Astrophotography: Pinwheel Galaxy

I had taken a trip to my parents in rural Virginia and had some darker skies than I was accustomed to North Carolina.  .  So it was a good opportunity to try for a new target.   This picture was taken on July 16, 2014.  

The main galaxy you see is called the Pinwheel Galaxy.  It is also know as Messier 101 (M101) and is located right beside the Big Dipper.  It is a spiral galaxy, but appears asymmetrical.  There are actually 5 total galaxies in this picture, but my scope did not resolve them very well.  The interactions of these other companion galaxies with M101 cause the the asymmetry.

My picture stats:

Other facts about the Pinwheel Galaxy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinwheel_Galaxy

Kid Science: Understanding DNA and RNA with Candy

One of the coolest things about my job is working with so many smart and innovative people.  And those people all have a passion for science they want to share.   Just recently a co-worker shared a cool way to teach kids about DNA and RNA.   And the kids get to eat the project at the end. :)

DNA is the building block of life and it is some pretty amazing stuff.

Here are some amazing facts (http://www.sciencecentres.org.uk/projects/handsondna/4.8%20-%20Amazing%20facts%20and%20quiz%20questions.pdf):

• Each cell contains roughly 2 meters of DNA.
• Humans have roughly 100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion cells).
 • If you unraveled all of your DNA from all of your cells and laid out the DNA end to end, the strand would stretch from the Earth to the Sun hundreds of times (the sun is approximately 98 million miles away from Earth).
 • You could fit 25,000 strands of DNA side by side in the width of a single adult hair.
 • The DNA is tightly coiled up and structured into 46 chromosomes.
•  Our chromosomes are arranged in pairs. We inherit one copy of the pair from our Mum and one       from our Dad.
• There are approximately 3 billion (3,000,000,000) chemical letters (otherwise known as bases) in the DNA code in every cell in your body.
 • This is a massive amount of information. It would fill 200 yellow pages in small type font.
 • If you tried typing the whole genetic code out (typing at 200 letters per minute) it would take 29 years (without taking any breaks!).


The pictures below were put together by a colleague and it is very easy way to have fun with your kids visualizing what DNA and RNA look like.   Have fun!

Smart Drugs: Modafinil

It is late at night and I was reading random stuff on the internet when I stumbled across some news that is now letting me ramble instead of just getting in bed like I really should.

In some ways it seems like science fiction to take a drug that will improve brain function.  I think of the move, The Matrix:

You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." The term redpill refers to a human that is aware of the true nature of the Matrix.

Cognitive enhancement means increased creativity, better memory, better decision making, increased focus, etc.  The truth is that we already have a cheap drug that most of us use everyday that some would claim have limited cognitive inducing properties.  I know I consume way too much of through coffee and sodas.  Caffeine has become a staple drug for many of us to get through the morning.  It may also be a very weak cognitive enhancer, but your body becomes very tolerant of it in as little as 3 weeks.   then you are just maintaining or going through some simple withdraw that many of us have felt in headaches or drowsiness.

But there are other smart drugs that enhance cognitive functions to a larger degree than caffeine.  Conditions such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson;'s, and ADHD affect cognitive ability in a negative way and we have developed drugs like Adderall and Ridelin to improve cognitive function of the brain that are hampered due to these conditions.  While these drugs are on the market and prescribed for very specific conditions, many healthy people want to the take the "blue pill" and in essence make their brain work more efficiently.

A quick Wipedia search on the topic quotes may sources including this one:  One survey found that 7% of students had used stimulants for a cognitive edge, and on some campuses use in the past year is as high as 25%.^{[dated info][7][10]} The use of prescription stimulants is especially prevalent among students attending academically competitive colleges.^[10] Surveys suggest that 3–11% of American students and 0.7–4.5% of German students have used cognitive enhancers in their lifetime

Students especially want an edge, but the problem is these drugs have some bad side effects.   That brings us to the recent news found in this article:  http://io9.com/sleep-drug-modafinil-affirmed-by-scientists-as-a-safe-a-1725355210

The drug the article talks about is Modafinil, a drug prescribed for people having trouble adjusting to shift work, or with sleep apnea among others condtions.  However it also appears to be a very good cognitive enhancer with very little side effects.

Only time will tell if this drug or any drug will ever be as common and accepted in society as caffeine, but with a much bigger cognitive enhancing impact.  You can think of all kinds of questions drugs like this raise.   Will only the rich have access to drugs like this and have even more of an edge in school just due to financial status?  Is is OK to take these drugs before sitting down for an SAT or GRE test?  How about in academic competitions?  Is it doping to make your brain work more efficiently?  Caffeine is accepted in society as a way to potentially be more alert during a test, but on the flip side its impacts are not as big as these other smart drugs may be.

As always it will be interesting to watch things that that seemed like science fiction just a few decades ago, have the potential to come true.  Will we all have the ability to take a drug and recall long buried memories in just an instance or pop a pill to quickly come up with the next new invention?  Or will the next Jeopardy champions have an asterisk beside their name because they were doping like baseball players but with mind stimulants instead of steroids.  It is an interesting world we live in and only time will tell if drugs like Modafinil are truly side effect free with cognitive enhancing properties and if so will society even accept them as ethical?

Kid Science: Silly Putty

Today is a holiday and what better way to spend it than doing science with the kids.   The fun science today is homemade silly putty.  It is easy and quick to make, but will provide entertainment for the kids and you while showing off some chemistry in the process.

Here is what you need:

1.  1 bottle of 118 mL Elmer's Glue-All (not the school glue)
2.  118 mL of water
3.  1/2 teaspoon of Borax
4.  1/4 cup of hot tap water
5.  Food coloring
6.  Bowl to mix everything up
7.  Zip-lock bags for storage

Now the fun part.  To make the silly putty just follow these steps.

1.  Pour the 118 mL of water into the mixing bowl along with the entire bottle of Glue-All.  Stir the mixture until you have a glue soup.

2.  Add some food coloring of your choice so your silly putty has some color.

3.  In a separate measuring cup, measure out 1/4 cup of hot tap water and add the 1/2 teaspoon of Borax.  Stir well until the Borax is mostly dissolved.

4.  Now pour the Borax solution into the Glue soup.

5.  Take a spoon (or your hands for some messy fun)  and mix everything up.

As you mix everything up, you will get a big blob of silly putty to play with.  Once your done playing with it, just store the putty in a zip-lock bag.

Step 1:  Mix the glue and water

Step 2:  Add the food coloring

Step 3:  Dissolve Borax into hot tap water

Step 4:  Pour the Borax solution into Glue soup

Step 5:  Mix everything up

Silly Putty!!

Store in a zip - lock bag

So what is the science behind this experiment.  The Borax is the key.  It hooks the glue molecules together to form the putty.  Glue is already a liquid polymer and with the borax we have made a more solid like polymer.  A polymer is just a long molecule that is mostly made up of repeating units.

For the chemists, the glue is made up of polyvinyl acetate.  Since it is a polymer each repeating unit contains an acetate group.  Borax is mode up of sodium tetraborate and reacts with the acetate molecules of the glue.  One molecule of borax bonds between to acetate molecules and as more and more of these bonds are formed the glue becomes more solid like.

Scouting: Foil Cooking

School has started back and with two boys that means cub scouts is back in full swing.  For those of you who like camping and want your little ones to help with some of  the cooking here is a super easy dish.

Just take some aluminum foil and place it on a flat surface with the shiny side up.  Place a hamburger patty on the foil.  You can break it up into quarters if your want it to cook a little faster.  On top of the burger place some of your favorite vegetables.  We added carrots, sliced potatoes, and peppers.  Add any spices along with salt and pepper and then it is time to wrap everything up.  Just grab the ends and connect them.  The vegetables are supplying the dish the water source that is needed to get some steam.  The steam is what is going to help cook the dish.   So when you wrap the dish up, leave a little air pocket in the top between the food and the foil.  This is to give the steam a place to hangout and cook your food thoroughly.  Then fold the other ends together.  Once it is wrapped up, then you can just place the food packet on some coals for about 4-5 minutes on each side.

This is a great way to get the kids involved in preparing their own food on a camping trip.  There are many other things you can cook this way.  Several different books are out there to give great recipes for foil cooking if you do a quick search.

GMO: Grape Nuts

Life has been a little busy and so I am cheating a little on this post by keeping it so short.  But sometimes a picture is a thousand words.

The news seems always to be abuzz about some company or some brand deciding not to use GMO ingredients.   Yet here is a perfect example of the repercussions customers don't see.  And remember most consumers who don't support GMOs do so because of health concerns.  These Non-GMO cereals don't look like they are getting healthier to me.





Another great article that digs a little deeper into this issue is here:  Article on Grape Nuts and Cheerios 

Source of picture::
http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2015/08/24/so-what-happens-when-gmos-are-removed-from-grape-nuts-less-benefits-higher-costs/

Astrophotography: Some good Books

There are some great resources on the web about getting stared in astrophotography and even more advanced knowledge on the subject.  But sometimes there is no substitute for a book.  There are few books I still use all the time and highly recommend if you want to learn more about astrophotography.  Even if astrophotography is not your thing, but you like to use a telescope for visual use you will learn a lot about general astronomy as well.

The first great book to start out with is The Backyard Astronomer's Guide.  This book is a great stater book.  It goes over all the different types of telescopes out there. You will read about mounts and eyepieces and how to start atrophotography if you wanted.  Even if you just want to use a telescope for visual use only this is a great resource.

Nightwatch is another one that I still pull out all the time.  You will find all kinds of general information, but this book really shines with the sky maps it provides.  This is book to use to learn the constellations as well as well as finding the location of any object you would want to view.

And finally whether you are just looking at targets or trying to take a picture, there are certain times of the year that each target is at a great location in the sky.  The 100 Best Astrophotography Targets has great pictures of each deep sky object from galaxies to nebula.  The book also gives information about CCD imaging which is a step above using you DSLR camera.  I don't do any CCD imaging yet and the book is an awesome guide of when I should photograph an object, not to mention the photos of each object are stunning.

These are some great books for your bookshelf if you love looking at the hidden treasures in our sky.  They are also books that I sitll pull out and reference still.

GMO Answers

Run a Google search on "GMOs" and you will get all kinds of info from facts to unscientific propaganda.  So is there a site where you can actually ask questions and get an answer?  There is one really nice site that is available for you submit your questions and get an answer.

Check out the GMO answers site.   This site is funded by Council for Biotechnology Information which include Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, Monsanto, Dow, and DuPont.  I know the first reaction is of course they are going to answer the questions with a GMO friendly bias.  Yet one of the things I hear the most about GMOs is that the big agricultural companies are not transparent, they are selfish, and not to be trusted.  Well these companies are more than willing to give you answers and information if you are willing to listen  Ask questions and they will give truthful answers.  Many times the answers are given by an outside expert such as a professor from an industry.




































However, the anti-GMO groups are not just sitting around letting the public become educated with truthful information from sites like GMO answers.  They are very good at finding ways to fight back.  So some of the experts that help answer questions about GMOs on the GMO Answers site among other researchers throughout the United States were asked by a group called the US right to know to turn over all of their emails to companies in the biotech field.  They were sure that the researchers were colluding with the biotech industry.  This couldn't be farther from the truth.

Kevin Folta was one of those researchers.  He shares his story here and it is a good read.  The Kevin Folta story.  Imagine being targeted by a group like this.  You have nothing to hide, but it still turns you life upside down to have to comply with some bogus request like the ones these researchers had to do. And then anything they find can be taken out of context to smear biotech, the researcher, and even the universities.

Smear campaigns are very easy to run.  People fall for misinformation all the time just like the phishing emails that clutter your inbox but are able to steal peoples info all the time.  Check out these articles and resources and see the other side of the issue.  This is the side that is usually hard to see behind the Photoshoped pictures of food turning into monsters..

Astrophotography: Whirlpool Galaxy

I have several astrophotography posts on slowly getting the equipment to be able to take pictures of more than just the moon.  I had everything to attempt a photograph of  a Deep Space Object and my first try in 2014 was the Whirlpool Galaxy or Messier 51 by its formal name.   M51 is a spiral galaxy and besides being a beautiful galaxy it is really close to a second smaller galaxy called NGC 5195.  

Google Search info for M51

My setup for the photo was:

Telescope:  SV90T (90 mm refractor)
Mount  Celestron AVX

The basic premise of astrophotography of deep space objects (DSOs) is to take a bunch of exposures of the target and then you will stack them together.  The longer the exposure, then the stronger your signal.   I unfortunately was not yet ready to go guiding which helps keep your mount locked on the target for a longer exposure.  I will go over guiding in a future post. For now I had was just using the Celestron AVX mount to track the target.  We talked about the GEM mounts in a previous post and how they move with the Earth's rotation so you might think this should be enough to keep your target nice a centered.  The answer is it does a good job for awhile, but it is not quite good enough to hold the target perfect for the really long exposures.  For those you need a combination of the mount and a second telescope and camera to lock onto a star near the target and give the mount small corrections to stay perfect.  Since I did not have a guiding setup my mount is good for about 30-45 second expsoures before I start to see slight star trailing.

I got the mount calibrated and polar aligned (perfectly pointing to the North Star) so it will rotate with the sky correctly and then slewed to M51.  I took around 75 pictures at a 45 second exposure.  My final picture had about an hour of exposure.  The more total exposure you get, usually the better the picture detail you can capture.  this is a fairly easy target since you can pick up so detail of this galaxy in binoculars.   Therefore I could get a decent picture even with only an hour of light gathering.

Once you have the photos you need to stack them.  That process is another post and after you get one stacked image you need to process the image.  Processing is another topic I will eventually have several posts on.  Processing is its own science and you can spend hours on this step.  there are also many different software package options which are used in slightly different ways.  The very first attempt I made at processing the M51 photo I had is below in the first picture.

First processing attempt of M51

I was actually a little disappointed.   I wanted a colorful picture.  I was using a software package called Startools.   I talked to the owner of the software on the softwares forum site and he helped me come up with a much better image as shown below.  This just shows how important processing is.  Your stacked picture has all kinds of data including gradients, viginetting, color, etc.  Some of the data you don't even want in there like light gradients from light pollution and some you need to bring out like colors .  In my first picture you can even see a diagonal streak I had from some reflection I was getting.  The moon was out and I am gussing it was bouncing off something to cause my scope to pick up a reflection and put a defect in the image.

Processing with Startools Software

I tried the same picture with a second software call PixInsight and got a similar pciture

Processing with Pixinsight software

This post opens up a lot of questions:

How to Guide and get longer exposures

How to stack images (I did not even mention bias, flats, and dark photos)

How to process images

Hopefully these re things to talk about in future posts.  In the end I am still learning, but my first real picture of something other than the moon was breathtakingly beautiful and amazing to me.  

Cooking: Sourdough Bread

A good friend of mine got me into trying to make bread (Thanks Patrick!).  He told me that as he read about bread making he saw that it is an art not a science.  I understand science, but I am a poor artist.  So my first attempt at making sourdough bread was not a piece of art, but it sure was good to eat.

Sourdough bread making in general has two steps.  The first is to make and "feed" a sourdough starter.  After about a week or more of feeding the starter you can complete the second step of actually making the bread.

There are all kinds of recipes out there.  Like I say, it is an art and so everyone has little difference in the way they do it.  The King Arthur brand website has a lot of resources and I used a lot of info from their site. Check it out for even more resources. 

1.  The Sourdough Starter

There are a few ways to get a starter.  The starter basically consists of flour, water and yeast.  There are two ways to get the yeast.  The first way is to stir 1 cup of flour and and 1 cup of lukewarm water together in a bowl.  Then just let it sit for a day.  Every day, take one cup of the "starter," one cup of new unbleached all purpose flour, and one cup of  warm water and mix them together.  There is yeast everywhere in the environment, so over time natural "wild" yeast is finding its way into the starter and the population will slowly grow.  The other way is when you make your starter from scratch you will add one cup of flour, one cup of lukewarm water, and some yeast from the store.   This will go ahead and inoculate your starter and make things progress a little faster.  In both cases you need to feed your starter which mean each day you are taking one cup of the starter, one cup of flour, and one cup of water and mixing them together.  This also means that each day you have almost 2 cups of old starter you are throwing away.  This brings us to the third way to get a starter going.  Instead of throwing the old starter away, you can give it to someone else and then they have a starter to begin feeding each day.  There are also recipes for the discards like pretzels if you feel bad about wasting.  No matter how you get a starter going you should feed it each day, but pay attention to the temperature which is important to yeast.  The location of the starter should be at least 72 F or above, with 75-85 F ideal.  You can find warm spots in the house like on top of stove that was just used or beside an appliance that might give off heat.

Regardless of how you get your starter you are "feeding" it more flour and water each day to give it a fresh food supply to continue to grow and nourish the yeast population.  Typically you will do this at least a week, but it is ready to use a bread recipe when you see lots of bubbles, it starts to get thicker, and it seems like it has gained some volume.  The longer you let it go and more mature it gets then then more "sour" it becomes.  So you influence the taste of the bread by the age and yeast population of your starter.  

2.  Making the bread

Once you have a starter that is showing good activity you are ready to make some bread.  There are so many recipes.  I chose to use a recipe from the King Arthur site.

http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/PrintRecipe?RID=91&radio=1

After adding all the ingredients, you will get a nice dough ball,

Just let the dough ball sit in a bowl for about a couple hours in a warm place to rise.

Once the dough rises, it can be carefully separated into two loaves and placed on a baking sheet.  Lightly cover the two loaves and let them rise for another hour or so until they have risen as well.

Then it is just a matter of baking the bread in the oven.  Next time I will shape the loaves a little higher so i get bigger pieces of bread when I cut it.  However the bread was really good.

The rustic was good, but I tried a second recipe the next day that as sweeter.  It contains one of my favorite ingriedients, sugar.   See below for that one.  The ingredients, cooking time, and steps vary slightly and you finish it off by brushing it with melted butter, but the overall concept is the same as the rustic recipe.   I think this is the recipe I will stick with for awhile.   It is delicious.   

 This is the fun of bread making; changes in just a few different ingridients gets you a very different tasting bread.   If you have other favorite bread recipes then be sure to share them!

http://www.food.com/recipe/light-almost-airy-sourdough-bread-322348