Shallow Thoughts : : Aug

Total Eclipse

My first total eclipse! The suspense had been building for years.

Dave and I were in Wyoming. We'd made a hotel reservation nine months ago, by which time we were already too late to book a room in the zone of totality and settled for Laramie, a few hours' drive from the centerline.

For visual observing, I had my little portable 80mm refractor. But photography was more complicated. I'd promised myself that for my first (and possibly only) total eclipse, I wasn't going to miss the experience because I was spending too much time fiddling with cameras. But I couldn't talk myself into not trying any photography at all.

Initially, my plan was to use my 90mm Mak as a 500mm camera lens. It had worked okay for the the 2012 Venus transit.

I spent several weeks before the eclipse in a flurry of creation, making a couple of solar finders, a barn-door mount, and then wrestling with motorizing the barn-door (which was a failure because I couldn't find a place to buy decent gears for the motor. I'm still working on that and will eventually write it up). I wrote up a plan: what equipment I would use when, a series of progressive exposures for totality, and so forth.

And then, a couple of days before we were due to leave, I figured I should test my rig -- and discovered that it was basically impossible to focus on the sun. For the Venus transit, the sun wasn't that high in the sky, so I focused through the viewfinder. But for the total eclipse, the sun would be almost overhead, and the viewfinder nearly impossible to see. So I had planned to point the Mak at a distant hillside, focus it, then slip the filter on and point it up to the sun. It turned out the focal point was completely different through the filter.

With only a couple of days left to go, I revised my plan. The Mak is difficult to focus under any circumstances. I decided not to use it, and to stick to my Canon 55-250mm zoom telephoto, with the camera on a normal tripod. I'd skip the partial eclipse (I've photographed those before anyway) and concentrate on getting a few shots of the diamond ring and the corona, running through a range of exposures without needing to look at the camera screen or do any refocusing. And since I wasn't going to be usinga telescope, my nifty solar finders wouldn't work; I designed a new one out of popsicle sticks to fit in the camera's hot shoe.

Getting there

We stayed with relatives in Colorado Saturday night, then drove to Laramie Sunday. I'd heard horror stories of hotels canceling people's longstanding eclipse reservations, but fortunately our hotel honored our reservation. WHEW! Monday morning, we left the hotel at 6am in case we hit terrible traffic. There was already plenty of traffic on the highway north to Casper, but we turned east hoping for fewer crowds. A roadsign sign said "NO PARKING ON HIGHWAY." They'd better not try to enforce that in the totality zone!

When we got to I-25 it was moving and, oddly enough, not particularly crowded. Glendo Reservoir had looked on the map like a nice spot on the centerline ... but it was also a state park, so there was a risk that everyone else would want to go there. Sure enough: although traffic was moving on I-25 at Wheatland, a few miles north the freeway came to a screeching halt. We backtracked and headed east toward Guernsey, where several highways went north toward the centerline.

East of Glendo, there were crowds at every highway pullout and rest stop. As we turned onto 270 and started north, I kept an eye on OsmAnd on my phone, where I'd loaded a GPX file of the eclipse path. When we were within a mile of the centerline, we stopped at a likely looking pullout. It was maybe 9 am. A cool wind was blowing -- very pleasant since we were expecting a hot day -- and we got acquainted with our fellow eclipse watchers as we waited for first contact.

Our pullout was also the beginning of a driveway to a farmhouse we could see in the distance. Periodically people pulled up, looking lost, checked maps or GPS, then headed down the road to the farm. Apparently the owners had advertised it as an eclipse spot -- pay $35, and you can see the eclipse and have access to a restroom too! But apparently the old farmhouse's plumbing failed early on, and some of the people who'd paid came out to the road to watch with us since we had better equipment set up.

There's not much to say about the partial eclipse. We all traded views -- there were five or six scopes at our pullout, including a nice little H-alpha scope. I snapped an occasional photo through the 80mm with my pocket camera held to the eyepiece, or with the DSLR through an eyepiece projection adapter. Oddly, the DSLR photos came out worse than the pocket cam ones. I guess I should try and debug that at some point.

Shortly before totality, I set up the DSLR on the tripod, focused on a distant hillside and taped the focus with duct tape, plugged in the shutter remote, checked the settings in Manual mode, then set the camera to Program mode and AEB (auto exposure bracketing). I put the lens cap back on and pointed the camera toward the sun using the popsicle-stick solar finder. I also set a countdown timer, so I could press START when totality began and it would beep to warn me when it was time to the sun to come back out. It was getting chilly by then, with the sun down to a sliver, and we put on sweaters.

The pair of eclipse veterans at our pullout had told everybody to watch for the moon's shadow racing toward us across the hills from the west. But I didn't see the racing shadow, nor any shadow bands.

And then Venus and Mercury appeared and the sun went away.

Totality

One thing the photos don't prepare you for is the color of the sky. I expected it would look like twilight, maybe a little darker; but it was an eerie, beautiful medium slate blue. With that unworldly solar corona in the middle of it, and Venus gleaming as bright as you've ever seen it, and Mercury shining bright on the other side. There weren't many stars.

We didn't see birds doing anything unusual; as far as I can tell, there are no birds in this part of Wyoming. But the cows did all get in a line and start walking somewhere. Or so Dave tells me. I wasn't looking at the cows.

Amazingly, I remembered to start my timer and to pull off the DSLR's lens cap as I pushed the shutter button for the diamond-ring shots without taking my eyes off the spectacle high above. I turned the camera off and back on (to cancel AEB), switched to M mode, and snapped a photo while I scuttled over to the telescope, pulled the filter off and took a look at the corona in the wide-field eyepiece. So beautiful! Binoculars, telescope, naked eye -- I don't know which view was best.

I went through my exposure sequence on the camera, turning the dial a couple of clicks each time without looking at the settings, keeping my eyes on the sky or the telescope eyepiece. But at some point I happened to glance at the viewfinder -- and discovered that the sun was drifting out of the frame. Adjusting the tripod to get it back in the frame took longer than I wanted, but I got it there and got my eyes back on the sun as I snapped another photo ...

and my timer beeped.

I must have set it wrong! It couldn't possibly have been two and a half minutes. It had been 30, 45 seconds tops.

But I nudged the telescope away from the sun, and looked back up -- to another diamond ring. Totality really was ending and it was time to stop looking.

Getting Out

The trip back to Golden, where we were staying with a relative, was hellish. We packed up immediately after totality -- we figured we'd seen partials before, and maybe everybody else would stay. No such luck. By the time we got all the equipment packed there was already a steady stream of cars heading south on 270.

A few miles north of Guernsey the traffic came to a stop. This was to be the theme of the afternoon. Every small town in Wyoming has a stop sign or signal, and that caused backups for miles in both directions. We headed east, away from Denver, to take rural roads down through eastern Wyoming and Colorado rather than I-25, but even so, we hit small-town stop sign backups every five or ten miles.

We'd brought the Rav4 partly for this reason. I kept my eyes glued on OsmAnd and we took dirt roads when we could, skirting the paved highways -- but mostly there weren't any dirt roads going where we needed to go. It took about 7 hours to get back to Golden, about twice as long as it should have taken. And we should probably count ourselves lucky -- I've heard from other people who took 11 hours to get to Denver via other routes.

Lessons Learned

Dave is fond of the quote, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy" (which turns out to be from Prussian military strategist Helmuth von Moltke the Elder).

The enemy, in this case, isn't the eclipse; it's time. Two and a half minutes sounds like a lot, but it goes by like nothing.

Even in my drastically scaled-down plan, I had intended exposures from 1/2000 to 2 seconds (at f/5.6 and ISO 400). In practice, I only made it to 1/320 because of fiddling with the tripod.

And that's okay. I'm thrilled with the photos I got, and definitely wouldn't have traded any eyeball time for more photos. I'm more annoyed that the tripod fiddling time made me miss a little bit of extra looking. My script actually worked out better than I expected, and I was very glad I'd done the preparation I had. The script was reasonable, the solar finders worked really well, and the lens was even in focus for the totality shots.

Then there's the eclipse itself.

I've read so many articles about solar eclipses as a mystical, religious experience. It wasn't, for me. It was just an eerily beautiful, other-worldly spectacle: that ring of cold fire staring down from the slate blue sky, bright planets but no stars, everything strange, like nothing I'd ever seen. Photos don't get across what it's like to be standing there under that weird thing in the sky.

I'm not going to drop everything to become a globe-trotting eclipse chaser ... but I sure hope I get to see another one some day.

Photos: 2017 August 21 Total Solar Eclipse in Wyoming.

Tags: eclipse, astronomy, photography
[ 20:41 Aug 27, 2017    More science/astro | permalink to this entry | ]

A Homemade Solar Finder, for the Eclipse

While I was testing various attempts at motorizing my barn-door mount, trying to get it to track the sun, I had to repeatedly find the sun in my telescope.

In the past, I've generally used the shadow of the telescope combined with the shadow of the finderscope. That works, more or less, but it's not ideal: it doesn't work as well with just a telescope with no finder, which includes both of the scopes I'm planning to take to the eclipse; and it requires fairly level ground under the telescope: it doesn't work if there are bushes or benches in the way of the shadow.

For the eclipse, I don't want to waste any time finding the sun: I want everything as efficient as possible. I decided to make a little solar finderscope. One complication, though: since I don't do solar observing very often, I didn't want to use tape, glue or, worse, drill holes to mount it.

So I wanted something that could be pressed against the telescope and held there with straps or rubber bands, coming off again without leaving a mark. A length of an angled metal from my scrap pile seemed like a good size to be able to align itself against a small telescope tube.

Then I needed front and rear sights. For the front sight, I wanted a little circle that could project a bulls-eye shadow onto a paper card attached to the rear sight. I looked at the hardware store for small eye-bolts, but no dice. Apparently they don't come that small.I settled for the second-smallest size of screw eye.

The screw eye, alas, is meant to screw into wood, not metal. So I cut a short strip of wood a reasonable size to nestle into the inside of the angle-iron. (That ripsaw Dave bought last year sure does come in handy sometimes.) I drilled some appropriately sized holes and fastened screw eyes on both ends, adding a couple of rubber grommets as spacers because the screw eyes were a little too long and I didn't want the pointy ends of the screws getting near my telescope tube.

I added some masking tape on the sides of the angle iron so it wouldn't rub off the paint on the telescope tube, then bolted a piece of cardboard cut from an old business card to the rear screw eye.

Voila! A rubber-band-attached solar sight that took about an hour to make. Notice how the shadow of the front sight exactly fits around the rear sight: you line up the shadow with the rear sight to point the scope. It seems to work pretty well, and it should be adaptable to any telescope I use.

I used a wing nut to attach the rear cardboard: that makes it easy to replace it or remove it. With the cardboard removed, the sight might even work for night-time astronomy viewing. That is, it does work, as long as there's enough ambient light to see the rings. Hmm... maybe I should paint the rings with glow-in-the-dark paint.

Update: I have an even simpler design that works perfectly on a camera with a hot shoe, and almost as well on a telescope, pictured here: Camera solar finder made from popsicle sticks.

Tags: astronomy, eclipse
[ 15:25 Aug 14, 2017    More science/astro | permalink to this entry | ]

A Barn-Door Mount for the Eclipse

I've been meaning forever to try making a "barn door" tracking mount. Used mainly for long-exposure wide-field astrophotography, the barn door mount, invented in 1975, is basically two pieces of wood with a hinge. The bottom board mounts on a tripod and is pointed toward the North Star; "opening" the hinge causes the top board to follow the motion of the sky, like an equatorial telescope mount. A threaded rod and a nut control the angle of the "door", and you turn the nut manually every so often. Of course, you can also drive it with a motor.

We're off to view the eclipse in a couple of weeks. Since it's my first total eclipse, my plan is to de-emphasize photography: especially during totality, I want to experience the eclipse, not miss it because my eyes are glued to cameras and timers and other equipment. But I still want to take photos every so often. Constantly adjusting a tripod to keep the sun in frame is another hassle that might keep my attention away from the eclipse. But real equatorial mounts are heavy and a time consuming to set up; since I don't know how crowded the area will be, I wasn't planning to take one. Maybe a barn door would solve that problem.

Perhaps more useful, it would mean that my sun photos would all be rotated approximately the right amount, in case I wanted to make an animation. I've taken photos of lunar and partial solar eclipses, but stringing them together into an animation turned out to be too much hassle because of the need to rotate and position each image.

I've known about barn-door mounts since I was a kid, and I knew the basic theory, but I'd never paid much attention to the details. When I searched the web, it sounded complicated -- it turned out there are many types that require completely different construction techniques.

The best place to start (I found out after wasting a lot of time on other sites) is the Wikipedia article on "Barn door tracker", which gives a wonderfully clear overview, with photos, of the various types. I had originally been planning a simple tangent or isosceles type; but when I read construction articles, it seemed that those seemingly simple types might not be so simple to build: the angle between the threaded rod and the boards is always changing, so you need some kind of a pivot. Designing the pivot looked tricky. Meanwhile, the pages I found on curved-rod mounts all insisted that bending the rod was easy, no trouble at all. I decided to try a curved-rod mount first.

The canonical reference is a 2015 article by Gary Seronik: A Tracking Platform for Astrophotography. But I found three other good construction guides: Optical Ed's "Making a Curve Bolt Barn Door", a Cloudy Nights discussion thread "Motorized Barn Door Mount Kit", and Massapoag Pond Photography's "Barn Door Tracker". I'm not going to reprise all their construction details, so refer to those sites if you try making your own mount.

The crucial parts are a "piano hinge", a long hinge that eliminates the need to line up two or more hinges, and the threaded rod. Buying a piano hinge in the right size proved impossible locally, but the folks at Metzger's assured me that piano hinges can be cut, so I bought one longer than I needed and cut it to size. I used a 1/4-20 rod, which meant (per the discussions in the Cloudy Nights discussion linked above) that a 11.43-inch radius from the hinge to the holes the rod passes through would call for the nut to turn at a nice round number of 1 RPM.

I was suspicious of the whole "it's easy to bend the threaded rod ina 11.43-inch circle" theory, but it turned out to be true. Draw the circle you want on a sheet of newspaper, put on some heavy gloves and start bending, frequently comparing your rod to the circle you drew. You can fine-tune the curvature later.

I cut my boards, attached the hinge, measured about 11.4" and drilled a hole for the threaded rod. The hole needed to be a bit bigger than 5/8" to let the curved rod pass through without rubbing. Attach the curved rod to the top wood piece with a couple of nuts and some washers, and then you can fine-tune the rod's curvature, opening and closing the hinge and re-bending the rod a little in any place it rubs.

A 5/8" captive nut on the top piece lets you attach a tripod head which will hold your camera or telescope. A 1/4" captive nut on the bottom piece serves to attach the mount to a tripod -- you need a 1/4", not 3/8": the rig needs to mount on a tripod head, not just the legs, so you can align the hinge to the North Star. (Of course, you could build a wedge or your own set of legs, if you prefer.) The 3/4" plywood I was using turned out to be thicker than the captive nuts, so I had to sand the wood thinner in both places. Maybe using half-inch plywood would have been better.

The final piece is the knob/nut you'll turn to make the mount track. I couldn't find a good 1/4" knob for under $15. A lot of people make a wood circle and mount the nut in the center, or use a gear so a motor can drive the mount. I looked around at things like jam-jar lids and the pile of metal gears and sprinkler handles in my welding junkpile, but I didn't see anything that looked quite right, so I decided to try a wing nut just for testing, and worry about the knob later. Turns out a wing nut works wonderfully; there's no particular need for anything else if you're driving your barn-door manually.

Testing time! I can't see Polaris from my deck, and I was too lazy to set up anywhere else, so I used a protractor to set the hinge angle to roughly 36° (my latitude), then pointed it approximately north. I screwed my Pro-Optic 90mm Maksutov (the scope I plan to use for my eclipse photos) onto the ball head and pointed it at the moon as soon as it rose. With a low power eyepiece (20x), turning the wing nut kept the moon more or less centered in the field for the next half-hour, until clouds covered the moon and rain began threatening. I didn't keep track of how many turns I was making, since I knew the weather wasn't going to allow a long session, and right now I'm not targeting long-exposure photography, just an easy way of keeping an object in view.

A good initial test! My web searches, and the discovery of all those different types of barn-door mounts and pivots and flex couplings and other scary terms, had seemed initially daunting. But in the end, building a barn-door mount was just as easy as people say it is, and I finished it in a day.

And what about a motor? I added one a few days later, with a stepper and an Arduino. But that's a separate article.

Tags: astronomy, hardware, eclipse
[ 19:25 Aug 10, 2017    More science/astro | permalink to this entry | ]

Keeping Git Branches in Sync

I do most of my coding on my home machine. But when I travel (or sit in boring meetings), sometimes I do a little hacking on my laptop. Most of my code is hosted in GitHub repos, so when I travel, I like to update all the repos on the laptop to make sure I have what I need even when I'm offline.

That works great as long as I don't make branches. I have a variable $myrepos that lists all the github repositories where I want to contribute, and with a little shell alias it's easy enough to update them all:

allgit() {
    pushd ~
    foreach repo ($myrepos)
        echo $repo :
        cd ~/src/$repo
        git pull
    end
    popd
}

That works well enough -- as long as you don't use branches.

Git's branch model seems to be that branches are for local development, and aren't meant to be shared, pushed, or synchronized among machines. It's ridiculously difficult in git to do something like, "for all branches on the remote server, make sure I have that branch and it's in sync with the server." When you create branches, they don't push to the server by default, and it's remarkably difficult to figure out which of your branches is actually tracking a branch on the server.

A web search finds plenty of people asking, and most of the Git experts answering say things like "Just check out the branch, then pull." In other words, if you want to work on a branch, you'd better know before you go offline exactly which branches in which repositories might have been created or updated since the last time you worked in that repository on that machine. I guess that works if you only ever work on one project in one repo and only on one or two branches at a time. It certainly doesn't work if you need to update lots of repos on a laptop for the first time in two weeks.

Further web searching does find a few possibilities. For checking whether there are files modified that need to be committed, git status --porcelain -uno works well. For checking whether changes are committed but not pushed, git for-each-ref --format="%(refname:short) %(push:track)" refs/heads | fgrep '[ahead' works ... if you make an alias so you never have to look at it.

Figuring out whether branches are tracking remotes is a lot harder. I found some recommendations like git branch -r | grep -v '\->' | while read remote; do git branch --track "${remote#origin/}" "$remote"; done and for remote in `git branch -r`; do git branch --track ${remote#origin/} $remote; done but neither of them really did what I wanted. I was chasing down the rabbit hole of writing shell loops using variables like

  localbranches=("${(@f)$(git branch | sed 's/..//')}")
  remotebranches=("${(@f)$(git branch -a | grep remotes | grep -v HEAD | grep -v master | sed 's_remotes/origin/__' | sed 's/..//')}")

when I thought, there must be a better way. Maybe using Python bindings?

git-python

In Debian, the available packages for Git Python bindings are python-git, python-pygit2, and python-dulwich. Nobody on #python seemed to like any of them, but based on quick attempts with all three, python-git seemed the most straightforward. Confusingly, though Debian calls it python-git, it's called "git-python" in its docs or in web searches, and it's "import git" when you use it.

It's pretty straightforward to use, at least for simple things. You can create a Repo object with

from git import Repo
repo = Repo('.')

and then you can get lists like repo.heads (local branches), repo.refs (local and remote branches and other refs such as tags), etc. Once you have a ref, you can use ref.name, check whether it's tracking a remote branch with ref.tracking_branch(), and make it track one with ref.set_tracking_branch(remoteref). That makes it very easy to get a list of branches showing which ones are tracking a remote branch, something that had proved almost impossible with the git command line.

Nice. But now I wanted more: I wanted to replace those baroque git status --porcelain and git for-each-ref commands I had been using to check whether my repos needed committing or pushing. That proved harder.

Checking for uncommitted files, I decided it would be easiest stick with the existing git status --porcelain -uno. Which was sort of true. git-python lets you call git commands, for cases where the Python bindings aren't quite up to snuff yet, but it doesn't handle all cases. I could call:

    output = repo.git.status(porcelain=True)

but I never did find a way to pass the -uno; I tried u=False, u=None, and u="no" but none of them worked. But -uno actually isn't that important so I decided to do without it.

I found out later that there's another way to call the git command, using execute, which lets you pass the exact arguments you'd pass on the command line. It didn't work to call for-each-ref the way I'd called repo.git.status (repo.git.for_each_ref isn't defined), but I could call it this way:

    foreachref = repo.git.execute(['git', 'for-each-ref',
                                   '--format="%(refname:short) %(push:track)"',
                                   'refs/heads'])

and then parse the output looking for "[ahead]". That worked, but ... ick. I wanted to figure out how to do that using Python.

It's easy to get a ref (branch) and its corresponding tracking ref (remote branch). ref.log() gives you a list of commits on each of the two branches, ordered from earliest to most recent, the opposite of git log. In the simple case, then, what I needed was to iterate backward over the two commit logs, looking for the most recent SHA that's common to both. The Python builtin reversed was useful here:

    for i, entry in enumerate(reversed(ref.log())):
        for j, upstream_entry in enumerate(reversed(upstream.log())):
            if entry.newhexsha == upstream_entry.newhexsha:
                return i, j

(i, j) are the number of commits on the local branch that the remote hasn't seen, and vice versa. If i is zero, or if there's nothing in ref.log(), then the repo has no new commits and doesn't need pushing.

Making branches track a remote

The last thing I needed to do was to make branches track their remotes. Too many times, I've found myself on the laptop, ready to work, and discovered that I didn't have the latest code because I'd been working on a branch on my home machine, and my git pull hadn't pulled the info for the branch because that branch wasn't in the laptop's repo yet. That's what got me started on this whole "update everything" script in the first place.

If you have a ref for the local branch and a ref for the remote branch, you can verify their ref.name is the same, and if the local branch has the same name but isn't tracking the remote branch, probably something went wrong with the local repo (like one of my earlier attempts to get branches in sync, and it's an easy fix: ref.set_tracking_branch(remoteref).

But what if the local branch doesn't exist yet? That's the situation I cared about most, when I've been working on a new branch and it's not on the laptop yet, but I'm going to want to work on it while traveling. And that turned out to be difficult, maybe impossible, to do in git-python.

It's easy to create a new local branch: repo.head.create(repo, name). But that branch gets created as a copy of master, and if you try to turn it into a copy of the remote branch, you get conflicts because the branch is ahead of the remote branch you're trying to copy, or vice versa. You really need to create the new branch as a copy of the remote branch it's supposed to be tracking.

If you search the git-python documentation for ref.create, there are references to "For more documentation, please see the Head.create method." Head.create takes a reference argument (the basic ref.create doesn't, though the documentation suggests it should). But how can you call Head.create? I had no luck with attempts like repo.git.Head.create(repo, name, reference=remotebranches[name]).

I finally gave up and went back to calling the command line from git-python.

repo.git.checkout(remotebranchname, b=name)

I'm not entirely happy with that, but it seems to work.

I'm sure there are all sorts of problems left to solve. But this script does a much better job than any git command I've found of listing the branches in my repositories, checking for modifications that require commits or pushes, and making local branches to mirror new branches on the server. And maybe with time the git-python bindings will improve, and eventually I'll be able to create new tracking branches locally without needing the command line.

The final script, such as it is: gitbranchsync.py.

Tags: git, programming, python
[ 14:39 Aug 05, 2017    More programming | permalink to this entry | ]