Today is the Summer Solstice. A year ago I lured TC out on Rockport’s Old Granite Pier to watch the Summer Solstice Sunrise (Figure 1). The solstice has always appealed to me. It emphasizes the fact that since the beginning of human time people have been looking up searching for something, searching for meaning. It represents the dichotomy of human experience, the scientific and the spiritual.
Figure 1 – Summer Solstice Sunrise, 2022 (c) DE Wolf 2023
“And so, perhaps, the truth winds somewhere between the road to Glastonbury, Isle of the Priests, and the road to Avalon, lost forever in the mists of the Summer Sea.”
At first, I was a bit put off by the lack of sharpness in this image. Artistically it look like a little fuzzy pancake. But then I realized that I had looked at M81 myself with my own telescope the previous night, and that is exactly what it looks like. The appeal lies in the subtle color, in the incredible dynamic range between the galactic core and the outer band; it floats; it is gorgeously ethereal. M81’s core contains a black hole with the mass of 70 million Suns and 15 times the mass of the black hole at the center of our own Milk Way galaxy. Breath taking!
But moving from the sublime to the more mundane, what I really want to talk about today is my Roomba by iRobot. It cleans my house by command either using an app on my cellphone or using Alexa by voice command. My house has never been so clean! Every day I send it to a different room. It is constantly updating its map of my house. Yes, true learning! So, I think a true robotic encounter.
You are encouraged to name your Roomba. Mine is Rumpole. And everyday as I watch him systematically lumber to his task. I think of Leo McKern, who played this character on television.
But really, I tend to be reminded of the nineteen-sixties futuristic TV series “The Jetsons“ and in particular Rosie the Robot, the Jetson family’s XB-500 series robotic maid. Rosie came complete with a little frilly French maids outfit. Like Rumpole, she was forever cleaning.
Futuristic fiction always bears the flavor of modern times. The Jetsons takes place in a temporarily displaced 1960’s. It carries forward all the prejudices and quirks of the 60’s. Worse, of course, is Star Trek. Did we truly hope that the future would be just as sexist as the then present? Rosie is a human-like machine that pushes a vacuum around. Makes no sense from an engineering perspective. Rumpole takes a deep dive under the couch, in the search of alien dust bunnies. Indeed, on his first mission in my bedroom, he had an encounter with a paper towel under my bed. Rumpole growled a bit and spit it out. The paper towel did not fare as well.
Figure 1 – Messier 51 taken with the iTelescope.net T18 12″ telescope (c) DE Wolf 2023
To people of my generation, the concept of robots began first with Robby the Robot Toy of the 1950’s and more so with the stories of Isaac Asimov, and of the Hallmark Hall of Fame, science fiction at its height. We dreamed of a world of robots and androids and pondered weighty issues such as whether they would be programmed with a prime directive “to bring no harm to humans” and whether we would be so kind in return.
Well, fiction becomes truth! For decades robots built our automobiles, farmed our farms, baked and packaged cookies for us. But they were huge ungainly contraptions, and there was no sense that theycould be interacted with directly. Well, wake up Rip van Winkle! I find that I have come to consciousness in 2023 and encounter robots everywhere. They have crept up on us, and they now surround us, not necessarily in a threatening way but as our helpers. And, indeed, the word “consciousness” rings true. We have come to grapple with the question of their sentience and awareness, even if we like to tuck it away somewhere safe.
When I was a teenager I was very “into” amateur astronomy. Back then if you wanted to see something with your telescope, a star, planet, or galaxy say, you pulled out your Norton’s Star Atlas and carefully “star hopped” from some bright star following the map field by field until if you were lucky found the desired object. Recently, telescopes have evolved with various complex auto-alignment systems. Well, I will have to admit that with age crawling around in various awkward positions to look under and over my telescope to get it aligned, more often than not defeated me. It was all very frustrating! Recently I added the Celestron StarSense Autoalignment System to my telescope. It is a little robot that you tell to align my scope and it does. Then you tell it what you want to look at and it goes there and tracks the object. Purists may argue that this is very algorithmic and not true artificial intelligence. But it is truly marvelous, arguably the best thing ever, and it is robotics at its very best, since it takes a difficult task for humans adn makes it easy and trivial. That in the end is what robotics is all about. Farming the Earth and building automobiles is one thing, aligning my telescope quite another! I call my telescope Celeste. My telescope now is smart enough to have a name if not a soul.
Still there is the problem that I would like to have Celeste high on a mountain top and I would like her to have a larger aperture so that I could take marvelous astrophotographs. Enter the age of robotic eyes, telescopes that you can control remotely, all located in distant sites perfect for astrophotography – places like Nerpio, Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. I took Figure 1 of Messier 51, the Great Whirlpool Nebula using a 12 inch robotic telescope (T18) on the iTelescope network. I have also used robotic telescopes on the Skygems Remote Observatories network. The proposition is a simple one. You control the telescope, either in real time or on a schedule, and the telescope takes the image. Then you download and image process it on your home computer. These encounters with robotic eyes are truly wonderful and enriching.
Purists will argue that this is not the same as taking the image yourself on your own telescope. I feel about this the same way that I feel about the argument that film-based analogue photograph is purer and better than digital photography. In fact, our cameras have become robots and through the combination of automatic analysis of the scene and high dynamic range digital imaging sensors have freed us of cumbersome analysis of the image, freed us to be artists. So often I hear “show me the camera’s raw image,” as if that were somehow truer and purer. I personally always shoot in raw, but I process, true to the point made by Ansel Adams that “You do’nt take a photograph. You make it.”
So three robots enriching my life anyway: the Celestron StarSense Autoalign, robotic telescopes, and my digital camera. I am truly Rip van Winkle, awakening in a Brave New World. To paraphrase Miranda in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,”
O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous [machinekind] is! O brave new world That has such [robots] in’t!
Figure 1 – Littoral zone, La Jolla Cove, (c) DE Wolf 2023.
The littoral zone is both physically and spiritually where the sea meets the land and the sky meets the sea. It is the glory and prize at the end of a rainbow. I spent quite a while trying to capture the image of Figure1. My Canon is not super fast. There is a noticeable delay between pressing the shutter and when the shutter actually opens. So it becomes a matter of guessing and anticipation. I tried to capture the “rainbow” in the sea foam, trying to time it just right. Here a low seagull accentuates the background, fuzzed out by billions of spray droplets.
Canon T2i with EF 100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM lens at 100 mm, 1/4000 th sec at f/7.1, ISO 800, Aperture Priority AE mode.
Figure 1 – Royal tern in winter plumage, La Jolla Cove (c) DE Wolf 2023
Staying on the subject of birds. Figure 1is another photograph from La Jolla Cove. This fellow is a Royal Tern (Thalasseus maximus). Terns are glorious birds, beautiful and elegant in flight. The Royal tern stands out for its distinctive head plumage. The crest shown in the photograph is however, the off-season head dress, when the birds lose most of the crest feathers and sport a white spot, resembling so many of my once long-haired contemporaries, who in the day sported elegant long hair and now are reduced to bald head with straggly ponytail.
Canon T2i with EF 100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM lens at 210 mm, 1/3200 th sec at f/7.1, ISO 800, Aperture Priority AE mode.
Figure 1 – Great Horned Owl (male), Spring 2023, Habitat, Belmont, MA (c) DE Wolf 2023
March 19th and spring is definitely in the air; so TC and I went on a sort of owl pilgrimage. The association of the owl as the sacred is a common theme in human mythology and spirituality. We have the little owl (Athene noctua) that accompanies Athena in Greek and her counterpart Minerva in Roman culture. This owl is the symbol of knowledge and wisdom. – “the wise old owl” Many cultures believe that people become owls after death. Among Australian Aborigines, owls are the spirits of women and as a result are sacred. Similarly, to the Kwakiutl people of Vancouver and Discovery Islands in the Pacific Northwest, owls were the souls of the departed and if people and if the owl was killed, that person would also die.
So each spring TC and I go in search of Great Horned (Bubo virginianus) owls at Habitat in Belmont, Massachusetts. Figure 1 shows the male surveying and protecting his kingdom. This old pair has been breeding for at least thirteen years and have successfully produced owlets again. They are never easy to photograph, always positioned very high in a pine tree or in a well camouflaged nest. We saw the nest but neither the female or her owlets. They are such magnificent birds.
Canon T2i with EF 100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM lens at 320 mm, 1/400 th sec at f/7.1, ISO 800, Aperture Priority AE mode.
Figure 1 – Nesting Brandt’s cormorant, La Jolla Cove, CA (c) DE Wolf 2023
Pelicans seem so unwieldy, almost a mechanical contrivance. Among the other denizens of the La Jolla oceanside cliffs are the Brandt’s cormorants (Urile penicillatus). It is a curious point that they segregate on the cliffs for the most part. There is a pelican section and a cormorant section, with only moderate overlap.
This was breeding season and the birds were quick to display their gorgeous and dramatic, iridescent throats. The one in Figure 1 is defending its nest and that nest to those of us who cannot fly, except in mind, was precariously perched above a wild and furious Pacific Ocean.
Canon T2i with EF 100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM lens at 180 mm, 1/250 th sec at f/7.1, ISO 800, Aperture Priority AE mode.
Figure 1 – Rufus hummingbird, La Jolla Cove, CA (c) DE Wolf 2023
So going from huge California Pelicans to more sublime and diminutive California hummingbirds, I came across the little beauty of Figure 1, a rufus hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus) under a tree at La Jolla cove. For a New Englander always in search of ruby throats, California is a hummingbird paradise. Indeed, we were delighted for the whole month by “Hubert” and Anna’s Hummingbird, who lived in a tree in our garden. Under trees are, on the other hand, dangerous places for David, who has a tendency to bang his head on overhanging limbs that are obscured by the rim of his cap. TC is ever on me for this and I try very hard. But …
So much appeals to me about the image. First, are the subtle iridescent colors of the bird especially the greens on top of its head. Second, is the green slate background that complements these green feathers. Third, is the bokeh, always a plus! And fourth, are the delicate lichens on the branches, which complements the rufus feathers on the bird.
Canon T2i with EF 100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM lens at 250 mm, 1/125 th sec at f/7.1, ISO 800, Aperture Priority AE mode.
Figure 1 – California brown pelican in flight, (c) DE Wolf 2023.
The Jurassic Park movie series, one of my favorites, has made the kind of image of Figure 1 both iconic and memetic – a pelican in flight. It invokes the sense that life on Earth is resilient and defiant – that “life finds a way!” I think that part of the appeal of La Jolla Cove is not just the very abundant wildlife but also the persistently dramatic backgrounds. Here my goal was to capture this pelican sharply, a key word here, in fight against the waves, surf, and foam. The resemblance to the pterodactyls of prehistoric times is unavoidable. You can clearly imagine, these great soaring birds, in retrospect clumsy of construction, riding the air current and thermals of another time and place.
“If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it’s that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, …”
Jurassic Park
Canon T2i with EF 100-400 mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM lens at 180mm, 1/4000 th sec at f/7.1, ISO 800, Aperture Priority AE mode.
