, so it doesn’t wiggle.)

So with a not-quite-perfect polar alignment, autoguiding becomes my essential partner. CCDSoft can be tricky software to work with when calibrating the autoguiding. The error messages and manual don’t really help solve problems like “Illegal motion in X-axis, error 352.” I thought I might even be dealing with a problem in the mount mechanics. In retrospect, I think I also hadn’t learned the correct switch settings on the QMD controller. (”Guide” and “.5″ works much better than the 16x slew mode for visual!)

On perusing the Software Bisque support forum last week, I was able to learn that their autoguiding calibration depends entirely on there being only one bright star in a large region of the guide imager. While I could see the guide motions working perfectly and orthogonal, the software doesn’t do matching of the star field, only looking for the one significant guide star.

Having discovered that, I was finally able to successfully calibrate the autoguider. And with one successful calibration (remembering to set the current declination), I could autoguide on different targets successfully for a long time.

(The Software Bisque manuals hint that there’s a way to link to TheSky so CCDSoft knows the declination of its target, but I haven’t figured that out yet.)

M74 two 15-minute exposures, SBIG ST-4000XCM, 180mm f/9, October 17, 2009

Pisces was high overhead, and I love M74, so I decided as a first target to revisit that favorite. I settled on 15-minute exposures. The first one came out “double vision” when the autoguider momentarily lost track during the exposure, but that was the only time that happened during the evening.

NGC7541 in Pisces, 15 minutes

A visit to the Night Sky Observers Guide suggested NGC7541 as a Pisces “showpiece,” and I love galaxy groups. This one was gorgeous in Jane’s 17.5-inch, too.

NGC7640, 15-minute exposure

Jane showed me NGC7640 in her 17-inch, a really lovely look, and I thought it would be a great target. We’re starting to enjoy comparing visual and imaging views.

NGC253, 2x15minute exposures

I admit I get impatient when I’m imaging, and want to collect more targets rather than more exposures on the same target. As a result, I have a little more noise in my images, but I’m having fun anyway. That said, I couldn’t resist spending some time on NGC253, the Silver Coin galaxy. I had a tantalizing glimpse of this target last year at Anza Borrego when I hadn’t yet learned how to make the autoguiding work. This time I got two lovely 15-minute exposures. Well worth it.

Pre-dawn crepuscular rays at Chuckwalla Bench

After a few hours sleep, we were greeted with lovely pre-dawn crepuscular rays, Venus, and Saturn making its return after solar conjunction. Not to worry, the telescope was capped, and about to come down into its box, anyway. (You can see the box ready to be loaded with telescope.) Jane paused to take this lovely picture.

On nice modern monitors, you can really enjoy the full resolution of your pictures. Jane and I just replaced our old Viewsonic CRT monitors with [...]]]> The world is full of wallpaper managers for every operating system out there. I enjoy wallpapers taken from some of my digital photography, such as this trip to Yosemite last year.

On nice modern monitors, you can really enjoy the full resolution of your pictures. Jane and I just replaced our old Viewsonic CRT monitors with some nice Dell 23-inch LCD models.

Immediately I saw that I needed to regenerate our collection of wallpaper photos to match the aspect ratio and higher resolution of our new monitors. I admit to being a stickler for my wallpaper photo albums. I have these requirements:

• I want to scale and crop the photos to fill the screen exactly, no tiling or stretching.
• I want no black bars, letterboxing, or distorted aspect ratios
• I want to dim the maximum brightness of the photos so my desktop icons are still discernable

My Canon 20D full-resolution pictures have more than enough pixels to fill the biggest screen, so I cobbled together a shell script some time ago using the PBM (Portable Bitmap) tools that have been around since probably the 80’s for manipulating images. I don’t think many of the Linux distros install the toolset by default, but they’re easily available. On Ubuntu or Debian you can install them with “apt-get install netpbm”.

I start by making a work directory (”wallpaper” in this instance) and a subdirectory to hold the full-resolution original images, named “full”. I collect copies of my full-resolution pictures there in ~/wallpaper/full.

Next I need to work out the transform. My original resolution images are 3504 pixels wide by 2336 pixels vertically. My monitor is 2048 pixels by 1152 pixels.

Rather than work out the math, I just scaled an original picture to the monitor width to see how tall it would be. This command pipeline would scale a picture to 2048 pixels wide:

jpegtopnm full/IMG_1234.jpg | pnmscale -width 2048 | pnmtojpeg >IMG_1234.jpg

Opening that scaled image in Gimp told me that it was 2048 x 1365. That tells me that I need to crop some lines from the top and bottom of the image to fit them exactly to my monitor field. 1365 – 1152 leaves 213 lines to cut from the image. With the pbmtool “pamcut” I plan to cut 107 lines from the top of the image and give it a total height of 1152.

So I made this shell script to process all of the photos. The plan is to read all of the files from the “full” directory, and write perfectly scaled images to a subdirectory named “2048″. I’m also going to use the “ppmdim” utility to reduce the overall brightness of the images just a little. Here is the final script, called “mkwall2048″:

for i in `ls -1 full`
do
echo $i
jpegtopnm full/$i \
 | pnmscale -width 2048 \
 | pamcut -top=107 -height=1152 \
 | ppmdim 0.8 \
 | pnmtojpeg >2048/$i
done

This loops through every file in the “full” directory, putting the filename in variable $i. The rest of the script is a pipeline that feeds the image through five different tools from the Portable Bitmap collection, as follows:

1. jpegtopnm converts the input file to a portable “any” map, then feeds it to stdout
2. pnmscale scales the image to a width of 2048 pixels, preserving the aspect ratio
3. pamcut slices off the top 107 lines, and preserves the next 1152 lines of the image
4. ppmdim reduces the brightness of the image by 20% (80% of the existing brightness)
5. pnmtojpeg converts the portable bitmap image back to a JPEG file

I’ve adjusted this script using the same process to make perfect wallpapers for my laptop monitors and desktops at work. It’s a real treat having a slideshow of my favorite photography available behind my work.

The Clear Sky Chart forecast for Desert Center, CA, was dark blue all night for our favorite observing site. The NOAA forecast called for a high of 99 and low of 77. Often a night like this can have uncomfortably [...]]]> Observing report, dark sky weekend, September, 2009, Chuckwalla Bench

The "Double Cluster" between Cassiopeia and Perseus

The Clear Sky Chart forecast for Desert Center, CA, was dark blue all night for our favorite observing site. The NOAA forecast called for a high of 99 and low of 77. Often a night like this can have uncomfortably hot weather. Chuckwalla Bench is a little higher than Desert Center, so I was hopeful that the night wouldn’t be miserable with heat. It turned out to be lovely shirt-sleeve weather all night.

Several of us were feeling dark-sky-deprived, so Jane and I were really looking forward to some quiet time with friends in our favorite desert location.

I took the Astro-Physics Traveler (pictured at the top of my blog in a photo taken at Chuckwalla Bench) to attempt a little low-power astrophotography.

As I mentioned, I was really rusty with the equipment and procedures, and am a beginner at astrophotography anyway, with a total of about four sessions under my belt. We were all out of practice; I think everyone on the trip left something at home or had some minor trouble.

After warming up with the Double Cluster as a good focusing target, my main goal of the evening was to make my first real asteroid trail or animation. With Juno very much in mind from Jane’s What’s Up podcast, I decided it would be my second target.

Animation of four Juno images taken over 50 minutes

Jane and Gary were hunting down Juno visually while I was imaging it. We had a great time using a combination of images and TheSky 6 to make a positive identification of Juno. I collected four ten-minute exposures, and made my first asteroid animation above.

The Helix planetary nebula, crop from full-frame image.

The Helix Nebula NGC 7293 is an irresistible target for a good wide-field telescope and a color camera. I combined three ten-minute exposures. The image above is a crop — click to see the full field image.

Crop of M1, "The Crab Nebula," click for the full frame.

My Crab Nebula is a combination of three ten-minute exposures. It’s not a great image, but still a treat to see the kind of detail that we don’t get to see visually. The full-frame image (click to see) shows this small target.

A crop from my M74 image, click for the full frame.

I love galaxies, and M74 is a favorite — for being small, hard to find visually, and a difficult “first target” of the Messier Marathons we do in March. I couldn’t resist trying to get an image of this little gem.

I know I need to put more exposure minutes into my images, especially of my favorite faint targets. My backgrounds are still very noisy; my focusing isn’t perfect. Since I don’t get to do this very often, I get impatient and want to grab several targets over an evening. Practice, practice!

Gary Spiers snapped pictures as we set up in the desert. Click the image for a link to his photo album from the night.

A night in the desert has to be followed by a great breakfast. After catching a couple hours of sleep, we all packed up the site in a gorgeous desert dawn and headed ten miles west to Chiriaco Summit, home of a great diner and the General Patton Memorial museum. Tanks and eggs, four stars! (Ratings and generals.)

Throughout my life I’ve been something of a serial hobbyist, with a tendency to pursue a hobby obsessively until I burn out on it, or at least until the flame starts to cool. Over the years I’ve tackled ham radio, flying airplanes, gliders, motorcycling, tournament bridge, and astronomy.

(My [...]]]>

Mojo playing bridge on the Sea Princess

Throughout my life I’ve been something of a serial hobbyist, with a tendency to pursue a hobby obsessively until I burn out on it, or at least until the flame starts to cool. Over the years I’ve tackled ham radio, flying airplanes, gliders, motorcycling, tournament bridge, and astronomy.

(My one lifetime avocation is computer programming and internet servers, which long ago became my profession.)

I was deeply involved in organized bridge for several years. I directed games at the San Jose Bridge Center, traveled to tournaments, and taught a couple hundred students to play the game. I was even president of our local bridge unit for two years.

In 2000 I finally achieved “Life Master” rank in the American Contract Bridge League, and hung up my cards. I didn’t make Life Master quickly. For one thing, I was never a bridge prodigy, just a reasonably smart guy who enjoyed playing the game. I was also so busy teaching and directing I didn’t get to actually play cards as often as I might have.

But why walk away from it? Why abandon the game I was so deeply involved with for so long?

For one thing, of course, there were plenty of life changes, job changes, my lovely new wife Jane, moving from Campbell to Marin and then Los Angeles. Astronomy had become the newest passion to get most of my attention, and I’m still enjoying that.

I can also honestly say that I didn’t miss bridge. Competitive bridge can have an unpleasant dark side.

I’ll never forget stepping into a hallway at the North American Bridge Championships to see a red-faced player berating his partner loudly and mercilessly.

As a director I was often asked to rule on a judgment call against players whose bridge experience certainly far exceeded mine, and often enough there were arguments and confrontation. I’m not an argumentative person, and confrontations like that could leave me sleepless for a day.

(Tournament bridge is much like the world of tournament Scrabble. The movie Word Wars is a great rental. One major difference — bridge doesn’t offer cash prizes.)

All along I knew that bridge would still be there when I was ready for it.

In June I took my first cruise with Jane and her family on the Sea Princess to Alaska. Bridge is a classic cruise activity, and Englishman John Beard was an entertaining and congenial teacher and director. I played five sessions of duplicate with a delightful lady from Texas who was really kind of hopeless at bridge.

This past weekend, Jane was in Toronto speaking at Starfest. Rather than stay home in my pajamas playing Free Cell, I opted to go out and play bridge.

I kibitzed a few hands on a Thursday evening at the Beverly Hills bridge club tucked into what looked like a former storeroom in a community center.

I dropped in on the Arcadia Bridge Center on Friday, and played in a North American Pairs qualifying match. Patrick Cardullo and I qualified for the Flights A and B unit final with a second-place finish.

I played a fun club game on Saturday with Tom Miyake, and made plans to meet him on Sunday for a unit swiss team game in San Marino. On Sunday we played with pick-up teammates and took second overall out of 18 teams.

I won my first masterpoints in nine years, and had a blast. In all those dozens of bridge hands, there wasn’t a single unpleasant moment.

In my return, I was reminded of what I love about organized bridge.

First there’s the game itself: the thrill of watching your partner execute a perfect end-play to make a doubled contract, recognizing a squeeze play as it develops and executing it, and the unforgiving and humbling nature of the game when you make a small mistake.

Then there are the people who play the game. During my weekend binge every player I met was interesting, delightful, and gracious. Bridge players come from all walks of life. They are smart and tend to be eccentric. The best players enjoy the inevitable humor in the endless patterns and chaos of the card deals, along with the foibles and misunderstandings. Yes, there is ego and intimidation in bridge, as in any competitive sport, but fortunately it’s rare.

The best players in competitive bridge will have you smiling and enjoying every minute while they’re beating your pants off. That for me is the joy of bridge.

Photos from our first three days with Jane’s family are here.

The cruise went non-stop from San Francisco to Ketchikan, which involved two days at sea. About 36 hours of the cruise were spent [...]]]> Jane and I are in our first port of call on our first-ever vacation cruise. We’re in a coffee shop in Ketchikan, Alaska.

Photos from our first three days with Jane’s family are here.

The cruise went non-stop from San Francisco to Ketchikan, which involved two days at sea. About 36 hours of the cruise were spent in 15-foot swells, which made for quite a rolling shuddering ship and a lot of dramamine patches given out by the medical staff. Luckily Jane and I aren’t susceptible to motion sickness, and mostly just enjoyed being rocked to sleep in our stateroom.

I joined a bridge game for the first time since 2000, and dusted off a little of my bridge muscle memory. I played two games with a delightful 70-year-old lady from near Austin, TX.

Ketchikan is a scenic town, and I’ll have lots of pictures for Day 4 of the photo album. Right now there are at least four giant cruise ships berthed at the town, and the merchants are busy sucking every dime out of them they can manage.

Internet access is available on the ship. You can buy packages for as little as $0.35/minute if you buy $175 worth, or pay $0.75 per minute pay-as-you-go. I think I’ll be content to visit internet coffee houses on our shore stops.

Next stop is Juneau, AK, and hopefully new pictures from there.

Listen to the audio …

At 0:49 into the video, about 15 seconds into the launch, CAPCOM says [...]]]> It’s been several weeks since NASA launched Atlantis to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Watching the launch, I heard several calls that made me sit up in my seat. You probably didn’t hear them. Watch it with me here:

Listen to the audio …

At 0:49 into the video, about 15 seconds into the launch, CAPCOM says “Bypass across the board Scooter, no action!”

Wow! I was just imagining what the flight controllers must have been seeing. This is what I heard in my mind as he said that, “Yes we see that you have multiple warning lights and alarms going off, but don’t do anything!” Holy crap!

Listen again at 1:20 into the video, “Atlantis, Houston, No action on the MPS H2 Out key.” In other words, “Yes, we see that additional warning, but don’t do anything about it.” Scooter called back, “Houston, we copy, no action.”

(I can’t believe at 3:20 in the video the public affairs guy (”Mission Control Houston”) says “No issues heading to orbit.”)

At 3:40 into the video, Houston calls up with some explanations for the earlier calls, “Atlantis, Houston, H2 out key is a ducer only, and the ASA-1 is a power only.”

“Copy ASA-1 is power only, and the H2 is ducer,” called back Scooter.

Later on in the post-launch press conference, we got to find out what was going on, and this article on nasaspaceflight.com had a lot more detail:

“A post launch review of the data showed that the failure seemed to have occurred two to four seconds prior to liftoff after main engine ignition and the resulting shake and bake. An EPD (Electrical Power Distribution) review of their BMU data of Main Bus A shows that Main A bus saw a 400 hz signal with a peak to peak of 100 amps. EPD is going to look at the Main B data next.

Wow! I had to wonder if that was a typo. 100 amps of current at 400 hz shorting into an avionics bus! No wonder several warnings and alarms went off.

Later the Flight Director had the commander turn off the power to ASA-1, which is one of four Aerosurface Servo Amplifiers on the orbiter. These are critical components that actually power the rudder and elevons during aerodynamic operations (flying in the atmosphere). With three remaining, they could continue the mission, but another failure would call for an immediate de-orbit.

The other interesting call was related to a transducer (”Ducer” in NASA-speak) that monitors the pressure of the hydrogen being fed to the main shuttle engines. That’s the “H2 out key.” If that warning lights, it could mean that one of the three engines is suddenly not getting enough fuel pressure.

So why did the controllers call “No action!”?

I can almost feel the heart pounding of a “steely-eyed missle man” monitoring all of the systems. One warning by itself is not a drastic call to action. They could see that all of the other systems were functioning correctly, and most importantly, the flight dynamics and performance of the craft as a whole were safe and correct. Doing something could have been a bigger disaster than doing nothing.

The H2 out key warning was a simple call. The controller can see immediately that all three engines are still producing their normal thrust. In the press conference someone pointed out that if there were a real problem, Scooter would have felt it in the seat of his pants, big time. The problem there wasn’t with the H2 pressure, it was with the transducer. “H2 out key is a ducer only.”

But that ASA-1 problem is still a concern, and even today, while Atlantis is in California being mated to a 747 for ferry operations back to Kennedy, technicians are crawling through the orbiter trying  to diagnose the problem. They suggest that a power wire shorted to ground, which fed all that current directly into the bus ground. That would make a lot of systems go a bit funny.

Hats off to the guys behind the screens in Houston. I know hardly anyone shared in those few moments of heart-pounding pressure, but a few of us heard what you were dealing with. Because of your heads-up attention, we can today look back and call it a nearly flawless mission.

If nothing else, for me it was an interesting foreshadow to a mission that would be as dramatic in its problems and solutions as any I’ve seen.

[Edit: The video I was linked to was made private by the uploader, so I found another copy and updated the time notes in the post.]

I love to make panoramas almost anywhere I take the camera. There are some examples on last week’s Mojave National Preserve trip, a weekend at Moonstone Beach, and the Fremont Peak Star-B-Q.

Making them smoothly takes a little practice, so I thought I’d pass on my pointers. I use a Canon [...]]]>

Moonstone Beach in Cambria, CA

I love to make panoramas almost anywhere I take the camera. There are some examples on last week’s Mojave National Preserve trip, a weekend at Moonstone Beach, and the Fremont Peak Star-B-Q.

Making them smoothly takes a little practice, so I thought I’d pass on my pointers. I use a Canon 20D and Panorama Factory.

Panorama Factory is so good at stitching together the pictures, you really don’t need to make any special effort at leveling the camera. No tripod is required, just turn and shoot. But a little preparation pays off later.

Once I’ve found a spot to take a panorama, I mark the beginning by taking a black frame: Turn off auto-focus, put the camera in manual exposure mode, then cup my hand over the lens to make a black frame.

The pano pictures will blend best if they all have the same exposure. I’ll use the built-in light meter while panning around the scene, and try to pick a median setting that doesn’t go more than one stop or so toward over or under exposing. In a lot of scenes with a brightly lit portion, this might be a challenge.

I try to avoid using the widest-angle setting of my lens to avoid any vignetting, and like to choose a “50mm equivalent” focal length, which is 35mm on my Canon 20D. You might also turn off auto-focus to keep the camera from suddenly focusing close if you sweep across a foreground object.

You don’t always have a horizon line, but it’s a handy reference if you do. My Canon 20D has auto focus targets in the viewfinder that serve as a nice leveling tool. Work from left to right and give each shot a little overlap. That’s about all the care you need to take.

I’ll end the series with another black frame. Don’t forget to put your camera back into auto-focus and your preferred exposure mode. A low ASA setting will help keep the noise low.

I shoot all my pictures in RAW mode, so they have to be processed into JPEGs. I use Adobe Lightroom for that. Generally if the exposure and white balance look good, the pictures shouldn’t need any adjustment. If some adjustment is needed, the panorama will come out best if you can apply the same adjustment to all of the photos. Lightroom’s copy and paste settings feature is useful for this.

Once you have your collection of individual shots, you can start through Panorama Factory’s wizard to begin stitching them. Since you shot from left to right, the filename order will be correct when you import them to Panorama Factory.

(I’m still using V4 of Panorama Factory, so some of these settings might have changed, but I’m sure the basics are still valid.)

Remember you can import all of the pictures with one step, by doing a multiple-select in the file browser. (I always make an individual work directory for the pano pictures.)

After the import, select “Fully automatic” photo stitching, set the camera type, and yes to “Automatically detect focal length.” DO select “Correct barrel distortion,” and DO NOT select “Correct brightness falloff.”

Yes, do select “Automatically fine tune.” But do NOT take the recommendation to allow Panorama Factory to do exposure matching or exposure correction. You took care of exposure matching at the time you took the shots by selecting one manual exposure for all of the pictures. And, at least in V4 of Panorama Factory, I’ve found that it tends to posterize the image when it does any exposure adjustment.

Say “yes” to sharpen the final image. I use a setting of 50%, but feel free to experiment.

For an output format, I select “Image file only,” and set either “Partial” or “360 degree” panorama as appropriate for the series.

Here’s one note, if you select 360 degree panorama, and you have a full overlapping frame on each end, Panorama Factory sometimes does not find the 360 degree point and duplicates part of the image. Deleting one shot from the pano on either end will solve the problem.

I typically use the “Spherical projection.” Not sure why.

I have other tools for printing, so all I want out of Panorama Factory is the image. I’ll select “Prepare image for internet display” and “Maximum size.”

Now when you click “Next,” Panorama Factory will work its magic for a few minutes. Save the image at the end. When it’s all done, I’ll use Photoshop or VuePrint to make thumbnail versions for my photo album, usually 800 pixels wide.

Admittedly I need to try this with V5 of Panorama Factory, but I bet the process will be close.

Once you develop a rhythm for making panos, you’ll enjoy making more of them.  I always take the laptop along on a road trip, and frequently I’ll make the panoramas right there in the car while Jane drives.

I’ll try to make another post on how I mix them into a JAlbum photo album.