M16

You probably have not heard of the Eagle Nebula (or M16, as it is also known) but you've probably seen the famous Hubble photo of its massive towers of dust and gas: the Pillars of Creation.

I don't remember where I first saw that image, but I remember thinking how beautiful and amazing it looked. For the first time I could imagine this distant nebula as a real place.

Now I've finally captured that nebula with my own modest equipment. While it does not compare to Hubble's iconic image, it does connect me, in some small way, to that magnificent object.

The Astrotourist: M16

Clear Skies Are not Steady Skies

Just because the skies are clear doesn't mean that it will be a good night for astrophotography. Sometimes the skies are turbulent because of winds or temperature changes. On those nights the stars will twinkle ferociously and looking at the sky through a telescope will be like looking at the bottom of a clear lake on a windy day.

Astronomers call that "bad seeing" and it causes the light from distant stars to flicker and jump. Needless to say this distorts astronomical images, leaving them blurry and wavy.

The image on the left is a shot of the galaxy M101 under good seeing conditions. The one on the right shows the same galaxy, taken with the same equipment, on a night of poor seeing.

Astrophotography Targets for April

The most popular target in April is the Leo triplet, a grouping of three beautiful spirals: M65, M66, and NGC 3628, but there are other, less famous, galaxies this month that are well worth capturing.

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M82

Unravelling the nature of M82 took almost two centuries and required dozens of independent insights from many astronomers. But Johann Bode, the one who first spotted those two faint patches of light and wrote them down in his journal, is the only name commonly associated with M81 and M82. Those other astronomers? I confess I don't even know their names.

The Astrotourist: M82

Comm Check

February 1, 2003. It’s a little before 9 AM and in 20 minutes the Space Shuttle Columbia is scheduled to land in Florida. In Mission Control, mechanical systems officer Jeff Kling notices two sensors on Columbia’s left wing have cut out. A few moments later, two more cut out. He discusses it with flight director LeRoy Cain, but neither can explain the event. How could four independent sensors just suddenly stop working?

But then Cain remembers back to Columbia’s launch and the large chunk of foam that hit the shuttle as it was rocketing up at supersonic speeds. The debris had hit Columbia’s left wing. Could the loss of the sensors be related? It couldn’t be, thinks Cain. It has to be a coincidence.

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Astrophotography Targets for March

March is the beginning of galaxy season!  In its trek around the sun the Earth's nightside sometimes faces the disk of our galaxy. When that happens we see the band of the Milky Way high above us. But as the Milky Way dips towards the horizon, we see what lies beyond our little metropolis of stars—and that means galaxies of all kinds.

Infinite Lives: Experience Transcendence

Darren Zenko writes about Transcendence in Edmonton's Vue Weekly. I love this quote:

"The best part is when you play for long enough, get into the hypno-zone that lets you X-ray-view straight through the sci-fi surface and down into pure, universal mechanics: when you look at a “stargate” and see a “dungeon stairway,” a “ROM upgrade” and see a “magic scroll,” a “barrel labelled NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION” and see a “potion,” you’re seeing through the illusion, not “suspending disbelief” but building up disbelief to such a degree that you’re not just playing a game, you’re playing all games"

Read the full article.

The Eskimo Nebula

In November 1999 the Hubble Space Telescope suddenly stopped working. Another gyroscope had failed, leaving the telescope with only two working ones—without at least three working gyroscopes, the telescope lost its bearings, unable to tell which way it was pointing.

Fortunately, only a few weeks later, a Space Shuttle orbiter rendezvoused with Hubble and four astronauts repaired the multi-billion dollar telescope in a series of spacewalks. To test out the newly repaired observatory, scientists on Earth commanded it to point to a target and take some pictures. The result was magnificent—the telescope had been fully repaired. And the target that Hubble captured, a bright planetary nebula known as the Eskimo Nebula, was revealed in all its glory.

My shot of the Eskimo Nebula (or NGC 2392) is of course far inferior to Hubble's. Nevertheless, there is something very satisfying in capturing the same object. You don't need a ten billion dollar space program to enjoy the night sky. All you need is some modest equipment, a little luck, and a lot of patience.

The Astrotourist: NGC 2392

Astrophotography Targets for February

Astronomers love catalogs the way physicists love graph paper and biologists love gooey biological stuff. When I bought my first CCD camera, I didn't need a catalog: My target choices were either the Orion Nebula or the Whirlpool Galaxy. Everything else looked like a brownish blob of varying texture and fuzziness.

Now that cameras (and my skills) have improved, I have more choices. Every month I pore through my catalogs in search of interesting objects that might make good pictures. Last month I wrote down my favorite objects for January. This month I list my favorite objects between 6 and 8 hours of Right Ascension, that is, those objects that happen to be pretty high in the sky at night in February:

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M78

M78 was harder to capture than I expected. The faint nebulae and dark clouds required a lot of exposure time and some aggressive processing.

The Astrotourist: M78

Big Download Reviews Transcendence

Live Mesh Wins 2008 Crunchie

Photo of Ray Ozzie and David Treadwell by magerleagues. Some rights reserved.

Winning isn't everything, but it's nice when it happens. Live Mesh won the 2008 Crunchie award for Best Technological Innovation or Achievement. We were up against Google Chrome (which I thought was going to win) and Facebook Connect (which got second place).

The list of companies and products that were nominated for Crunchie awards reads like a who's who of trendy, cool start ups and products. It's a world that Microsoft doesn't often appear in (our business enterprise competitors, IBM and Oracle, for example are nowhere near it).

M77

M77 has been badly neglected photographically, at least compared to more popular galaxies like M51 and NGC 891. The Hubble Space Telescope hasn't imaged the whole thing yet, though both Robert Gendler and Russell Croman have (which is almost as good).

One reason for skipping M77 is that it is very difficult to capture. The long exposures required to bring out its faint outer arms often leave its bright central core overexposed. Nevertheless, the results are worth it. I love its tightly wound disk and the contrast with its faint outer arms. It looks a lot like M94, which is another favorite of mine.

The Astrotourist: M77

Astrophotography Targets for January

With the beginning of the New Year we say goodbye to the galaxies of Andromeda and say hello to the nebulae of Orion. January is the best month to capture the Orion Nebula, the most famous nebula in the sky and probably the easiest deep space object to photograph. But there are many other nebulous objects to capture this month.

These are some of my favorites:

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M33

I wasn't always a fan of M33. Its ragged, messy arms are less photogenic than the classic spirals of M51 and M81. But what M33 lacks in grand pattern it more than makes up in detail.

The Astrotourist: M33

Happy 5th Anniversary, Transcendence!

Five years ago today I released Transcendence 0.7, the first public alpha release. Since then, we've gone through seven major releases and eighteen minor releases. No, we haven't reached 1.0 yet, and yes, we are running out of pre-1.0 version numbers, but five Terran orbits later, I am very proud of all that we in the Transcendence community have accomplished

Five years seems like a long time, but believe it or not, the development of Transcendence began much earlier. On May 1st, 1995, the following post appeared on comp.os.ms-windows.nt.misc:

In case anyone is interested, I've just uploaded a beta version of a game that I've been working on. Right now, the game only runs on Windows NT (not Windows 95) and has only been compiled for Intel platforms. Please try it out and let me know what you think (by e-mail). The file is frontier.zip and I put it up on ftp.wustl.edu under the /pub/msdos_uploads/nt directory. I imagine that eventually it will get moved to the win/nt directory.

Frontier is a game of both skill and strategy in which you explore the various star systems of the Frontier while seeking to increase your income and pay for improvements to your ship. Throughout the game you will fight increasingly more powerful enemy ships and stations, and, by looting their remains you will be able to equip your ship with better armor and weapons.

-- George Moromisato

Sound familiar? Frontier was my first attempt at creating a cross between Nethack and Star Control II and as you can see from the description, Transcendence is Frontier's direct descendant.

To celebrate the 5th anniversary of Transcendence's first public release, I've dug through my archives to find the original release that I posted in 1995: Frontier 0.5.

Transcendence has come a long way since then, and I have no doubt that the game will continue to improve and evolve in ways that we cannot yet imagine. Happy 5th anniversary!

Saving Microsoft

Wired's December 2008 cover story is about Ray Ozzie and how he is trying to turn the Microsoft battleship. I was lucky enough to get interviewed for the article and a few of my quotes survived. In the article, Steven Levy describes Microsoft's current challenges and paints Ray as the man trying to "lead—or drag, if need be—a software giant with 90,000 employees, $60 billion in revenue, and an untold number of blue screens of death across a chasm."

I know it's unfair to think that a company with $18 billion in annual profits could be "in trouble" (GM wishes it were in that kind of trouble) but after the problems with Vista and the attention lavished on Google and the iPhone, I think that Microsoft felt humbled and demoralized. An athlete who thinks he's in a slump will not perform at full potential. What Microsoft needs to get out of its slump is to start winning, not just in terms of profits, but in the arena of public opinion. And one way to change public opinion is with a good narrative: Ray as an agent of change who brings redemption to a once-respected but now humbled competitor. It doesn't hurt that there's some truth to that story.

Related Articles

• Wired's December 2008 cover story is here.
• Steve Clayton, Microsoft employee and prolific blogger has a good take on the Wired article.
• I talk about the Live Mesh announcement in this article.
• Wired also wrote about Ray and Microsoft in 2006.

M74

I finally got a chance to take some pictures from the dark skies of the West Coast. This shot of M74 required more than seven hours of exposures.

The Astrotourist: M74