Deep Space Objects, the Celestial Sphere, and STEM Capstone

It’s a dark and clear night in Daniel Boone National Forest, and the night sky is easily the most attractive it has ever been, not a cloud or twinkling blemish in sight. Hands trembling beneath its worldly presence, I set my camera, a small Nikon d90, onto a cardboard box atop the dewy ground, its lens taking a glance at a world that was made visible by the lack of light. One click, one photo, and I release the trigger and lift the camera to peer at the screen, but it is pitch black. Looking to the sky, there are a plethora of colorful points and streaks that looking back to the camera again, there are none.

That is a recounting of my first encounter with the art of night sky photography. This delicate art is based on the simple concepts of luminosity, and the behavior of light. A long exposure camera lens will take in more light as time goes on, the more light enters the lens at different angles and points, the more contrast the resulting picture will have, and the more varying input it can have for each point on the lens. This means that you’ll have your classic HD TV advertisement, darker darks, brighter brights. As a result, stars are like beacons, and with enough time, you can even see the outlines of the galaxy.

Time really is a critical variable in this process, as without adequate lengths of time, deep space objects that you might want to highlight, such as the Andromeda Galaxy or the Eye Nebula, may not appear in frame. There, however, is another proponent of time that a nighttime photographer would have to be wary of, and that is movement. This refers to movement on the ground, such as an unstable camera stand, but more importantly the motion of the objects themselves. The moon moves quite fast across the night sky, and if great detail wants to be captured with a small camera, very long exposure times, or a larger lens would be necessary. The problem with long exposure times is that the moon will move, the problem with a larger lens is that they are expensive. For the casual photographer, there has to be a simpler solution that is both cost effective and, well, effective.

Unfortunately, there isn’t.

Modern night sky photography is taken in milliseconds, but data is sourced from lenses that are several meters across, and scientists have taken a picture of a black hole millions of billions of light years away with satellite dishes scattered across the planet, rotating ever so slightly to adjust for the rotation of the Earth, and motion around the sun. The casual photographer does not have access to these fantastic devices, and it would seem that I, with my small Nikon d90, would never be able to take a decent photo of the beautiful night sky. 

That, however, might not be the case. In STEM Capstone, a class I am taking this year at Naperville North High School, we are assigned to create projects of our choosing that satisfy goals of our choosing. I, as the introduction might imply, chose to design and create an inexpensive device that can track specific objects in the night sky.

Thus far my progress has been limited to planning, and so plan I have. The basis for the plan lies in functionality, as many things are necessary for the mechanism to work, particularly a formal definition of what I am actually doing. My plan is to create a land based device (I considered a satellite, but that seems difficult), that can take long exposure pictures over the course of several minutes or hours and can track moving objects in a calculated fashion. For objects on the celestial sphere, the hypothetical 2 dimensional spherical sheet that is a projection map of the stars around it, the program would likely assume all stars move synchronously, as despite the vast differences between their speeds, their displacement is simply too vast for such a small change in angle (10 to the negative very large number) to actually be visible on a land based camera. That leaves the set of our planets, their moons, our moon, and the International Space Station as objects to calculate angles to.

There are two options for which this can be done, the first being simply to calculate the orbit relative to the object orbited, find a common orbit, and then compare the distances. For example, Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, could be calculated by finding Earth’s vector displacement from the sun, and comparing it to the vector displacement of Saturn from the sun plus the vector displacement of Titan from Saturn. A simpler way is to state that these objects are too small to accurately take a picture of and narrow this set down to the moon and perhaps the ISS. If that consideration is taken, then finding the moon’s, or ISS’, orbit around the Earth only requires knowledge of their mass and current position at a permanently constant time (e.g. position when time is October 23rd, 2020). 

Knowing the angle to the point on the celestial sphere or to other quickly moving objects around the Earth is not enough to make this land based device to function. The machine would have to take into account its own angle of incidence upon the earth, as well as the original orientation of the camera. The second can be solved by having the device return to a neutral or origin position, and the first can be solved with a compass and a level. For all intents and purposes that this device might plausibly have, the margin of error of that technique would be well within reason.

The device itself would function with small, lightweight motors hooked upon two separate axles to control rotations in the hemisphere necessary to point towards the night sky. The specifics of the device, however, will come in a later post. Thanks for reading. 

The Not-so-secret Life of Walter Mitty

Of fantasy, one’s greatest asset is their own imagination, and in pursuit of satisfaction, one’s greatest recluse is their fantasy, when reality is not enough. Walter Mitty, the main protagonist of James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” uses his imagination to break free of his real life, and have the respect, fame, and admiration, that satisfies his own ego, which is consequently depleted by his real experiences.

Over the course of the story, Mitty has five delusions, each representing a similar action in his real life, portrayed through his imagined heroic actions and respectable status. His roles are fleetingly similar, being the highest echelons of the profession: a captain, a commander, a killer, a surgeon, and a martyr. 

The first of the five introduces the story as he, a navy commander, fights through “the worst storm in twenty years,” bravely shouting orders to his crew with a confidence that seemed to warrant his courage. The second occurs as he passes the hospital as he, a world renowned surgeon, saves the operation of a famous banker, with MacGyver-esque creativity. The third when he contemplates his wife’s interrogation of him if he could not find the item she wanted him to purchase as he, a killer, describes his own ability to accurately shoot a gun despite any harrowing circumstances. The fourth as he skims over an old edition of a magazine to find references to the German air power as he, the merciless Captain Mitty, braves a fight through hell on the battlefield with unwavering confidence. The fifth, and final, as he stands against a wall smoking, as he, a “proud and disdainful” man, stands strong before a firing squad, with no regrets.

His real life is not quite as exciting. He drives his wife to a hair salon, where she reminds him to purchase overshoes, of which he does, and remembers to purchase puppy biscuits along the way.

This stark difference between his imagined world, and his reality is the portrayal of escapism that causes him to daydream. The qualities that he admires, and portrays through his delusions, he aspires to in his real life as well, and pursues them in small ways, be it speeding on the freeway, or avoiding his embarrassment of purchasing puppy biscuits by going to a far away location. In this way he is the ordinary man, as much as he is every man, for he dreams of a life that is unattainable to him as he is, as any man might, and faces the rather unheroic ongoings of his daily life, forgetting what to buy, ending up in the wrong lane, and being consistently chastised by his wife.

James Thurber is a humorist, and Walter Mitty is quite the characteristic character for his style, one which Britannica describes as “Thurber’s quintessential urban man.” He loved to portray, be it through his short stories or his cartoons, the urban mythology of a hapless man and strict wife, living an unsatisfied life, a definition so famous, the terms “a Walter Mitty” and “Mittyesque” came derived from it. Perhaps Mitty is a character based off of Thurber’s own experience, for he, who went blind in his later years, would have had the knowledge of sight to have the dynamic visual imagination he portrays through Mitty, indicating a dissatisfaction with his own life.

Of this dissatisfaction, even Mitty’s imagination does not cope perfectly with it, as each of his delusions are cut short before they reach their conclusion. All his heroic deeds in each scenario are preconditions to the dream, and the actions of the dream are all stopped before he can perform it. He is a courageous captain who has faced many storms, and shows off bravery in the face of one so great, but never has to weather the storm, nor does he cure the patient, receive his verdict, win the battle, or die heroically to the firing squad. In effect, his dreams and his real situations end the same way, unsatisfactorily. 

Other than just portrayals of his dissatisfaction, another major theme is his wife’s strict nature with him, completing Thurber’s ideal urban man. She is several times the source of the reason why Mitty’s dreams cut short, as well as the first, when she interrupts his weather defying acts to tell him that he is driving at a speed that makes her uncomfortable. She later tells him that he isn’t “a young man any longer,” despite his attempts to feel so when he drives. He wakes up from his dream of a gunslinger to concerns that his wife will scold him for not having bought “what’s-its-name,” which he later remembers is puppy biscuits. These feelings are coupled by his descriptions of car chains, which symbolically bind him forcefully to the word of his wife, and further by his interaction with the gloves his hurried reaction to the police officer, a figure of authority, shouting at him to move at a traffic light. Later, she scolds him for sitting where it was hard to find him, despite later leaving for something she did not specify for a time longer than she stated.

As a result of her lack of apparent love for him and strict nature, Mitty feels that he is missing his freedom and respect, and as a result, dreams up fantastical worlds where he warrants those things along with the awed attention she does not give him. He is the fanciful urban man, but his pain is real, yet his fantasies elevate him beyond that, even as he cannot break from it.

Thurber goes beyond what this post can do justice for — you can read the short story here, a repost of his of his 1939 submission to the New Yorker. In light of the 2013 film of the same name, it is difficult to find reviews of the short story that do not take part in the film, so I can sum it up simply: beautiful, impactful, and honest, most definitely worth the 10 minute read.