Category: Photography

A 20 Year Project

by Yu Gu, posted in Astronomy, Photography, Projects

August 27, 2003: the day when Mars reached its closest point to Earth in 60,000 years.

There was a lot of hype (and hoaxes) around this Mars opposition. I was also preparing for it by making a 12.5” F6 Newtonian. Still a Ph.D. student at the time, I got help from several friends to make this happen.

The Mars season was a success! With a modified webcam (I sourced a monochrome CCD chip from Italy to replace the color sensor in the webcam!), I captured some really good Mars images.

The success fueled a dream, a larger scope for planetary imaging. I started to plan out a 16” F7.2 Newtonian on a tracking Dobsonian mount. As an engineer student, nothing seems to be impossible at the time.

The design used a mixture of steel, aluminum, and carbon fiber. While the mirror was on order, I built a 6” finder scope first as a testing piece. It was completed in 2004:

By summer 2007, the main scope was taking shape, again with the help of friends, and it was quite impressive 😊

The first light happened on Mar 2008, I believe (I have lost a few pictures of that…), and I remember the view of the moon was incredible.

If you look carefully, you may see motors on the dob mount in the picture above. Building the tracking system for the scope took a long time and was not successful. At the same time, I started on the market for a tenure-track position, and started realizing how inadequate my CV was. The work on the scope slowed, and then stopped.

Many things had happened between 2008 and 2020… The scope spent most of this period in the darkness of a garage, as evidence of “I once had a dream.” I still had the dream, just not the time and energy to pursue it. In the meantime, I found a 16” F5.85 mirror to replace the F7.2 mirror to make the scope more practical.

In 2020, I got a call from Mars again and resumed my astrophotography journey after a 16 year break. With improved cameras and image processing tools, I was able to take better Mars images with 11” SCT.

But what I really wanted was to complete the 16” scope. So, I started working on it again. I bought an equatorial platform to allow tracking but was disappointed to find out the poor quality of my new F5.85 mirror.

After an 18 month wait, now I have another mirror, a 16” F5.25 made by Zambuto. I also modified the scope to be mounted on an equatorial mount. It looks great, but a bit too tall on a pier… A shorter pier (see the photo at the beginning) solved the problem so I can take down the scope by myself at night.

My spaceship is finally ready to go, and I have been enjoying the ride since. Should I dare to dream bigger?

(Click on the photos to see larger size, and check out more photos in Gallery)

Photos from the Mars 2020 Opposition

by Yu Gu, posted in Astronomy, Photography

Here is a summary of my 2020 Mars imaging season.

After a 16-year break from astrophotography, I am back in the game gain. Compared to the 2003 opposition, Mars has changed quite noticeably. There have been two global dust storms (2007, 2018) and more smaller storms that altered the planet’s albedo features. I tried to label some of the potential changes here (please click on the photo to see a higher resolution one).

I also produced my first Mars map from my deck in Morgantown WV. The regions around the North Pole is still missing (just like Earth, the Mar’s rotation axis is tilted). I will have to wait for another opposition to complete the map.

The weather on Mars had been mostly clear, with hardly any clouds as compared to 2003. This was great for map making though. I did catch the beginning of a dust storm, which went on to spread to almost half of the globe in just a few days. Well, those were the few days that Mars turned its back on me, so I did not get to see it.

Sometimes, it’s hard to imagine the orange colored blob in the telescope is actually another planet; smaller but not that much smaller than our own planet Earth, and it’s changing over time. Maybe one day, we will get to visit Mars so we can point a scope at Earth and see it as a blue colored blob.

So, What Do We Do with It?

by Yu Gu, posted in Astronomy, Photography, Research, Robotics, Uncategorized

I am more of a telescope collector than a sky watcher. I have about a dozen telescopes of different designs: achromatic, apochromatic, doublet refractors, triplets, Newtonians, Maksutov-Cassegrain, Maksutov Newtonian, H-alpha solar scope, Dobsonian mounts, German equatorial mounts, roof prism binoculars, porro prism binoculars… you name it. I know way more about telescope designs than constellations of the sky or features on Mars. Most of my telescopes spend years collecting photons in a very dark place: my closet.

I am more of a camera lover than a photophile. I have several cameras from the film era to the mirrorless age. I have a couple dozen lenses with focal lengths ranging from 14mm-500mm, not counting telescopes.

I have learned to accept this. There is nothing wrong with being obsessed with equipment, I told myself, the hobby is supposed to be fun!

I also like robots. My lab, IRL, has about two dozen robots, plus a 50-robot swarm. The UAV lab I worked in before had about a dozen UAVs. Most (but not all) of these robots and UAVs were custom developed. I, as someone who always like toys, had a hand in the design of most of these systems.

So now, what happens when we have all the hardware we ever wanted? Of course, we can only get close, but not there. There is a pretty big difference between “wants” and “needs”, and we often rationalize “wants” as “needs”. As engineers and perfectionists, seeing small issues with the current setup makes us feel itching. We are constantly dreaming up next design iterations. We are telling ourselves better robots will make our research better.

Is that true? Do we really need more/better robots to do better research? Maybe to some degree. If we don’t have the appropriate tools, we can’t do certain experiments. If we don’t have high quality equipment, some work may be very hard to do (e.g., mapping without 3D Lidar or robotic pollination without a precision manipulator). I think another important reason for having the best robots, like having the best telescopes/cameras, is that we have no one else but ourselves to blame for the underperformance…

So, let me ask again, what happens when we have all the hardware we ever wanted? What do we do with it? The answer is simple: let’s focus on research. Instead of rushing to start on the next generation design and letting the existing robots collect dusts, let’s make them do things nobody else can dream of or believe!