June 13, 2018

Here Are Some Stars to Take Our Minds Off Donald Trump

I feel like I need a breather from the “real” world I allegedly inhabit at the moment. So here are some stars:

I have no real excuse for posting this, but it is the result of an experiment and all experimental results should be published, right? Last night I went out to a semi-dark area for one final practice session with my tracking mount before I head off to northern California. I decided to see how well the tracker works with the lens at full zoom, and this is the result. The lens is zoomed out to 220 mm (600 mm equivalent) and the exposure time is about a minute. I have no idea what part of the sky this is. I just pointed the camera upward and took pictures at a few different spots.

Anyway, the tracking is not bad! There’s very little apparent motion even at full zoom. However, one minute is as far as it can go. I tried a frame at two minutes and it was clearly streaky.

Four of the stars have little plumes. Can anyone tell me what these are? Something real, or just artifacts of the camera? They all point in precisely the same direction, which makes me think they’re artifacts of some kind, especially since they don’t show up in an identical picture with a shorter exposure:

This picture has an exposure time of 9 seconds and there are no plumes. The arrow points to the star at the very bottom of the upper picture, which has a noticeable plume there. Any ideas what this is?

UDPATE: A reader suggests the plumes are vibrations from bumping the camera at the beginning or end of the exposure. That’s entirely plausible given my general ham-handedness around delicate equipment.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

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So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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