Massimo's photoblog

Ice in fairyland

mmarengo@ornitorinko.org (Massimo) — 2010-01-18T20:20:30Z

Ames, IA (Jan 18, 2010)

The last couple of weeks have been all in a rush. I am teaching a 300 level course of general astrophysics. It is fun, as the subject matter allows me to talk about a lot of interesting phenomena. I like to surprise the students in showing how reality sometimes can be quite weird and have them think out of the box. But of course doing that requires a lot of preparation, as it is very easy to fall back in the routine of writing a lot of formulae on my transparencies, and have them just learn to solve mechanically the exercises that they will need to solve for the exams. That would be boring, though, and I hate boring stuff. So three times a week I have to figure out how to make things interesting, and that’s a lot of work.

Two weeks ago I was in D.C. for the American Astronomical Society meeting. With 3,400 astronomers, it was the largest astronomical meeting ever, at least on Earth (I am sure that somewhere in the Galaxy there has been some alien meeting even bigger). Still it was quite big for us earthlings. I especially enjoyed the banquet in the Air and Space museum. Not everyday you can have dinner in front of the real Apollo 11 command module (that thing actually went around the Moon, wow). Heartfelt thanks to whom gave me the ticket! One thing that I learned at the meting is that on Mars, during Summer, the temperature can get as high as -30C, which is enough for very salty water to be liquid (hence the droplets of water that have been observed on the legs of the Mars Phoenix lander, or the dark stains that appeared on mountain slopes because of ephemeral water springs. This is very exciting, but also made me realize something I didn’t know: two weeks ago in Ames Iowa, with a wind-chill of -34C, was colder than Mars!!!! This week has been warmer, with temperatures just below freezing. Today we woke up in the fog, with frosted threes conjuring a fairy-tale landscape, as these photo shows.

The end of the zeroes

mmarengo@ornitorinko.org (Massimo) — 2009-12-31T06:06:14Z

Chicago, IL (March 8, 2008)

Two days ago I read on The New York Times an opinion piece by Paul Krugman proposing to call the first decade of the millennium, that will be over in less than one day, “the Big Zeroes”. One doesn’t need to be a Nobel Prize in economics to realize that he is referring to the gains that employment, median household income, health of the economy have achieved in the decade that is closing. In this respect, we can certainly all hope that the new decade will end on a different note.

Not all ended bad, though. I still remember when, just a few years ago, two friends of mine asked to be woken up in 4 years because they really didn’t like how certain elections had just ended. Well those 4 years had passed and that big disappointment was erased by the euphoria of an unlikely victory full or promises. Let’s hope that this new decade will bring these promises to fruition.

On a personal level, these 10 years have certainly coincided with big changes. One decade ago I was still a student in a busy city of the east coast. In the last years of this decade I have been commuting between that busy city to another large and windy city in the mid-west, where my wife was living and working. Just before this decade was ending, we have been finally visited by Santa, or at least one of Rudolf friends (I have photographic proof, see on the left, that’s our backyard on Dec 25, 2009), because we are now living and working as Professors in the same University, in a small (and certainly less busy) town in the middle of the prairie that was.

Let’s then say goodbye to the ‘00 decade, and wish all the best for this new decade that starts.

Cold

mmarengo@ornitorinko.org (Massimo) — 2009-12-20T01:51:34Z

Ames, IA (Dec 13, 2009)

Today was warm, with most of the day above -6C (that’s 21F degrees). As I said, warm, with little wind and some clouds keeping the temperature up to a bearable level. Much better than last week, when arctic winds pushed the thermometer as low as -20C (that’s negative even in Fahrenheit). Or the week before, when we got a blizzard sweeping the midwest and depositing a foot of snow (now frozen solid in candid sculptures of ice) all over the place.

I remember reading about Iowa during the last presidential primaries (here is it where Obama got his first decisive and unexpected victory), with a correspondent from the New York Times complaining about having to report from “this ice-box”. This was way before I thought of coming here: I cannot say I didn’t knew what was in store. Which is fine, I kind of like this weather. At least the snow doesn’t melt into a muddy mess after the storm. Yeah, for sure we will keep this ice galleries until March... Anyway, at least the houses in Iowa are better isolated and warm than the places we have been in Massachusetts,. Nice ice crystals, however, still form in the inside of window panes (meaning it is a must to have double panes), as shown in the little photo on the left. The large photo? One of the little birds that have made their home in our garden to take advantage of our bird seeder, a very popular item these days.

Iowa

mmarengo@ornitorinko.org (Massimo) — 2009-11-29T06:51:31Z

A Road in Iowa (Nov 28, 2009)

It has been exactly 4 months since the last post. Four months since we moved to Iowa. All these months spent slowly getting accustomed to our new home, new people, new land where the roads keep going straight until they touch the sky. We are settled now. If you still keep passing by, you may be surprised. So many pixels in wait...

Fazio Fest

mmarengo@ornitorinko.org (Massimo) — 2009-07-30T02:50:09Z

Cambridge, MA (May 28, 2009)

In May I was asked to be the “official” photographer of a Symposium here at the Center for Astrophysics. The meeting was in honour of Giovanni Fazio, that has been the head of the group in which I worked for now almost 12 years. Giovanni, in the photo, has left a deep and significant imprint in many fields of astronomy. With a background in high energy physics he and few others jump-started infrared astronomy, first with telescopes attached to stratospheric balloons, and now with infrared space telescopes. It was a very nice event, with many of his students and collaborators talking about the science they shared with Giovanni. The Symposium was celebrating the first 50 years of science by Giovanni, in anticipation of many more years to come.

I took a few hundred photos of the event, out of which ~140 “keepers”. I will post some of them in future posts...

As time goes by

mmarengo@ornitorinko.org (Massimo) — 2009-07-20T01:57:02Z

Boston, MA (May 23, 2009)

Despite my lack of posts, times goes by. I will soon be leaving Boston for our new home in Iowa. In the last few weeks, I have used some of the very little time at my disposal to walk around the city, and imprint as many photons I could on my CCD. I will digest them later, maybe post some of them here. I should rather say there... because the move in fact already started. The little old XPC computer that is hosting this web site is already in Chicago, halfway stop on its final Iowan destination. After 12 years in NEw England, I will soon follow.

Nothing New, Really (from Pornocracy to Berlusconi)

mmarengo@ornitorinko.org (Massimo) — 2009-06-28T19:38:13Z

Valle d’Aosta, Italy (March 14, 2009)

Italy is a country where old and new coexist in a seamless fashion. Medioeval castles are casually scattered in the middle of modern neighborhoods. In many cities all over Italy you cannot dig a new underground train line without bumping into 2,000 years old ruins. The structure of the state, and the legal system itself, are direct descendants of the ancient Rome institutions. What the heck... if you think of it, the main religious authority, successfully meddling in the country’s civil and political life, is an absolute monarchy funded two millennia ago and still thriving.

With this background it is perhaps not surprising that italians are used to good and bad governments, scandals of bribery, corruption, sex and whatever you can imagine. The papacy itself, during the 10th century “saeculum obscurum” (dark age) also known as the period of “pornocracy”, was ruled by powerful women that arranged the election and murder of their lovers and illegitimate sons as Popes. Italians have seen a lot.

That may explain why nobody seems to be really shocked by what is happening these days. Imagine a country where a powerful public official is caught in a sex scandal involving prostitutes and cocaine, many of them flown to his state and private residences by air force airplanes. Imagine a country where the wife of another public official accuses him publicly of “consorting with minors”. Imagine a country where a public official has been involved in several cases of corruption, and escaped being convicted only because of the statute of limitation, or because he promoted a law absolving himself from any penal consequence of his actions. Imagine a country where yet another official was part of a secret society conspiring to overthrow the government. Imaging a country where a public official is also owner of most of the media, insurance and retail industry, in total absence of an anti-trust law, and uses his dominant position to make public calls to remove unsympathetic journalists from the public TV, and to boycott opposition newspapers by depriving them of advertisement revenues.

Now imagine a country where all of the above refers to the same official, that happens to be the prime minister, and then you have found Italy. Now, as I was saying above, Italians have seen a lot in their multi-thousand year’s history, so it is perhaps not so surprising that the ratings of Silvio Berlusconi have not suffered the least from all these scandals. Maybe Berlusconi is right, italian men like him the way he is, “an exaggerated, cartoon version of your standard italian male stereotype: vain, pompous, full of hot air, patronising and sexually insecure”. Still, what about italian women? How can they put up on with a system in which the easiest way for a woman to have a political career in Berlusconi’s party, is to be pretty, not too much dressed and possibly sleep with somebody important? Is Italy the land that feminism forgot?

Across the river

mmarengo@ornitorinko.org (Massimo) — 2009-05-19T04:15:42Z

Mississippi River, IL (Oct 12, 2008)

We are moving! Mayli and I will both take a professor position at the department of physics and astronomy of Iowa State University. We will be moving across the Mississippi river to Ames, IA in August, just before the start of the next academic semester. I hope soon to have more time for posting photos in this blog. In the near future, of course, expect more farmland photos, and less ocean pictures!

Paris is always Paris

mmarengo@ornitorinko.org (Massimo) — 2009-03-16T21:16:08Z

Paris, France (Oct 7, 2008)

Last autumn I spent a few days in Paris. The weather was cold and rainy, and I was at a meeting for most of the time, but Paris is always Paris, and even just one afternoon walking around along the Seine guarantees plenty of photo opportunities. I had no idea what these two guys were taling about, but I saw their animated discussion from afar and it was just the matter of waiting for them to pass by, and shoot. Paris in the fall, when the sky is moody and the leaves of many colors.

The panorama below is made of several photos stitched together. I like to make these stitches, some of them 20,000 pixels or more on the long side, even though I end up not printing them. Anybody knows of places where to print posters with these highly not-standard aspect rations and huge pixel sizes? At an affordable price?

Paris, France (Oct 7, 2008)

The Dragon at the Mall

mmarengo@ornitorinko.org (Massimo) — 2009-03-08T21:04:12Z

Crane Beach, MA (March 19, 2005)

I actually mean the National Mall. As you probably know by now, I am working at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian is an educational and research institute administered by the government of the United States. It manages the largest museum complex in the world, and 9 research centers. The Smithsonian Headquarters (the Castle) are in Washington D.C., in the National Mall, where there are some of the most important museums it administers. The research centers are all around the world. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory main campus is in Cambridge, MA, but parts of it are in Arizona (Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory) and Hawaii (SubMillimeter Array).

The Smithsonian made a photographic contest among its staff, and one of my photos has been selected. If you are in the DC area, you an see the photo as part of the exhibit “Inside Perspectives: Photographs from the Smithsonian Community” at the S. Dillon Ripley Center Concourse, 1100 Jefferson Drive, S.W., Washington, DC. The Exhibit is open from March 4 to May 31, 2009.

Wilson Hall

mmarengo@ornitorinko.org (Massimo) — 2009-03-02T01:47:20Z

Batavia, IL (Feb 24, 2009)

This is the high rise building at the center of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab. The temple of high energy physics in the US, Fermilab is home to the Tevatron. With a circumference of 4 miles, the Tevatron is the most powerful accelerator in the word, capable to accelerate and smash protons and anti-protons at energies of 2 Tera-electron Volt (that is 100 million times the energy of the electron beam in a television picture tube - the old ones before flat screen TVs). This energy is packed in a volume which is 1 trillion times smaller than an atom. Fermilab’s Tevatron will lose its primacy at the end of this year, when the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will start to accelerate protons at energies 7 times larger, and lead nuclei at energies 600 times larger than the Tevatron.

I have spent the last week at Chicago visiting Mayli, working either at Argonne National Lab, or at Fermilab. On Friday I was at Fermilab attending the talk Mayli was giving, in which she presented the results of 4 years of work trying to understand the mysteries of neutrinos.

The Cloud Gate

mmarengo@ornitorinko.org (Massimo) — 2009-02-24T06:36:17Z

Chicago, IL (Feb 22, 2009)

On Sunday we went to downtown Chicago, in one of these sunny cold days that you would expect in this city in February. We left the car in the parking lot below the Millenium Park, which I thought was managed by the city and thus cheaper than the other private garages we have used in other occasions. Well, it turned out to be not that cheap after all ($25), but at least we were right at the center of the park, which is where I wanted to be, to take some photos of the snow-covered architecture (it had snowed the day before).

The huge drop of metal in the figure above is the “Cloud Gate” by Anish Kapoor, the indian artist known for his sculptures that “blur the boundaries between the limits and the limitless”. The sculpture is quite striking, and resembles an enormous drop of liquid metal just touching the plaza, reflecting the high rise buildings of the Chicago Loop and the cloudy sky (hence the name). When I saw it for the first time it reminded me the antithesis of the 2001 Space Odyssey monolith: the blackness of the monolith contrasting with the reflective surface of the gate, the sharp angles of the parallelepiped versus the smooth seamless surface of this sculpture, both of them a gate to infinite spaces.

The sculpture is certainly a tourists magnet, and is always surrounded by group of people taking pictures of themselves reflected on the shiny surface of the cloud gate (which is affectionally called “the bean” by the locals, because of its side-shape). It is as if Kapoor succeeded in allowing the public of create its own piece of art by “entering the scupture”, rather than passively absorbing whatever canned image the artist could have wanted to deliver. What I find most impressive is the total lack of seams between the 168 welded 1-cm thick steel panels used to fabricate its surface, by contract assembled to last for at least 1,000 years. The absence of flaws in the surface makes the object absolutely unreal, destroys the sense of scale, and gives the impression that a large chunk of the landscape has been removed, and substituted with the sky as if looking through a wormhole.

Roseway

mmarengo@ornitorinko.org (Massimo) — 2009-02-16T05:38:12Z

Boston Harbor, MA (Sept. 6, 2008)

This beauty is the Roseway. She was docked in the Boston harbor in a rainy day in which I decided to go out and test my new D700. The Roseway is a shooner with a long and illustrious history. It was built in Essex, MA as an elite fishing boat in 1925, tasked not just to catch the most fish, but also to beat the Nova Scotia fleet in the annual race with the Gloucester fishing yachts. She was christened after an acquaintance her first owner, that apparently “had always her way”. During her career as fishing vessel, she set the record of 74 swordfish caught in one single day in 1934.

During the war she was assigned to the naval district of New England to guide ships through the minefields and anti-submarine netting protecting the Boston Harbour, and was decorated for her exemplary service. After the war she served ad cruise boat, and appeared in a TV movie.

After 84 years of service, she is now a registered US National Historic Landmark, and is operational as an educational platform for the World Ocean School. You can often see her crossing the Harbour with her red sails in the wind.

Ice Floats

mmarengo@ornitorinko.org (Massimo) — 2009-02-09T01:17:04Z

Lake Michigan, MI (Feb 7, 2009)

The Midwest is going through a strange break in winter, almost like an out-of-season brief summer. The piles of snow at the side of the road are gone. The snow owl in front of Graham’s in Geneva is toppled. I am sorry I didn’t see it before the big thaw, it must have been quite spectacular.

I just arrived in Illinois yesterday, after a grueling week of proposal-writing for Spitzer: we will see in a couple of months if NASA will allow us to search for more planets around nearby stars. I slept for a good portion of my flight, looking out of the window from time to time, to see the uniform white cover of clouds shining in the sunny day. Just when the plane was crossing into Lake Michigan from the Michigan side, the view opened to reveal the geometry of ice and water floating not far from the shore. A close look at the full resolution image shows the surface of the ice to be criss-crossed by a spiderweb of fratures. In some areas what looks like a solid block is in fact a mosaic of little tiles of ice, brought together by the currents. Farther away from the shore the water was completely clear, and the Chicago side of the lake was ice-free as well. This contrast must tell something about the weather in Michigan... and I thought that winter in Chicago was the worst!

Claudia

mmarengo@ornitorinko.org (Massimo) — 2009-01-23T04:25:43Z

Merida, Venezuela (Jan 4, 2009)

This is Claudia, aunt of Victoria. Claudia is a cousin of Mayli (my wife) in Merida, Venezuela, where we have been for the new year holidays.

As I wrote many times, Venezuela is a complicated country. When I met Mayli the first time, I thought that Venezuela was a sort of “Switzerland” of South America. Oil rich country, I thought it was avoiding the strong social conflicts (and military dictatorships) that in recent decades have plagued other countries in the continent. I realized how far this impression was from reality the first time I flew to Caracas, and saw the “Christmas lights” of the girdle of slums surrounding the capital, with million of people living precariously without services in neighborhoods on landslide-prone foothills. That was before the sweeping elections of Hugo Chavez to the Venezuelan presidency in 1999, running on a platform of reform for social justice and reduction of poverty.

Many years later, the slums are still there, and the social struggle is unabated. The photo was taken along the via “Panamericana” in Merida, while we were driving to Mayli’s grandmother house. Anybody from Merida knows the reasons for the protest in the photo?