Jim Helfers Principles/Navigations: December 2022

Friday, December 30, 2022

The Fibonacci Moons Project

This project was conceived just after I had finished the "Month of Moons" project, about the time I was teaching HUM 201HN, a Grand Canyon University course on intersections between the arts, humanities, and sciences. The main student project in this course was to present a project that described some kind of intersection between art and science, using some artistic medium.

The scientific concept I was trying to describe was the Fibonacci sequence, which is connected to the Golden Ratio. It happens that the Fibonacci sequence, in which succeeding numbers are the sum of the two previous numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . .), describes a spiral which can be seen in many natural structures (do a Google Images search on the Fibonacci sequence, and you'll see what I mean).

I'd intended to finish this project in a month (since I only needed 14 images), but in practice, it took me over a year.

I had several issues:

The lens I was using (the M.Zuiko 14-150mm f4.0-5.6) proved difficult to focus in the dark. Since it didn't have a scale on the manual focus ring, I attempted to focus manually on the moon using the magnifying viewfinder, as suggested by sources. That method sometimes did not produce focused images. So, I used auto-focus whenever I could, but the autofocus was constrained by the position of the moon in the frame (if the moon were too close to the edge of the frame, it was impossible to get the AF to target the area). I didn't understand the magnitude of this problem until I began the compositing process.
To get the images to composite correctly (using the Olympus Workspace feature), I shot at two focal lengths (150mm and 100mm), so that I could resize in Workspace. That issue, plus the limit on the number of photos that could be composited in Workspace, limited my options unacceptably.
A few days per month, even in Arizona, were cloudy, plus, using my ephemeris program to plot the position of the moon in the sky sometimes made me miss the optimum dark time for shooting. Therefore, even the initial phase of the project took more than a month.

I discovered these issues in full during the compositing process, which I unwisely left until after the shooting process. Because of that, I spent a couple of months compositing in Workspace, then reshooting the out-of-focus images. Over the next several months, I continued to have problems 1 and 3 during the reshoots.

I finally was able to composite a complete image in GIMP, using the RAW files generated by my shooting process. Using GIMP gave me more control over image enlargement and placement. So, the end result is not optimal--I'd prefer to have the phases of the moon show more consistently throughout the spiral, and I would like to shoot these images in sequential order as well. So, let's call this project a first draft.

Thursday, December 1, 2022

Grandpa Does the Arizona Trail: Passage 4

Well, I finally hiked the section of Passage 4 from Patagonia to the Temporal Gulch Trailhead (about half of the passage) on October 29, 2022 (my birthday present). We dayhiked from the Temporal Gulch Trailhead, where we were dropped off by Ken of Ken's Shuttle Service (a very nice person). We got the information from Ken that this portion of the trail is in the process of a reroute, to avoid the dirt roads it is currently following, and to avoid the Mount Wrightson wilderness. In the process, it will also avoid going directly through Patagonia. In my opinion it would be a loss to stay out of the wilderness area, and Patagonia is a very nice town.

At the Temporal Gulch Trailhead, they've installed a number of informational signs--

you can see from the picture that there's a triptych of information about the trail itself, then to the right of the picture is a standalone sign commemorating the Native American heritage of the area; in this case, these are the ancestral lands of the Tohono O'odham people. What was interesting was that this sign was in Spanish, with some O'odham words. I looked around for an English translation, but didn't find one (I didn't look at the other side of the sign). I've been told that there should be both a Spanish and English version there, but I did find it odd that one colonial language should be represented, and not the other. Again, maybe I just missed the English side.

This section, as currently routed, is all on Forest Road 72, which becomes 1st Avenue going into Patagonia. The day was perfectly clear, around 65 degrees, with sweeping landscapes and great bits of small nature. About half way through the hike, we could see the town of Patagonia in the distance. To the north is Mount Wrightson. Though it's not wilderness, we did have a day in which we saw few other people before re-entering town. It's clear, as well, that the people of Patagonia appreciate hikers on the AZT. The town is a great mix of cowboy and mining history, with plenty of young families and (apparently) a growing gravel bike scene. Also, some great food and coffee.