Purpose

I spent some time with an old friend this evening, I had lost track of what was important in these past few months in my slavish devotion to the path I have chosen academically. Its funny, I know who my groomsmen would be if I were to be wed, who my best man is. This blog is about my hopes, my activities, I want to share them with those people who care about me.

My life is somehow gotten harder over the past few months since I made the choice to alter my life drastically. Days blend together, I cannot keep track of which doctor I have seen and why, its all a wall of memories of lab coats offices and paperwork, the same paperwork over and over and over. The same exams, weight and height, blood pressure, then the questions about medications. My normal is now sitting inside the health care bureaucracy begging to be seen maybe even heard. I could not spend as much time as I wanted to with my friend, because I need to be at yet another teal office at 8:00am tomorrow.

The day to day is bleak, inhospitable but I do it with the knowledge that there is finally light at the end of the tunnel. Its a strange thing to choose to remake yourself. You begin to reflect on those things you would like to change, what you want to do with yourself, with your free time. I want to expand my existence.  I want to earn a bunch of money, to buy things, not for the sake of having them, but for the sake of pursuits I enjoy. My life should not be about the existential crisis of my professional choices, I should be able to enjoy it.

This surgery is a tool to reach a healthy equilibrium, so I do not spend any more money on prescriptions or unhealthy food. So I can save, be self sufficient, I can prove to myself that I can set a goal, attain it and drink the rich nectar of its reward. Evenings under the sky with a few friends, a telescope whirring from one object on the dark canvas of the sky to another.

My dear reader I hope that you take away from this, not the despair of my daily struggles but a reflection about what it is you truly want. What can you do to nurture your soul when not at work?

Seeking the Darkness

Part of The Plan is finding suitable sights for astrophotography. Unfortunately you cannot know everything until you get out there, but some things are important, we are looking for a relatively flat dark sight. Flat can be roughly determined via looking at images on Google Maps. Dark however is interesting, I have been evaluating several sites for there suitability when I came across this:

This is a map of the light pollution in the lower 48 states. On its own its not that interesting but if you pair it with Google Earth you now have the ultimate tool for finding dark skies. The KMZ file for Google Earth can be found here. (Thanks to the Santa Cruz Astronomy club.)  The interesting result is that I have looked at a few sights for our second expedition, after the all up test at Alamo Lake state park. The options are as follows:

Painted Rock Petroglyph Site - No GOOD (LP)

33° 01’ 23.26” N

113° 02’ 58.65” W

Elev: 584ft

Hot Well Dunes - (Good LP)

32° 31’ 26” N

109° 25’ 36” W

Elev: 3452ft

Alamo Lake Camp Area E -(Good LP)

34° 15’ 22.82” N

113° 33’ 41.08” W

Elev: 1245ft

Navajo National Monument Campground - (Good LP)

36° 41’ 9.77” N

110° 32’ 27.13”W

Elev: 7533ft

Where LP stands for Light Pollution. Please if you are interested in joining one of these expeditions let me know. 

Why I am so stressed out right now

Sometimes we stress about things for no reason other than we are conditioned by our upbringing to be constant worriers. I know this condition well, but it is not why I am stressed right now. I am stressed because I fear that, thought I am attempting to make a positive, massive change in my life I will be stopped by some sort of bureaucratic snafu.

I have found the people in my department have been extraordinarily helpful, giving me the opportunity to maintain my enrollment and health insurance.  Though there was a snafu early on.

I hate my insurance more than anything, but I need it. I need it to pay for an operation with an 80% chance to make me a healthy individual. But before they will pay, I need to go through a 3 month supervised diet, where I will not loose any weight. Its not enough that I am willing to subject myself to one humiliating test after another, and go through health scares when doctors try to cover there ass. It is not enough that I am willing to fill out the same form at one doctor or another, endlessly.

This is all so I can undergo a procedure which will cause me to absorb food differently.  Gastric bypass surgery is not for the feint of heart, you will be required to chew vitamin supplements for the rest of your life. I must forgo tobacco and NSAID pain relievers for ever. There are times when I worry about what I am giving up, and have to remind myself that I am only giving up things that are bad for me. I am willing to risk life and limb for the chance to reshape my future.

But to demonstrate that willingness to risk life and limb, I must continually return to student health services and prostrate myself for yet another referral. I must complete a 3 month supervised diet, while at the same time undergoing the pricks, and the prods. I must do battle with the university trying desperately to make room for my surgery which may or may not happen. I must call, prod, and be frustrated with people who are "just doing there jobs." It would seem that Franz Kafka was right, I am enduring this suffering for a goal in the not too distant future, which is still very nebulous, all I want is a surgery date, all I want is to suffer through a 2 week liquid diet and painful surgery and 3 more weeks of  all liquid diet. All so that I may have hope that I will not drop dead at 45, weighing 500lbs.

The Plan

So as you all know big changes will be coming over the next year. I will be undergoing weight loss surgery, the result of which will be an unusual diet for the foreseeable future. Another side effect will be increased energy and the ability to save money to do new and exciting things. The one thing that I want to do is have a vacation.

What is a vacation, is it traveling to some place that you have never seen taking a bunch of pictures and posting them on Facebook. Is that what we do to recharge our batteries? I think that when we go someplace we should disconnect from our lives in a meaningful way. The result is that my vacation plans have now become slightly elaborate.

First, I need a new telescope for deep sky astrophotography, hence the posts I have been making. If you want to see the current setup I have created a pin board for it here.  This setup is optimized for wide field deep sky objects. It utilizes a digital rebel modified to allow the full visual spectrum to be recorded by the chip. It can still be used as a photographic camera, thus multiple batteries may be needed.

Second some upgrades to my computer for processing large raw images, a bigger monitor and some more ram. Also a Macbook air, for capturing images at a remote site. With these things acquired we move on to the question of where to go.

Third, we need camping supplies. I have compiled another board on Pinterest here.

Once all three components are acquired there will be a local shakedown, learning how to assemble components in a useful way. Not everyone will be required to attend the shakedown events, just be willing to be told what to do when we arrive at our expedition end points.

Initially I thought the north rim of the grand canyon would be a good place to go, but unfortunately there are few clearings. The optimal place would be someplace dry and flat. Hence, the ultimate goal would be a winter trip to Death Valley, but before that we need a few expeditions to fine tune our approach. Our initial expedition would be to the Grand Canyon Star Party on the South Rim in early to mid June for 5-6 days. With a trip to the north rim to see which sight is better. Eventually however we will move to Alamo State Park for our first solo astrophotography expedition (AE1). The date for this expedition is to be determined, probably in the spring of 2014. Finally in the fall of 2014 we will try for another location, possibly in the Coronado National Forest (AE2).

Finally some time in the winter of 2014 we will attempt our expedition to Death Valley. (AE3) The solo expeditions will allow us more freedom to shoot the shit while engaging in behaviors that are frowned upon at some star parties. I would like 3-4 guests to join me for these expeditions, hopefully they will be enjoyable.

My motivation for this type of vacationing is simple. I sometimes wish to disconnect from the modern world and do something purely for enjoyment (or frustration) and this type of vacation seems to do the trick for me in my head.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Using Acromats for astrophotography

So I am hoping to work and save a little money for a new telescope and some camping gear, more on that later. Right now I am looking into equipment for a new telescope rig. The interesting thing is that I have fallen in love with the Orion 120mm f/5 Achromatic refractor. Now this is for an astrophotography setup so you should be screaming that I need an APO. This is about 10x less than an APO because it has only two optical elements in the lens. The result being chromatic aberration. Now in the old days this would be a huge problem as you had no ability to process photos after they had been taken. You basically took the image on film and developed it and if there was the slightest error, you were screwed.

Digital cameras make the world a bit nicer. Here is an image taken by the telescope I am interested in: 

The original can be found here. (scroll to the bottom) The image has several issues, the focus seems off the tracking might be bad, but the thing we are going to deal with is the fact that its too purple. This purpleness the result of chromatic aberration, so I opened up the image in GIMP and used a filter I found called Darla's Purple fringe fix. Applying the default settings we get this:

Still not great but less purple. Interestingly Photoshop has this built in. If anyone from the gimp team is reading this, please implement that feature! Anyway I am hoping to post about my plans for astrophotography tomorrow.