Astronomy: Northern Lights

Posted on by AstroPilotDad

A major bucket list item for my wife and I that got checked off from my list (unfortunately, not my wife’s) was viewing the northern lights. We’ ve always wanted to go to iceland and view the northern lights, hopefully through those glass dome camping sites. However, with work, kids and other things going on in life, we never made plans. It was something we would do eventually. Since we moved to PNW, there were several ocassions when the suns activity resulted in aurora down to our latitudes, however, given the PNW weather all but once, it was clouded out. The one time it wasn’t clouded out, I ventured to a nearby park which was fully packed with people hoping to get a glimpse of the aurora but alas, we didn’t see anything. I took a few pictures that night and did capture some activity but it wasn’t visible to naked eye.

This past month though was a different story. It was a cloudless clear night. I ventured to the same park and took me 10 minutes to find a parking spot at 10pm at night. I found a spot far away from the road to avoid light from cars ruining the image and my night vision and immediately could see a faint wisp of what looked like clouds. I figured it was the aurora and took some pictures. It looked great in the camera. However, as my night vision adjusted and time passed on the activity only increased and i could clearly see the green and pink hues (although not as vivid as the camera captured them).

Everyone, including me, were awed by the brilliant display which at around 11pm at night peaked and exploded to cover almost the entire sky. It seemed to originate at the zenith and spread across the sky (mostly concentrated in East, North and West). The display was very dynamic chaning every few seconds and you could hear the oohs and aaahs from the crowd. It was Amazing! I spent another half hour looking at the sky, taking more pictures and headed back home.

I asked my wife to head out to the park right in front of our home to view the lights as it was clearly visible even with the light pollution around our house. However, she was too tired for the day and decided to try going the following day as the news reported that we should be seeing the activity all through the weekend. The following day she kept tabs on local social media groups to see if the activity was visbile for her to get out and check it out but, unfortunately, it wasnt. Well, all that means is the trip to Iceland is still on our bucket list of things to do. Hopefully, we will have the means and opportunity to go at some point in the future. We hope our kids have an interest as well and can appreciate this amazing celestial event!

Private Pilot: Flying in Phoenix, AZ

Posted on by AstroPilotDad

I’m in the process of catching up on posts and this one is from early November when we had gone to Arizona for a family wedding. It was a 4-5 day affair where we had a huge gathering to celebrate my nephew’s wedding. Since we hadn’t taken real time off in a while, we thought this would be an ideal time to take a vacation either before or after the wedding. My brother was flying in from California and we coordinated plans to stay a few more days after the wedding to do some local sight seeing – and may be drive up to Sedona.

With that in mind, I searched for and found a school that rented aircraft to non students. The school, like any other, had a checkout requirement which I scheduled for in the early days of my trip down there. That way, once I got my checkout, I could rent out the aircraft a couple of times in the 10 day period that we were planning to be there to do local sight seeing. I was even entertaining the idea of going up to Sedona one of the days knowing fully well that it had to be a day that wasn’t too hot as I did not want to deal with density altitude issues especially knowing that Sedona airport is at an elevation. However, given that this was early November, that problem was unlikely.

The day of checkout was in between two events during the day. Right after the first event, I took an Uber went to the flight school and had two hours of ground followed by a flight. The aircraft available at the flight school had 6 pack with vaccum guages while the ones in my local flight school have G3X and no vaccum guages. While not an issue, I like and have gotten used to the electronic display. The only challenge is the familiarity with the airspace. We covered that in our ground school but it obviously takes a bit of practise and reading up to make sure you are not encroaching into unauthorized airspace and understand the local visual landmarks that ATC, local pilots and students use. The other nuanced part of this area is that there are Class D airspaces just next to each other with a common boundary and there is a airforce base that sometimes may be active and not at other times. In addition the class D airspaces are under the Class B shelf so you have to keep track of that as well.

The checkout flight itself was uneventful and the CFI thought I did a good job and gave me a check out. I too enjoyed flying out in the phoenix area. The terrain and the view is very different from what I am used to in the pacific north west. The plan was for me to go back a couple of times to do some local sight seeing and like I mentioned before even go back to Sedona. However, my brother decided to cut back his vacation and head back early. My wife had a lot of office work pending on her plate so we also decided to head back early cutting our 8 day long vacation down to 4 days. I do intend to go back down there and get current with the school to rent an aircraft and fly out to Sedona. Hopefully sometime soon!

Here is the track of my flight. The practice area is a vast open flat land just south of the mountains!

Personal: What a day!

Posted on by AstroPilotDad

Couple of weeks ago, I had a pretty interesting 24 hours. Before getting into it, here is some background: Last year I bought into an LLC that affords it members a dark sky site and a piece of land to pursue astronomy. I will get into the details of that exciting part in a later blog. Suffice it to say that I am a member of Goldendale Sky Village (GSV) and I’m in the process of (hopefully) building a remote observatory. I had hired a contractor to install a concrete pier towards that goal. Goldendale sky village is a LLC formed by like minded astronomy enthusiasts who purchased a piece of land in Eastern Washington to pursue their hobby. I too enthusiastically bought into the venture and have 5000 sqft of land for my personal use. I don’t own the land but can use it in any way I like for my hobby.

Last year, I got the plot cleared and this year was working on getting a pier installed. It is towards this goal that I had to drive there. I had built a template and secured J-bolts to attach to the pier. The plan was to go there in the middle of the night and early AM the contractor would pour concrete (about 30 minutes worth of effort). My presence was there to ensure that the J-bolts and pier plate template are level and aligned to the celestial north. I wouldn’t need to worry about it if i was getting a custom plate machined for my mount and the J-bolts but I wanted to have the option of using Dan’s Pier top plates. These are custom built pier top plates with adapters to switch out and replace for any mount type. Having these would make my pier (and potentially future observatory) mount and future proof. Those plates are a bit expensive and they have a long lead time. I could not order them in time to use directly for concrete pouring. So I built the template, with the hopes that in case my pier top is not aligned to the north or my template was off, I could still use custom machined plates. My neighbor at GSV kindly offered to machine one for me in case I need to go that route.

Any way, I digress. My plan was to reach GSV before sunrise to make sure I got the polar alignment marked out and hope was to leave GSV around 7:30 am so that I could reach home around 10 and be able to get to work. I left from home at 2:00 am to reach GSV just before sunrise. I also had a doctor appointment in the afternoon which I thought I could comfortable make it to. Well, hehe 🙂 . After getting the concrete poured, I left for home hurriedly. Half hour on the road from GSV, I got engine temperature hot warning. The indicator was yellow, meaning I could still drive but cautiously. Within a couple of minutes it turned red and there was smoke from the front of my car!!! I had to stop on the side of the road, wait for a while for engine to cool down and check whats going on. To my surprise, there was hardly any coolant! I did not have AAA with this car as we hardly use it after our son was born. Its a 2010 mini cooper so no place to put a car seat 😐 . To top it all off, I was in an area with no cellphone coverage. I knew that I won’t have cellphone coverage for another 30 miles. So after waiting for a while for the engine to cool down, I decided the only option was to drive to an area of cellphone coverage and get a tow vehicle. Oh, did I mention that I dropped my cellphone on gravel early in the am? It was causing the screen to flicker wildly making it unusable after 30 sec to 1 minute of activity … Calling the tow companies would be fun. It was for the same reason that I couldn’t call to cancel or reschedule my dr. appointment (the timing of these appointments is critical for my FAA medical certificate – I can write another blog about those stories 🙂 ). But first things first, I had to get to cellphone coverage area.

So the next 30 miles took me close to 2 hours as the car was getting hot if my speed went over 20 miles an hour. It was annoying the hell out of other drivers on a singe lane highway. I tried to drive as close to the shoulder as possible with my hazard lights on so that they could overtake me but, you know, there are some drivers who just get pissed off no matter what ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Anyway, after driving for what felt like hours, just as I got to an area with cellphone coverage (that was the first life saving moment of the day), the car wouldn’t start. The day was getting hotter too so the engine wasn’t cooling enough. With my broken cellphone, I couldn’t browse the web to be able to find towing companies in the vicinity so I called my wife, explained my situation and had her call the towing companies. No one was available. She called 4 of them and all had one excuse or the other and could not be bothered to help out. I was just 5 miles from the town center!

Assuming that no one was ready to help out, I thought my best bet was to abandon the car, walk the 5 miles to town and talk to one of the towing companies. If that did not work, either stay the night in a motel or see if any of my friends could come pick me up. I was talking to my wife discussing what to do and how to go about things when she asked if there is anyone from GSV that could help me out. I’m like ofcourse, I should have thought of that!!! One of my fellow villagers also had concrete poured in the morning and he was gracious enough to let me go first because I had to go to the dr. appointment. Welll so much for that 🙂 . Anyway, I did not have his contact information but we are all a part of a slack group. I called him on slack right away! This was my second life saving moment of the day. He not only picked up but was about to leave from GSV back to Seattle area after finishing up his lunch. I asked if he could pick me up and he kindly offered to do so. Since I was fully vaccinated and he too was, it was not a concern to sit in close proximity with each other. I would have worn a mask if he insisted or if he wasn’t vaccinated but since we were both vaccinated, it did not come to that.

After about an hour, his car pulled up behind mine, I just picked all the valuable stuff from the car and hopped on to his. After an uneventful journey where we talked at length about our life and background and interest in astronomy, I reached home at around 4:30pm. He also gave me tips, suggestions and pointers on what kind of a mount to go for as I am in the market for a new mount (more about that in a subsequent blog). I owe him a big one for being the life saver on that day! I was up from 1:00 am the previous night and survived only on a protien shake, cashew cookie bar. So first thing I did after getting home was had breakfast+lunch+dinner combined then a nice hot shower. I was totally exhausted but stayed up till late evening so as to not got to bed at an odd hour.

It was a very long, very tiring and an eventful day. One that I’m sure I will reminisce at a later point in time! Oh btw, I did call the state troopers in Yakima county to let them know that I had left my (my wife’s) car on the highway and plan to pick it up in the next day or two. I owe another friend a huge one for helping me with it and spending money on an accessory that he did not immediately need. I will try to cover that adventure (well, it wasn’t an adventure as such but an experience) in the next blog. Until then, stay safe!

Personal: Yay! N!=1

Posted on by AstroPilotDad

We did it! We made it a trend! Well, not really a trend but as I said in my previous post, I choose to call it that 🙂 ! I’m talking about the hike we did this past weekend. It was hike number two for us. Yes, we did the same hike that we did last time, we did it with the same set of friends as last time but the weather was much nicer and we did it in less time because – experience 😛 .

Anyway, to be honest, we need to do a lot more of outdoor activity that we currently do. While we take our son for walks almost every day (rain or shine), we need to be a lot more deliberate about enjoying the nice weather out there. This will only last a short while before either the gray PNW skies take over or there is smoke all over the place due to forest fires, which, unfortunately, has been happening quite a lot. There is an undeniable beauty to the pacific northwest summers but if this trend continues, it will be harder and harder to find those perfect summer days.

On a lighter note, I can confidently say that our hike was not a singular event. If it happend more than once, you can extrapolate it to say that its likely to happen 🙂 just like, if we find evidence of second genisis, we can confidently say that life is all pervasive throughout the universe. That doesnt mean if we dont find the evidence, there isn’t life elsewhere. I am firmly on the camp that there is life and that too of bizzare (of the kind that we can’t imagine because for most part our thoughts and imagination are bounded by the life we see on this planet) nature out there. It is like we can’t imagine what fourth dimension of space looks like. We can use analogies and extrpolate from imaginnig what living beings in an imaginary two dimensional world will experience when someone from third dimension shows up but its not the same. We cannot imagine a fourth dimension of space. Anyway, I digress 🙂 .

I think the point I was trying to make with this post is COVID has thrown a wrench in everyones life and I don’t think normal as we knew it prior to the pandemic is every going to come back. What we all can do is bring some normalcy and routine in our lives by doing things that make us feel in control of the situation. Even without COVID, our lifestyle was expected to change because of our kid but we want to make sure we were deliberate in keeping doings things we wanted to do. With COVID its become exponentially harder but the hikes (n=2 or rather n=!1) are a step in that direction for us as a family. For me personally though, my wife has been very supportive, allowing me to engage in my hobbies of flying and amateur astronomy, for which I am eternally grateful!

WOW! This post went from our decipline in outdoor activities to life out there in the universe to 4th dimension of space before coming back to the pandemic. What random thoughts go in this tiny brain of mine 🙂 Anywhoo, for anyone interested, Here is an interesting video on what life in 2d might look like:

Until next time!

Private Pilot: Up in the Air!

Posted on by AstroPilotDad

This will be a short but exciting post! Now that we have decided to increase our risk tolerance and send our son to day care, and the fact that I am fully vaccinated, I felt a bit more comfortable flying with an instructor to get current on my annual review so that I can get going on my IFR training. So that’s what I did the weekend of 05/15. My instructor had gotten his first shot so wasn’t fully vaccinated yet but given that I was fully vaccinated and wearing an N95 mask, I felt comfortable.

The weather was nice and the review was pretty straightforward. Took off from Paine field, went over lake Steven’s did a few maneuvers including but not limited to steep turns and stalls. After the CFI assessed my proficiency at that, we came back to KPAE to do a few touch and gos. Most of the landings were decent but not great showing that I had gotten a bit rusty due to the lack of practice. For one particular landing, I was a bit high and the CFI asked me to do a forward slip. I did not do a good job at it keeping my airplane nose higher than it should be leading to lower than desired speed for the slip. I corrected for it and made a good landing but the CFI had to remind me to watch my airspeed while doing the slip. Something for me to practice on my next flight

After just under an hour of flight time, the CFI signed my log book and my review was done. I can now freely rent an airplane and finish up on my cross country requirement for IFR. I also spoke to the chief instructor about restarting my Instrument rating and he was going to check on availability and get back to me. I am looking forward to getting back to the training and getting my instrument rating as soon as practical! First up though, some touch and goes and local flying the next time I rent the airplane on a weekend with nice weather! Boy, I am excited to be able to go flying again!!