Long Horn Beetle on Observatory Window

 

Long Horn Beetle on Observatory Window
It's unusual to see these critters migrating along in the concrete jungle, where most of its habitat is nonexistent. This appears to be some variety of the Taiwan Long Horn Beetle in obvious silhouette so its identification colors are not visible. But what is it doing here? On the observatory window!

Only one was seen. It made the sudden appearance just days after a rain spell splashed debri, dirt, and mud up on the window. This may be it's afternoon lunch at the highrise, thousands of feet in the air. It was a stubborn little critter, obstinate and not wanting to move, even when coaxed. Moral of the story is keep your windows clean on both sides, closed, and strange beetles will not be invited for a house brunch or privacy invasion peeking through your window or touring through the premises.

This may be an incentive to set up the telescope as a remote outdoor station so there is minimal risk going outside and getting bit by a creature of the day or night.

Taipei Sunset

Taipei Sunset in Taiwan this Evening

While waiting for the clouds to clear for telescopic astronomical imaging of deep sky objects, this dramatic and unusual sky vista appeared. Shot with a handheld iPhone X camera set on automatic exposure, Sunday September 13th, 2020, showing true sunset colors. Looking like paintings, the photos capture the incredible variety of cloud systems at one time. No rain or storm today but there was a beautiful rainbow yesterday, shown below.

Solar Eclipse June 21 2020 Taiwan

Color solar images: shortly after noon, it started out looking like a partial solar eclipse over Taiwan but the Moon continued to eat a larger and larger chunk out of the Sun until it took on the Annular Eclipse appearance shown below. Thick overcast, haze, air pollution and rampant clouds blocked the sun. A solution had to be found for imaging the eclipse. A high tech approach was taken using a series of alternating small telescope sites connected by ISP.

The view at 4:16 pm local time had this maximum coverage.

WEATHER - At this moment, the sky is cloudy with upper atmospheric haze and low level high speed clouds passing overhead. Normally you would not see the eclipse today.

To continuously watch the annular solar eclipse unobstructed from Taiwan, I put together a small telescope system of localized video networks photographically linked together with video cams to cover the best weather portions of the island. Small telescope locations linked

A Celestron 3" Dobsonian reflector FirstScope is the prime telescope used for solar viewing by quickly projecting the sun's image onto a sheet of paper, firmed up by a clipboard. It's easy to stop down the aperture to reduce heat intensity and use a safe solar filter over the front tube. A camera photos the image projected on the paper and corrections are applied with computer image processing to clean up the image and correct for foreshortening effects. Photos taken over a brief period of time are ok but any activity too long will have active heat build up, and could start melting the internal plastic secondary mirror holder or other plastic telescope parts. Photo'ing the clipboard paper is safe but never look through the eyepiece. The setup is ideal for briefly imaging the paper at the final time of maximum coverage during a total Solar Eclipse, at a time of reduced heat.

include Taipei, Yunlin, Chiay, and Taichung Taiwan. At 4:16 pm local time around maximum, the day darkened substantially and a strong breeze suddenly appeared. Humidity stayed very heavy, temperature stayed exorbitantly hot, and visibility suddenly and unexpectedly increased by 5 to 10 more miles. The observatory tent abruptly began flapping in the wind and I remember thinking it's a good thing it's tied down. The telescopes did not image any solar prominences because the video exposures capturing the phase sequences were not set to do so. Many images were obtained but for brevity only a few are shown here. The entire imaging project was conducted with Apple iMac running MacOS system Catalina @3.4Ghz