Micrometeorite candidates

The kids and I took apart a defective hard drive yesterday, and I used one of the magnets (in a plastic bag, which I then inverted) to fish for micrometeorites in the soil near a downspout.  I found a few plausible candidates, as well as a bunch of surprisingly pretty microscopic ferrous dust.

Here is a particularly pretty area.  The pointer is pointing to a round micrometeorite candidate.  It's stuck to some probably earth-origin stuff--the hard drive magnet magnetized all the samples, so they stick together.  There is also a pretty piece of glass or crystal closer to the top edge.

I ended up preparing a slide with four candidates (one a bit dubious) mounted under a glass coverslip.  It's hard to grab pieces as they are very tiny--though big enough to see naked eye as a tiny dot--and stuck magnetically to other things.  In particular, I lost the round one in the first photo, as it just shot away when I tried to grab it with a toothpick (which looked like a big blunt log under the microscope).  Here's one that didn't get away.  It's about 60% of the size of the ball in the first picture.  You can't tell in the photo, but if you shine the light on this, it's very metallic--a nice silvery object.

I ended up perfecting a method for extracting them.  First, I use the toothpick to sweep the area around it clean, looking in the microscope most of the time.  It's confusing, since the miscroscope reverses the view, but eventually the brain gets used to it.  Then I wet the toothpick with acetone.  The micrometeorite candidate sticks to the toothpick.  I then transfer it to a clean piece of glass.  Because the acetone evaporates so quickly, it's easy to just wipe the toothpick on the glass and the micrometeorite drops off.  I lost two promising samples--especially that nice big round one in the first photo--before I got the above two.

From what I've read, rounded things that look like they were partly melted are good candidates.  Here is a less rounded item that ended up on the slide of the four that I saved.  I don't know how it got there, as I only intentionally transferred three to it, if memory saves.  Maybe it accidentally got carried there.  It looks too rough-edged to be a micrometeorite.  However, I've also read that they can avoid atmospheric melting by being small, so maybe rough-edged things count as candidates, too.  It, too, has a nice shine to it, though the photo doesn't show it.

If you try to view this with bright-field microscopy, of course you just get black silhouettes.  What I did is I taped a bright LED flashlight to the microscope, pointing at the sample, and then I took timed exposures, holding the camera to the eyepiece (sometimes with some sort of adapter to keep the camera in place).  For the second two photos, I found a way of adding more light.  I took the microscope outdoors, and then reflected sunlight onto the slide with a mirror (actually, a hard drive platter--they make lovely mirrors).

The photos were taken with point and shoot cameras hand-held to microscope eyepieces, with some loose-fitting adapters to make it easier. The first photo was with a Sony P100 through the 10X Huygens eyepiece that the microscope came with. The second and third photos were with a Canon G7 through a Rini 30mm telescope eyepiece, using my home-made telescope-to-microscope eyepiece adapter.

Update: I wish I knew how to better identify micrometeorites. The very round one may not be one--see this article.

Paper craft sundial

Here are instructions for a paper craft sundial I built last night.  The hard part was doing the trigonometry for getting the gnomon to be at the right angle after folding--I hadn't done much trigonometry for a while, especially in regard to laying out a three dimensional object (the gnomon is wider at bottom than at the top).  With the script complete, construction takes about fifteen minutes.

Fix for balance issue on 70mm F/4.3 refractor

My son's 70mm F/4.3 refractor had too easy movement, and couldn't balance with a 32mm Plossl eyepiece (it balanced fine with a light Kellner).  We added a tension adjuster on one side.

The second photo shows the right altitude bearing.  The nut is superglued in place.  If it ever comes unglued, I'll glue something on top of it to keep it in place, or replace it with a threaded insert, or think of something else.  The nut actually was a locknut, but I cut out a lot of the locking plastic, so its locking action is very mild.

And the last photo shows the inside of the mount.  The black ring is a superglued fiberglass washer.  On the other side, under the knob (you can kind of see it in the first photo) there is a superglued washer made from milkjug plastic (rough side facing the wood) so the knob doesn't come undone.

Sundial completed

It's done now, and I made an Instructable with detailed instructions.

Now, can I persuade my kids' school to have it painted somewhere?

Working on sundial

I'm planning to draw a large analemmatic sundial with the kids, with chalk on the driveway. But that's not as much fun as writing a perl script to generate a pdf file with all of the dimensions. The beta version of the script is now running here. Source is also available, of course.
Update: Just executed it in sidewalk chalk. That's the best I can do in terms of permanence, since we rent our house from the University.

Another telescope instructable

And another one of my telescope instructables has been put on the home page of Instructables. This is my 8" F/4 travel scope.

Observing on the Gulf Islands

In July, I visited one of the Gulf Islands in British Columbia, where my parents have a sea-side cottage. I brought my airline-portable 8" F/4 scope. The usual curiosity from airport security about the eight pound wooden box in my backpack, but no problems (I just need to allot an extra five minutes).

From my parents' front porch, I looked at and showed them M13, M27, M31/32, M51, M57, NGC 457, the Double Cluster and Albireo. The views were excellent. M27 had a very nice brighter squarish middle, with wings sticking out. I think that's tied for my nicest view of M27 (I've had a good view of it through my 13", too). When looking at M31, I couldn't see M110, perhaps because the M31 area was (a) low in the sky, and (b) that was the direction of Vancouver. NGC 457 (Owl/E.T./Airplane) always pleases people. We also saw a meteor and several satellites.

Once my parents went in, I went after the North American Nebula (NGC 7000). I have never had much luck with it. I saw it in my 68mm refractor with an O-III filter in a past year from the same location, but it was a very faint fuzzy with no structure. This time, still with an O-III filter, it was better due to better aperture: the edges were defined, and I could pan around it with the approximately two degree view of the Rini 30mm in the scope. (I should consider putting in a 2" focuser and using an even wider eyepiece in it.) I kind of got an impression of a shape reminiscent of North America, too.

I had heard that one can see the North American Nebula naked-eye with a filter if the sky is dark, and so I stared at the sky through the O-III filter. And I think I did in fact see it. I think I could also see M13 naked-eye with averted vision (no filter of course). It was almost directly overhead, so that helped no doubt.

The next time we went to a peak in the middle of the island, where I did an unofficial star party. We had almost thirty people show up, unofficially invited by email. We started with Saturn at around 10:15 pm. The rings were sharply defined, though I was using a low magnification due to the scope being fast and there being wind. (I also discarded the light shield due to wind.) I thought that it would be dark by 10:15 pm, but I didn't reckon with northern summer. It was closer to 11 pm before it was nice and dark. However, the party went very well. I showed the same objects as I had shown my parents, plus the Lagoon and Swan nebulae.

I always like it when deep sky objects are naked-eye visible. Overall, on the island, I naked-eye bagged North American (if O-III is allowed for naked-eye; but a filter only blocks light!), M8, M13, M31 and the Double Cluster. Only North American and M13 were particularly special to see naked-eye. M8 is naked-eye from my home, and M31 and Double Cluster are naked-eye from my regular observing location. I think sometimes I can see M31 naked-eye from home, too, but it's hard with the streetlights to the north.

My smaller Dobsonian instructable

Looks like my smaller Dobsonian telescope instructable has been featured as an editor's choice and is on the front page of Instructables. Yay!

Instructables space contest

Instructables is running a space-related stuff contest with nice prizes. I posted photos of four of the projects I described in this blog, and I encourage any readers to post their own projects.

How fat am I?

Suppose I think of myself as shaped like a four-dimensional spacetime worm. We draw diagrams of such things for students—a wide line moving up the board. It is amusing to note that such diagrams are not at all to scale. In a natural unit system, the speed of light will be taken to be c=1. For instance, one might measure time in seconds and distance in in light-seconds. A light second is 299792458 meters long. An average human earthly lifespan is of the order of magnitude of 10⁹ seconds. My largest spatial dimension is about two meters, i.e., about 10⁻⁸ light-seconds. That means that my earthly temporal dimension is of the order of magnitude 10¹⁷ times longer than my largest spatial dimension. This means that I thought of as a spacetime worm, I am an exceedingly thin worm. If this worm were rotated, projected and scaled so as to be a meter long and maximally thick, a hydrogen atom would be ten million times thicker than the worm.

Moreover, this worm is quite straight. The main variation in its shape seems to be a cork-screw shape induced by the earth's orbit around the sun. But the diameter of the spiral is about a thousand light-seconds, which is a millionth of its length.

So a scale drawing of me in my earthly career as a space-time worm would have me be 10¹⁷ times thinner than I am long, and despite a subtle cork-screw, straight to within about one part per million.

Progress on AstroObserver for Android

I've been learning OpenGL ES 1.0. Here's what I'm getting as a full-sky star map. It looks a brighter and better on my device than on this laptop, though--different gamma settings, I suppose.

I'm modeling the light flux pretty precisely: in other words, I scale the star by a factor proportional to 2.512^(-mag/2) (the 1/2 is there because the light flux is proportional to the square of the radius of a two-dimensional image).

If anybody wants to try the demo (which just shows a rotating sky at maximum speed), it's here.

More Android dark adaptation goodies

And here is an Android app, which requires a rooted device, to give better control over screen brightness, allowing almost continuous adjustment to very, very close to zero, at least on my device.  This will be useless to you if you don't have a rooted device.

Red keyboard for Android devices

I've been working on a red-themed keyboard based on the Gingerbread keyboard.  Should be nice for night use.  Here is a copy.

The screenshot is in Google Sky Map.

Night mode for Android devices

While astronomy apps tend to have a built-in nightmode, I was very pleased to come across ChainFire3D for Android which, among other things, has a global night mode that works on all apps. The red is a bit too bright, I think (maybe someone should email the developer about it), but otherwise I think it's great.

It needs a rooted device.

p.s. I'm still working away on AstroObserver. It's going more slowly than I'm used to, partly because I've been sick. I'm basing it on AstroTools, but I'm redoing a lot. 

AstroObserver for Android, project beginning

I am starting work on a free open source (GPL) astronomy app for Android, called AstroObserver, thanks to a kind stranger giving me a no-strings-attached gift to buy an Android device (I bought an Archos 43) and Raphael Lelant very kindly giving me the source code to AstroTools under the GPL for me to get a start.

Whole sky image

This is a really neat image of the whole sky that you can pan and zoom.

Nebula around Lambda Orionis

I had no idea it was there. It's gigantic.

Hunting for meteorites

Inspired by stuff on the web (e.g., here), I went hunting for micrometeorites. I wrapped a magnet with plastic wrap, and ran it through the dirt under one of our house's downspouts. Apparently meteorites have high iron content so magnets capture them. There was some magnetic dust. I then transfered a couple of pieces of it to a microscope slide and had a look. I saw black chunks of stuff with transmitted light, unsurprisingly, but they became pretty and shiny when I shone a flashlight on them. The two largest ones had rough edges. Micrometeorites are supposed to be smoother due to their hot passage through the atmosphere. But moving the slide around, I cam on a smaller piece with smoother edges and interesting texture that matched what one would expect a meteorite to look like. There was some shiny bumpiness, some small pit-like spots and some interesting rod/wave like areas.

I tried to save the tiny piece for future observations. I tried to stick it to some sticky tape, but the goo made it very hard to observe under the microscope. So I ended up dissolving the goo with acetone to recover the piece. As a side-effect, the piece became cleaner and was brightly metallic under the microscope. Unfortunately, I eventually lost it. It was very small, about four or five times longer than wide, and the width was about that of a hair or maybe a touch more. I lost it when I tried to transfer it with the tip of a needle from a dirtier cover glass to a cleaner one, but somehow it just disappeared--I used a powerful loupe to try to find it, but couldn't. Oh well.

At least the kids got to see it. I don't know it was a meteorite, of course. Too bad I lost it before taking a picture.

70mm refractor project just about finished

And we've almost finished the 70mm refractor.  I may still add some sort of sight for aiming it more effectively, though.

The tripod is made of cherry from a recalled crib that I picked up for scrap wood for free on Craigslist, together with some 1/2" Baltic birch plywood.  I glued two cherry slats side-by-side to form each leg.  The mount is a miniature Dobsonian mount.  The big round cutouts on the mount are to accommodate the oversize focusing knobs.  The azimuth bearing rides on PTFE pads and an old CD.  The altitude bearing uses PTFE pads and a plywood circle.

I had some trouble focusing a GSO 32mm Plossl in it--there wasn't enough focuser in-travel.  I suppose if I want to use that eyepiece with it, I can trim the top of the diagonal a little.

The moon

Here is a great zoomable image of the moon from NASA.