Massimo's photoblog

The last few days have been quite busy, again. I arrived in Boston from San Diego on Friday night, and spent the next few days to recover from the previous trip, to finish some work that needed to be done before leaving again, and to prepare this trip. This morning I woke up very early for my standards (5:30AM) to catch an airplane to Tucson, Arizona, via Dallas. The reason for this trip is an observing run at the MMT telescope at Mt. Hopkins, using the MIRAC infrared camera with the new Adaptive Optics (AO) system of the telescope. AO is a technology developed in the last few years that allows to correct for the blurring caused by atmospheric turbulence by correcting the images in real time with the help of a reference star, or a laser projected on the sky (here at MMT is used a reference star). With AO in principle is possible to reach performances comparable to that of space telescopes, in terms of visual acuity of the instrument. If the weather will hold I will try to observe a very bright star (Mira) that a couple of years ago had an eruption. The goal is to detect possible formation of dust in its ejecta, through its thermal radiation (like trying to see the smoke of a gun after it fired).

Of course I slept for most of the trip, with the exception of the last part when we were approaching Tucson. This is a part that I like a lot, because the airplane passes over the southern Arizona deserts which are very beautiful to look at. As usual I was seated on the wrong part of the airplane, with the sun in my face, creating strong reflections on the window. The landscape was however so beautiful that I tried anyway to take some photos, and the image above is one of the unexpected results I got. This lonely mountain was rising from the afternoon mist and dust covering the desert. The photo was washed away by the sunlight on the window, so I had to increase the contrast, a lot to bring forth the subtle details of the landscape. I didn’t change too much the amazing colors though, that in fact were even bluer (after increasing the contrast) than this final version.

This is maybe not the best of the photos I got during the flight, but is the one I prefer. Maybe because it reminds me of a certain mountain where a dragon called Smaug lived, before a hobbit called Bilbo Baggins forced him to flee forever.