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Tag Archives: astronomy

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JotD: You might be an astronomer if… (PWH00030)

The PolyBlog
May 14 2025
You might be an astronomer if… 1.	The weather is affected by your purchases; 2.	You get upset when someone confuses astronomy and astrology; 3.	You spend more time choosing a telescope than a spouse; 4.	You think cities should issue hunting licenses for streetlights; 5.	Your observing equipment costs more than your car; 6.	You rewrote “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” to make it factually correct; 7.	When people say, “it’s all politics,” you think they’re talking about Pluto being demoted; 8.	You pack more equipment than clothes for a two-week vacation; 9.	You are jealous of places with regular blackouts; 10.	Your daughter Pleiades can’t walk, but she’s already seen Orion’s belt; 11.	You and your lover drive to a dark, secluded place to see meteors…and you do; 12.	You know that the size of your equipment really does matter; 13.	You wonder how the clouds know when you get your imager in focus; 14.	You consider Venus to be a significant source of light pollution;	15.	You go to Hawaii just for Mauna Kea; 16.	There are no tools in your car, but you always have a red flashlight, binoculars, and bug spray; 17.	You consider Canon vs. Nikon debates to be fighting words; 18.	You bought a vehicle based on the size of your scope and number of accessories; 19.	You no longer enjoy full moons; 20.	You spend $20K on a scope even though you only get 40 clear nights a year; 21.	Someone says “Uranus”, and rather than giggle, you correct their pronunciation; 22.	When people ask you “What’s up?”, you start identifying visible constellations; 23.	You know an Iridium flare isn’t a medical condition nor found at a traffic accident; 24.	You see night scenes in movies and calculate the time of year and latitude; 25.	You can say “So that’s an 8 inch, want to see my 12 inch?” without blushing;
Posted in Humour | Tagged astronomy, humour, JotD | Leave a reply

QotD: Black Holes (PWQ00007)

The PolyBlog
April 22 2025
“What happens in a black hole, stays in a black hole.” ~ Anonymous

Posted in Quotes | Tagged astronomy, QotD, quotes | Leave a reply

Working on images for an astronomy guide

The PolyBlog
February 22 2025

I wrote on my ThePolyblog.ca site about “needing” to write an astronomy guide, but not really being that thrilled about it. The issue is that there are a few fora that I participate in for astronomy, and I really don’t like the way people answer certain questions. It almost seems irresponsible to me to answer the questions like they do.

For example, if someone said to you, “I want to buy a vehicle”, would you say, “Oh, you should buy (this specific model)”? Probably not. You’d ask them what they want to use it for, how often they’ll be driving it, how many passengers, etc. The car they use to go shopping around town once a week is probably not the vehicle they need for hauling pigs, if they have pigs to haul. And a whole host of other variables, which is partly why there are so many cars on the market. They serve different market niches. But someone out there could probably just say “Get a Honda Civic”. The basis for their recommendation is relatively linear — a good all-around sedan, and if you don’t have any other details, maybe it’s as good a recommendation as any, probably better.

Yet, for astronomy, people frequently respond with:

  1. Just look up with your eyes — the equivalent of telling someone just to walk instead of buying a car;
  2. Buy binoculars — like saying to get a bus pass;
  3. Buy a Dobsonian — the Honda Civic of cars, a good all-around suggestion;
  4. Buy a large EQ mount with an expensive refractor and some good camera gear — the equivalent of telling someone they need off-roading capabilities so they can get all the way to the top of a nearby mountain because that is the biggest / hardest use to handle; or,
  5. Don’t buy (brand x)—this is the same as those who will tell you never to buy a Ford or Dodge or American or Japanese, whatever, because someone they once knew had a bad experience 40 years ago with a bicycle owned by someone who drove one of those vehicles one-time as a rental. I.e., their reasons have nothing to do with the current models, nor have they tried any of them, but they have strong views.

If you go to a proper telescope store (if you can find one still in business), they’ll ask you a bunch of questions just like a car dealership. And it is THOSE types of questions that will help you find the type of scope that is right for you. Every time that I see someone has written a guide to telescopes, I get excited that maybe I won’t have to write my version because someone already did it and did it better. And then I see that, in most cases, they either approached it as a budget question (what’s available in your price range) OR some decent options in each type of scope. It is kind of like what Consumer Reports does — they tell you what are some good washing machines or air fryers in a given price range, rated against some basic criteria of usage (capacity, physical size, power, etc.). But if you look around a CR site, you’ll also notice that they often publish a pre-guide of sorts — like “how to choose the right washing machine for you” or “what do you need to know about air fryers before you buy one”. Everybody seems to write the pricing guide version; nobody wants to write the other version. The version that says what to do to the person who is likely to show up on a site and say, “I like space / my kids are interested in space. What kind of telescope should I buy?”. They have no idea what questions to ask and nobody to guide them as they decide.

So, yeah, I’m writing some astronomy guide(s)

The first volume is simple and will be a general overview of astronomy with a hefty middle section about types of telescope variables, what different types are available, and even some good models of that type. A combination CR-style pre-guide with a normal pricing guide to good models of each type. I’ve toyed with JUST doing the scope guide, but I don’t think it is enough of an itch for me. I want to include a basic approach to understanding astronomy as a discipline, where observers fit in the grand scheme of things, perhaps a history of astronomy, an overview of what’s out there, the “technical” side for scopes and binos, how to use and setup each type, some thoughts on ongoing usage, navigation, accessories, etc. Then the book will feel like I’m creating something, not just covering technical stuff.

And I do have ideas for other guides, more creative on my side, and designed to help push me in the hobby. I am not sure of the exact order of the subsequent volumes, but I may do books on:

  1. Constellations and asterisms — things you can see with your eyes and some guide materials…part of what interests me is finding ways to combine not just Western / white history of constellations but also other cultures, like perhaps coming up with a combination of my own which would be the “best of the constellations” from multiple cultures?;
  2. The moon — with coverage of each of the 28 days in the cycle and what to look for;
  3. The sun — I am not sure this is a whole book, could be merged with other stuff;
  4. The planets — my focus (no pun intended) is generally on observations, and again, I don’t know that I can do a whole book on this;
  5. The Messier objects — this set has the opposite problem…it is more than enough for a book if I do it right, although heavily photograph- and starmap-based;
  6. Spotlights on globular clusters, coloured stars, comets and/or asteroids.

I am not thrilled with open clusters or star groups; they both seem really boring to me. I also don’t know that I have any added value on Nebulae or Galaxies as there are lots of materials already out there with far better equipment than mine. Similarly for double stars. I might mention them as part of some other omnibus. And in addition to all those topics, I wonder if I have an itch to scratch for weather mapping, apps in general, and observatory options. Oh, and I’d love to do something about outreach options. And then there’s the one that scares me…an introduction to astrophotography and processing. That is WAY beyond my abilities at the moment.

But I need to start with my cover design and my logo

When I did my layout for the cover of my HR guide, I knew there would be other books. So I slapped my frog on it, and branded it as a series of books called “A PolyWogg Guide to Government”. If I were to go back, I might consider adding a little Canadian flag to the chest of the frog or the duck below, but I like it enough as is. And before I finished the guide, the cover served as visual motivation for me to keep writing.

For astronomy, I kind of like the same layout. The title, subtitle, name, website and swath across the top will stay. I’m looking at changing the colour of the swath but I am not sure to what yet. The text is easy: “A PolyWogg Guide to Astronomy”.

But I have been questioning if the frog should change. It is still PolyWogg; it is still me. I could leave it as is. But I like the idea of adding some sort of space theme to it. I could do some sort of heading like I had for a section of my website at one point, with a good Milky Way background and a regular space-themed logo of some kind.

Yet I like the idea of having my frog involved. I reached out to my contractor on Fiverr to see if they could take my frog and just add a telescope to it, make it look aligned so it was looking through with the left eye, perhaps. They can do compositing for about $30 an image, so yes, they can do it. But it’s not their primary business line, and he wondered if, instead, I just wanted to try something with the various AIs out there.

I confessed that I had tried that, but I am far from an expert. Most of the images that I generated often had both in the result — a frog and a telescope — but rarely did it look like the frog was using it. It was more often than not a frog sitting on a long, thin telescope lens, as if it was a tree branch. Some gave me really weird results where the telescope was actually going through the head of the frog and coming out its eye. Shudder. It did have both themes, frog and scope, but getting them to interact wasn’t successful.

I wondered instead if I went for some sort of Dreamworks logo where instead of the kid fishing from the crescent moon, what if I had a frog on it? My first options were more like it was on a banana. Or swiss cheese. The moon was consistently yellow (I assume resembling cheese?). I reframed the prompt as red-eyed tree frog sitting on white crescent moon with craters, and it was better, but well, see for yourself. The frog is okay in the first one, not thrilled with the moon. And the frog seems to be enjoying it way too much.

Frog 1A

I like the moon better in this one, but not much, and I am not as thrilled with the frog.

Frog 1B

The moon is silly, but the frog is kind of cute.

Frog 1C

This one was my first “winner” or at least good enough to consider. It emphasizes the moon over the frog, but the frog is pretty cute. And since it is basically serving as a logo, I can’t have the image too complicated.

Frog 1D

I then went a bit broader. I tried a bunch of options where it was the frog staring up at the moon. One was really cool as a picture, but the AI couldn’t seem to figure out right from left. The frog was looking to the right but the moon was in the top left corner. You can revise the prompt, but no matter what I did, it would never move the moon closer than the middle of the image. I went for more cartoon-style options. And I got the ones below. I like the more realistic moon in this one, definitely a decent option. It’s on my list. I’m not sure how the background will show up in the cover, but that’s the contractor’s problem. 🙂

Frog 2A

I like the relative spacing of this one, good moon. Not sold on the frog angle, nor the random bubbles in the background. Meh.

Frog 2B

I really like this one, although the frog looks off somehow. A little too cartoony in the head, if that makes sense. But it makes it look like the frog is looking at the moon.

Frog 2C

I like the lilypads, framing, and a somewhat dull moon that is not overblown. But I don’t like the frog or spacing vis-a-vis the moon.

Frog 2D

There is a lot to like in his image. The pond, the lilypads, the moon is bright but not overblown, clouds. Even the moonlight on the water. There is a LOT to like in this. But the frog looks more like its back is to the moon, even with shadow coming off the body, so what is the frog looking at? The sky? A firefly? I wondered if maybe I could tell it to tweak it and face the moon more, but as this was one of the paid AIs, multiple regenerations cost money and I still have more to do. Plus I’m not likely going to sell the guides sooooo cost is an issue.

Frog 2E

I love 95% of this one. The moon and sky are almost perfect (rather not round bubbles for stars, but whatever). The moon is a gorgeous example. And the frog is sort of looking at the moon, but well, not completely and he looks sort of fat and dumpy. Did I just body shame a frog? I’m losing it here.

Frog 2F

Good frog, could sort of be looking at the moon, but not quite. And I’m not thrilled with the moon.

Frog 2G

At the end, I wondered, what if I just did a night sky with the frog looking up, and no moon to pull focus. Most of the options weren’t awesome, but this one snuck through my pickiness. Cute frog, wide-eyed innocence (one of the reasons I like these types of frogs), and the sky isn’t bad. Plus no moon to pull focus, as I said, so you get the sense the frog is just “looking up”. I started to think this was the way forward.

Frog 2H

Leonardo, where have you been all my life?

The contractor suggested another tool. Leonardo.AI is similar to many others, but allows you to modify existing images somewhat, and I thought, “Sure, why not?”. It has a bunch of free credits for you to try things, and some upgrade options to buy a bunch of tokens so you can try it out more (same as Civit.ai, which a friend recommended and I bought $10 worth of tokens to get going).

I inputted the basic prompt — red-eyed tree frog with telescope — and hit generate. With most AIs, I have had to reframe it / tweak it in subsequent versions to say cartoon frog or looking through telescope, etc. It generated four images. The first was a weird-looking version of the frog sitting under a scope. Meh, nothing to write home about.

The second was a better frog, this time standing behind a brass version of a telescope. Not awesome, but not bad. The scope itself is on an EQ mount, which is a level of detail none of the others ever bothered with. Except the scope looks more like a video camera almost. I mean, I know what it is, but I specifically chose the parameters. Others might not be able to tell it was a scope.

The fourth had the frog standing behind the scope, the scope is angled up, wait wait wait, and noooo. The frog isn’t looking through it, looks almost like it is eating it although when you zoom in, the chin is just on the edge of the scope. Soooo close.

But the third one I skipped over? We may have a winner.

Frog 3

It’s the right type of frog. I was able to remove the background (wood floor, some sort of smoke rising from a campfire or something, maybe on a deck?). The scope is a brass refractor (which did exist) with a very simple tripod and mount. And holy smokes, the frog is VERY CLEARLY trying to look through it. I didn’t even TELL it to do that, I just said next to scope.I’d love to see the green part of the head about 10% darker green to match my original frog better, but that would be beyond picky. If this works for the contractor (and it comes 1032px x 1032px, which is decent resolution). I might have my new logo. For free. With all commercial rights.

What do you think? Will this frog work as a logo? This is about the size for thumbnail.

Posted in Writing and Publishing | Tagged astronomy, goals, writing | Leave a reply

Today I choose to offer astronomy training (TIC00029c)

The PolyBlog
August 18 2020

As readers of my blog know, I am an amateur astronomer. And my road into astronomy has not been paved with the remains of rainbows or yesterday’s sunbeams. I have struggled mightily over the last 7 years, including some epic battles with my scope to get aligned.

In the end, two people in the club really helped me nail down my wayward astro gremlins, and now I try to pay it back whenever I can. I have a couple of posts that get a lot of foot traffic about the “proper” way to do alignment of a Celestron GoTo scope, and I’m of the firm belief that users of the SE series of scopes fall into very set categories:

  • 75% of owners will use their scopes right out of the box without any trouble, it will work as intended, no gremlins;
  • 10% will not get it to work, but it is more user error than anything else, and they will never get ANY scope to work, because it just doesn’t make sense to them;
  • 10% will struggle mightily but will learn how to make it work; and,
  • 5% will have serious gremlins that they won’t be able to banish, or even know what gremlins they face.

So I know that my type of scopes are popular, and I want to make sure no one is left dangling. It’s a horrible feeling. And since I have experience with it, I tried to do some training tonight for 4 intrepid souls looking for some assistance. Three made it out, betting the fourth might not of expected us to go ahead as it was looking almost like a thunderstorm was coming

One of the three has had a scope before, relatively understanding of the stars, just new to goto scopes; another was relatively new to astronomy but had set up a couple of times; and the third was brand new and had no idea how to get his scope going.

Unfortunately, both the last one I listed and me were not prepared properly for tonight. I started to set up my scope, and after a little bit of time, realized that I totally forgot my diagonal. I normally have it attached, but I did some stuff awhile ago and there was no joy in Mudville tonight. It wasn’t attached and I didn’t think to bring it, thinking the old one was still on there. Nope, removed it some time ago. Sigh. So I didn’t get very far. For the other fellow, the battery on his Red Dot Finder died. For the more experienced guy, something is off with his handset or scope, not sure which. So his worked, but not as well as it should have.

And honestly? That’s the type of thing that can drive you crazy…you think it isn’t quite right, but start to doubt yourself, so having an experienced person say, “No, you’re right, it isn’t supposed to do THAT!” is helpful, if not a solution. We’ll work on fixing that over time though.

I was surprised though about the training. I expected to run through pretty quick, and everybody would be able to replicate my steps. But it didn’t take long for that plan to fall by the wayside. One had problems with his red dot finder, another had problems understanding what he had to do, third was having equipment problems. Each of these meant stopping to help JUST that person. A fourth person would have messed that up.

Others had suggested only doing 1:1 but that seemed SO inefficient. I’m going to do some videos at some point, so this was a bit of a test, and as a test, I would say we’re going to be in beta mode for a long time. But one went away “solved”, more or less.

Today I choose to offer some astro training.

What choices are you making?

Posted in Goals | Tagged astronomy, goals, TIC, today I choose | Leave a reply

Today I choose to start a long-term astro project (TIC00028c)

The PolyBlog
August 18 2020

About two years ago, a member of our astronomy club was helping the widow of another astronomy club member who had passed away. Like many of the survivors of astro lovers, the widow inherited a bunch of astro equipment, digital remnants and a bunch of accumulated reference material. To wit, he had left behind a large collection of issues of Sky & Telescope.

For those of you who don’t immediately know (and why would you?), S&T started publication way back in 1942 and has been going strong ever since. Almost immediately, even during WW II, it moved to 12 issues per year. The late astronomer had every issue, as far as I can tell, from 1966 through to 2017. Quite the collection. And when the helper guy sent out an email asking if anyone wanted them, my initial thought was not “Hell no” but rather “What an interesting project.”

The potential bias of new-found passion

You see, I’m a latecomer to astronomy circles. While I was interested as a kid, I was 45 before I had my first real scope. As such, I am prone to that syndrome common to all late converts, the possible belief that astronomy really started the day we started observing, and that nothing that came before is worth reviewing. Get the basics, start new, and assume that everything you experience “new” is likely genuinely new.

People in religious circles experience it all the time…the newest converts are often the most passionate, assuming they know how to interpret scriptures because they can read and they know how to recruit people to their new passions too.

Many new converts to hobbies suffer the same passion bias…they want the newest book, the newest gadget, the latest technique. But I’ve been down that road in lots of different disciplines and I know that while you might toss the bath water, you make sure you save the baby first.

But here was 50 years of recent astronomy history, doled out in monthly increments. What riches are hidden in those pages? What lessons learned could I glean if I went through them, in relative order, that wouldn’t be apparent just from reading a current issue? How would I know the best way to interpret the current context if I don’t know from whence it evolved?

More pointedly, what is truly “new” and what is merely “old song and dance routines dressed up in new costumes”?

Enter the project idea

I wasn’t 100% sure what the project would be, or what form it would take, but I had some initial inklings. I took them all. No, I didn’t ask my wife, and she has politely refrained from asking me if I am completely f***ing nuts, mostly because she already knows the answer to that. She believes me to be a hoarder, and in some senses, she isn’t wrong. But that is not what this is. I have no desire to hang on to them in perpetuity, they are disposable in my view.

I want to read them, in order, but quite frankly, I know I don’t have the time. What I CAN do is skim read them, noting things that leap out at me as interesting. There will be some obvious big leaps…how do they react to the latest eclipse or comet? How did they respond to a bunch of the space era milestones of the ’60s? And when our first explorer crafts approached the other planets, how did the magazine cover it? All of those are fair game.

But that’s not really what I’m most excited about in my browsing and reading. I’m really looking for things that haven’t changed. Advice, for instance, on getting started. The importance of learning the sky. Maybe some enduring legacy approaches that are interesting to see in context. Is it a planisphere? Is it a moon map? Is it a simple version of our modern day star charts? Is it endless lists of RA and DEC coordinates?

In short, I don’t know. And I wasn’t sure if/when I would ever know. All the magazines came in boxes initially, and then I put them on a storage bookcase, mostly stacked by decade. So, for example, all the 1970s were grouped together and took up two “cubes” in the shelving. But within that decade, nothing was further sorted. It was just all jumbled together. Mostly there were 4-5 issues together that were in order, mainly from where I moved them off their original shelving in the widow’s inherited library, one handful at a time. Then again when I took them out of the boxes. But if I’m going to do this project, I really need them sorted at some point.

Since I was moving them across my basement, and moving the shelving it was all sitting on, now is the time to do a sort and get it “done”. 52 years, 12 issues per year, plus asundry other magazines here and there stuck in, probably another 75 or so…call it 700 issues in total. That is a lot of sorting. Oddly enough though, I have some experience sorting magazines. I did it A LOT back when I worked at the library during my undergrad at Trent. Normally it was alphabetical — A-F, G-M, N-S, T-Z (a 6,7,6,7 split). For this, it was simpler, group by decade first (pretty much already done) and then take a decade at a time, dropping them into years, before then sorting a single year at a time in reverse chron order. I thought it would take a lot longer than it did. I was about 40% of the way through, staring at a large number of remaining issues and thinking I should just stop at that point and dump the rest together without sorting them further.

But I stuck with it and the rest wasn’t that bad, improved partly by the layout of the magazine. For an extended period of time, they produced thicker issues with the month and year on the spine. Much easier to sort than looking for it on the cover where it moved around about 6 times over the 50 years. That would have drove us nuts in the library back in the day when we were trying to do binding because we had to fill out forms that gave details about where certain info could be found on the issues. Annoying if it moved around as it did here. Oddly enough, I found myself thinking a lot today about my time at Trent. Most of the people I worked with are all gone now, and I mean that literally. Most of the permanent staff were all at retirement age when I left 30 years ago, and the ones I was close to have all passed on. I feel a bit of a void from different parts of my life, and that is one. I guess those will increase as time goes on.

Anyway, I digress. As I said, I persevered, and they are all entirely sorted for the years that I have them at least. I can access electronic versions for the missing years, and I’m inclined to go all the way back to the beginning.

My idea, as I said, is not to read every word, there is no time for that and this isn’t an academic research paper going for an in-depth comprehensive consideration of every article. Instead, I’m looking for things that appeal to the new astronomer. Almost paper-based versions of outreach, in a sense. The electronic versions are going to be hard as they are scanned PDFs, and the quality isn’t that great for the original typeset nor the scan itself. But it’s a start.

I’m undecided how much volume my reading will produce…I’ll blog as I go, but I don’t know if I’m talking a short blog for every issue, a blog for every year, or a blog for every five to ten years. All three appeal to me, to be honest. And I’m hoping to include them as articles for our local astronomy club, although again, I don’t want them to be too long yet I also don’t want to be trying to do 10 years of articles in 500 words or something. We’ll see what I get as I go. I will likely start off with a blog for each year, but we’ll see how much that produces. At least I’m semi-organized to start now.

Today I choose to start a long-term astro project, reading all the back issues of Sky & Telescope magazine back to 1942. If I cover a year a month, it’ll take me almost seven years to clear everything out. I’m hoping to get it down to about half that, but we’ll see. Depends on how interesting I find each issue and if I get bogged down anywhere or not.

What are the choices you are making?

Posted in Goals | Tagged astronomy, goals, magazines, TIC, today I choose | Leave a reply

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