ATLAS Shrugged

Stop!

Is this really it? 

I stopped walking, squinting to focus, eyes scanning the area again cautiously. In all these years of looking, the moment of the find has not changed much in character. An uncomfortable mix of uncertainty and optimism, maybe even a subconscious holding of breath in case I disturbed the universe, usually culminating in a moment of relief. 

That indeed was it.

Like a faint apparition in the nautical twilight of Boise, Idaho, beyond an empty parking lot next to a tree, hung the unmistakable form of a comet. My first naked eye comet with the ungainly name of C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS (more on that later).

Comet C/2023 A3 as seen from Boise, Idaho on Oct 14th (handheld, cellphone shot)

In the Lair of a Lagoon

Wide angle view of Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae, Sep 20, 2024.
Photo credit: Purnendu Gupta

The Lagoon nebula is a popular late-summer / early fall target for stargazers in the northern hemisphere. Perched above the tipped "teapot" of Sagittarius it disappears below the horizon quickly in the following months. By that measure, this Friday, September 20th, two days before the official start of fall, was past its prime viewing window. Yet, I chose to give it a shot.  

The result was the image above. A two-for-one wide angle view of two nebulae, the Trifid on the left and the Lagoon on the right. Light that is more than four thousand years old, gathered over 52 minutes through a narrowband filter. The image is rich in red Hydrogen-alpha light which is the signature of emission nebulae. To me, the swirling clouds around a brighter core of the Lagoon looks like the whorls in rose petals. The nearby Trifid has menacing dark streaks across its face. Unfettered by such features, the Lagoon might appear to be a calmer place.  Yet, nothing could be farther from the truth.

The Goddess of Dawn

Aurora in New Jersey, May 11, 2024

The word "Aurora" comes from Latin. In Roman mythology and Latin poetry it is the name of the goddess of dawn. It was first used by Gallileo in the context of the atmospheric phenomemon. The word pairs “Aurora Borealis”, or “Northern Lights”, conjures up imagery of colorful, curled flows of light tucked away in the high northern latitudes, somewhere in the Nordics or Iceland. Rarely does this phenomenon descend from the earth's poles to the lower latitudes. In the contiental United States, that means it does not extend beyond northern states like Minnesota or Alaska.  Viewing the Northern lights has been on the bucket list of low latitiude dwellers like myself.

Spring of 2024, May 11th was one of those very rare occassions when the "goddess of dawn" visited us right here in my New Jersey backyard at the lowly 40 degrees north latitude. 

Fireflies

A string of eight galaxies known as “Markarian’s chain” with 14 more of their visual neighbors. A personal first of 22 galaxies in a single shot with the new Apertura 72mm f/6 refractor. Shot from my backyard on May 1st at about 11 pm.

Watch closely.
Those little pools - of light.
Take away their names,
And they become a swarm
Of fireflies.

 

Mooned!

A Seven Year Wait

The North American total solar eclipse of 2024 was a long time coming for me. Since missing the opportunity in 2017, I had rationalized I would do what it takes to get in the path in 2024. I reasoned that my daughter who was only three years old then would be ten and build a much better memory of it. The wait had effectively been for seven years, and I was ready to be mooned!

Taming The Digital Wolves

This would be my first total solar eclipse ever. I wanted to watch the event with my own eyes without having to fidget with camera settings and looking at an LCD screen. As a result my camera had to be automated. I considered several eclipse automation software and settled in on one called SetNC which was free and yet effective. Some helpful folks over at cloudnights.com shared their experience with the software and recommended tweaks to defaults based on their 2017 eclipse experience. I had tested it out and it seemed to work. 

Also a regular tripod would not suffice. In order to stay pointed at the sun for the minutes of totality, the mount had to be able to track the sun automatically. While I already had an "alt-az" mount - it did not pack very well even as check-in luggage. I experimented with a more portable tracking mount that would comfortably fit inside a carry on bag and having played with an iOptron skyhunter, settled on a Skywatcher AZ GTI mount.  It was battery or AC operated alt-Az design but with an off market wedge and a Sky-watcher provided firmware update, this could also become a lightweight equatorial mount. I was not going to try roundaout ways to polar align by day (without a visible pole star) for the eclipse, so al-az was cool, but I could not resist the prospect of this being a dual purpose mount for future night time astro as well. I had tested both pieces to understand  their little quirks and how to make them play well together. 

 

Location location location

The last two days leading up to April 8, 2024 had been the culmination of a series of changes to our travel plans. 

The initial plan was to go to Texas and observe the 3 minutes of totality from the comfort of my sister 's place, but the weather gods intervened. Over the last 20 years, April generally was cloud free in Texas while rest of America on the eclipse path was iffy. This was one of the exception years. A weather system was moving across most of American eclipse path. My backup location at Rochester, NY was also predicted to be clouded out. I had become an expert on specialized weather apps such as Astrospheric, that spewed hourly predictions days in advance for a fee. It seemed Vermont was going to be the place near us with the least amount of clouds. The Canadian weather model which is supposedly the most accurate for cloud cover predicted a 16% at the time. However hotels in the path of totality were ridiculosly expensive (somewhere like 4-5x of regular price). We decided to stay just outsize the path of totality in Lake George, NY but drive in to the most favorable location on the day of based on weather reports. 

Interestingly, the timing of contact has been predictable for 2000 years, since the Babylonians saw the repeating pattern in eclipse records, but they did not know why or where the next one would occur. The location became predictable only about 300 years ago since Edmund Halley applied Newtonian gravity to the problem, for the first time predicting an eclipse in England. While we were beneficiaries of such precision, the weather prediction was another story.

Verity in Vermont

Based on predictions the prior night, we were in a small town in Vermont in the path of totality. We waited as the moon’s shadow sped towards us with a land speed three times that of a commercial jet. 

In the middle of a pleasant spring day, an eerie twilight set in. The air became chilly, as the last sliver of the sun disappeared. Final rays that escaped through the craters on lunar limb, put the “diamond ring” on show.
And then, all that remained was a black hole in the sky.

We stared at the dark face of the moon, with wispy solar corona streaming in all directions around the edges. At a few spots along the rim, red plumes of solar prominence emerged, visible by naked eye. It was as if bits of our host star was oozing out into space. The prominences looked tiny, yet any one of them would be larger than the whole of the earth. Flanking the scene, two bright dots appeared in the darkened sky - Venus and Jupiter in a single line, the plane of the ecliptic.

For the shortest 3 minutes ever,
and for what will be the last time in the next 20 years in America, a cloudless mid-day had turned into night.

Into A Sea of Stars

 

The Universe That Wasn’t There

Growing up in a big city almost anywhere in the world breeds a certain disinterest in the sky. 

Observing stars in the night sky just isn't something big city people do, or fill any part of their busy lives thinking about. So for most of my childhood, which was in a corner of a big city, I never really developed a feel for the night sky. There was a bookish understanding of stuff up there. Planets were things that existed in text books. The sun moved between imaginary lines of tropics in diagrams of geography lessons. A school teacher once mentioned that সপ্তর্ষি মণ্ডল (the Bengali name for the Big Dipper in the Indian sky culture) was a constellation which looked like a question mark if one looked north at the dead of the night. I only had a vague idea of where "north" was - thanks to a tiny little compass tucked away in a drawer in my grandfather's writing desk. We lived in a bungalow style home wth an open terrace. During warm summer nights, especially with power cuts which were frequent then, my parents and I sometimes went up there to catch a cool breeze. I have vague memories of seeing the moon. But trying to find a constellation at an unearthly hour was an adventure too far. I had no idea where or how to begin. Then there was in a monthly magazine a series titled কালপুরুষ   ("Kalpurush") authored by a famous writer of the time. The title stood out as strange, mysterious and memorable in an awkward way. It literally translated to "temporal man". Though I had no idea what it really was about. I would later learn in the vedic constellation nomenclature, the name was a reference to Orion the hunter. But for that time, the universe lay perfectly hidden behind the everyday things we did in the pursuit of happiness.

Temporal Man 

In the four decades that passed, my own pursuits took me to major cities in India (Delhi and Mumbai) and thereafter to the United States. And eventually I had the good fortune of moving to the suburbs of New Jersey where light pollution had not fully enveloped the night skies yet, and life at night was not a mad rush to get ready for the next day of work. With books, and then phone apps as a guide, I slowly taught myself how to read the night sky. Armed with a digital SLR camera that I already had and a pair of astronomy binoculars which I bought, I started my journey into the world of backyard astronomy and astrophotography. These modest tools would become my magic wands to lift the veil of darkness. And one of my first adventures would involve chasing Orion.

Into a Sea of Stars

Somewhere between then and now, ten years had passed and my flirtations with the hobby had grown into a steady affair. This night in 2024, was a chilly February night with a few wispy clouds. I opened my front door for a "check in" on the universe before retiring for the night. Centered on the vaulted arch of my doorway was this starry humanoid figure majestically towering above me. Orion the hunter, It was by now a very familiar friend. Betelgeuse on its left shoulder, was visibly ruddy, as was Aldebaran, the eye of Taurus to the far right. There was also no mistaking Sirius the dog-star at its left foot. The bright "eye" aside - I could see the whole Canis Major constellation down to the dog’s tail. In my mind, for a moment every vestige of human settlement below faded away. I felt like I could take a step forward from the threshold of my home and dip into a sea or stars.

Hello Darkness

I had to pause to take a picture. This was a single shot with an SLR on a tripod. I threw in a clip-in light pollution filter to suppress the amber glow of sodium-vapor street lamps. A few tries later - I landed on this single 20 second exposure that did the trick. And after a little abracadabra on the computer - it was just  perfect.  Only in hindsight I realized that ten years after my first rendezvous, I had come a full circle standing face to face with the timeless “Temporal Man” again.

From being blind to a whole universe that lies hidden in plain sight, to being able to open the front door and step into a sea of stars - many of which I know by name - has been a long and rewarding journey into realms I did not imagine existed. And for that, I shall remain eternally grateful to life.