Ross Cunniff

Text of my testimony before the EPA yesterday (July 30, 2014): Good afternoon.  My name is Ross Cunniff.  I am a Fort Collins City Council member, but I am speaking only on my own behalf today. My father was born and raised in Colorado.  Although he left Colorado to serve in the US Army, we returned frequently in the 1960s and 1970s to visit our family here.  I have vivid memories of Colorado from those days.  I remember startling blue skies, fast-running mountain streams, tree-covered hillsides, and snow-capped mountain-tops.  My wife and I moved to Colorado in 1987 to raise our family.  Although many more people lived here by then, the character of the state was much the same as I remembered, and we delighted in sharing it with our daughters as they grew up. However, the past decade has seen significant change for the worse.  Colorado is not the same as it was when I was growing up.  The view of the Front Range is frequently obscured...

Thursday, November 28, comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) went through perihelion.  It's not clear what happened to it, yet, but the world had a ringside view thanks to NASA's STEREO spacecraft.  These spacecraft orbit the Sun.  Right now, they are opposite the Sun from Earth: I took the animated GIFs I found at isoncampaign.org and time-correlated them into a single animated GIF, which you may find here: [Original image credit: NRL /NASA] If ISON does emerge somewhat intact, expect a plethora of images from amateur astronomers around the world.  Stay tuned...

Today, I announced my bid for Fort Collins City Council, in District 5 (the current councilmember, Kelly Ohlson, is term-limited).  You can read all about it at http://www.rosscunniff.com - it should be a great adventure!

In the previous post , I explored the field-of-view of a GoPro Hero3 Black camera.  In this post, I explore the timing of two cameras, both paired with the same remote.  I set the cameras to 848x480 240Hz video, pointed them at a kitchen timer that has an LED blink once per second, and recorded.  Here are four images from each camera, composed together so you can see how the timing varies: So, accurate to within 2 frames at 240 Hz - only about 8 milliseconds or so of difference.  Should be good enough for my purposes.  The bigger concern is the color shift apparent between them.  Note that the bottom image seems a little more saturated than the top.  Probably correctable, but annoying.

I got two  GoPro Hero3 Black cameras and am planning a panoramic project with them.  However, to do the project correctly and accurately, I need a good read on their field-of-view.  So, I set up a tripod and a grid and a tape measure, and took a few photos.  Here they are, desaturated and contrast-enhanced, with central red dots and some annotations.  First, measuring the diagonal FOV: Next, the horizontal FOV: Finally, the vertical FOV: The front of the camera lens was almost exactly 17 inches from the grid.  The camera body started about 17.25 inches from the grid.  Assuming the sensor is embedded some distance into the body, I used an estimated field-to-sensor distance of 17.5 inches.  This yields the following field-of-view, in degrees: Diagonal: 146 Horizontal: 121 Vertical: 93 Doing a little interval math on the field-to-sensor distance shows these angles are accurate to about plus or minus 1.5 degrees. Int...

I found out this weekend (Aug 25/26) that everything goes better with Inception. So, in honor of Neil Armstrong's passing, I made this montage of Apollo 11 footage from NASA footage ( http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=11463015 ) and the music Mind Heist by Zack Hemsey ( http://music.zackhemsey.com/track/mind-heist ) The only concession to timing was that I cut a few seconds of Walter Cronkeit's face out to match the length. Everything *does* go better with Inception!

July 20, 1969.  I was 5, and my father had just returned from Vietnam.  He took me outside that night to see the Moon.  It was not quite this full - 6 days instead of 8 as pictured here - but still stunning.  A person was walking on the moon!  The Apollo program had a huge impact on my childhood, and strongly influenced my choice of engineering as a career. There will be plenty of tributes to Neil Armstrong today, but for me, it is enough to say that a giant of American history has passed. I took this photo this evening in memory of Neil.  May we honor his memory by continuing to explore the Universe.

As documented in my Expedition Notes , I was on the summit of Haleakala for the 2012 Transit of Venus.  Here are a couple of representative images.  First, the beginning of the transit, in white light - a stack of 10 images taken with a Canon EOS 40D and aligned and processed in Photoshop.  Click on the image to see it full-size: This is the color of light the Sun puts out.  It is not yellow or orange - people only think it is because the only time you can actually stand to see the Sun is when it is rising or setting, especially through clouds (and it is still not safe to look at it this way!).  At those times, the light is significantly reddened from the passage through very thick layers of air and dust.  Note the sunspots and other details - white light is interesting.  But what is *very* interesting is Hydrogen Alpha light.  This image of the end of the Transit is a stack of 7 images taken with a Sony NEX 5N camera and aligned and proces...

This year, we planned a family outing to Hawaii.  Being a science geek, I said, "If we are going to Hawaii this summer, let's make sure we are there on June 5 for the Transit of Venus ".  Hawaii is one of only a couple of spots in the United States where the entire transit would be visible.  And so, we chose early June for our vacation.  Our target was Maui; specifically, the summit of Haleakala, the highest peak on Maui: View Larger Map We chose Haleakala for several reasons.  First, Maui is indeed a tropical paradise, an excellent spot for a family vacation.  Second, at 10,023 feet, Haleakala is almost always above the clouds.  Finally, we anticipated that the world + dog would descend upon (ascend up to?) Mauna Kea on the Big Island, making it very difficult to find a good spot to set up telescopes - in fact, we heard later that only shuttle buses were allowed to the summit, so we were quite likely the highest-altitude amateur observers of th...

Today, much of the western United States got to see a partial solar eclipse.  For some lucky observers, they got to see an annular eclipse (where the silhouette of the moon was completely centered in the sun).  Here in Fort Collins, it was "only" partial - but pretty spectacularly partial (up to 85% obscured).  Unfortunately for me, the clouds completely eclipsed the maximum eclipse.  However, I got a nice sequence of the rest of it up until sunset.  This is a composite of images taken roughly every 5 minutes during the eclipse. Edit - here is an edited version to bring out the contrast a little better.  Note the limb-darkening of the Sun versus the very sharp edge of the Moon. The sharp-eyed might note that there is a stray "sun spot" on one of the images.  It is a bird who flew through during the exposure... Notes - this series was taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mk II camera - most exposures were 1/1000 sec at ISO 400.  The camera was at...

When I was about 11 or 12, I had a rock collection.  A few dozen fossils and geological oddities that I had picked up here and there.  They all fit in a single glass case – I could see them all at once, and instantly knew the significance of every rock.  However, I was also a frequent visitor to natural history museums.  I noticed, in those museums, that the professional geologists and paleontologists had a catalog system that helped them keep things straight, and also see patterns which generated deeper insights.  With this catalog system came labels on the samples. So, one day, I typed up (on a manual typewriter!) a few dozen labels for my own personal catalog system.  As I recall, each label contained the date I collected each sample, its original location, and a sequence number.  I carefully glued these labels to each of my specimens, and then stepped back to admire my creation.  Look what I had!  It was a… a… a… a rock collecti...

I wanted to make a Christmas present for my middle-school-aged niece, and I wanted it to be science-related. So, I found these images at various places on the web (starting at the very nice page assembled by Steve Albers ). I then wrote a computer program to turn the images into the maps you see here - projected onto icosohedra (20-sided solid objects). It reminded me once again what a remarkable time we are living in. When I was born, *none* of these maps would have been possible. And many of them have only been made possible in the last decade (in fact, the Mercury and Vesta maps were just made this year). Here is an example - our very own Moon: You can find all the images at Google Plus Edit: People who were not logged in to Google+ could not download all the pictures. So I've also uploaded the album to Flickr . There are maps of: Callisto Deimos Dione Earth Enceladus Europa Ganymede Iapetus Io Jupiter Luna Mars Mercury...

I went out early this morning to catch the last lunar eclipse until 2014.  This one is unique, because, from the United States, it occurred near sunrise.  So you can see the pink light on Horsetooth mountain from the pre-dawn glow in the east.  The moon went behind the mountains before totality. This picture was taken at about 6:45 AM local time on a DSLR attached to an 80mm f/6 telescope (480mm focal length), a 1/2 second exposure at ISO 400 (and then computer-processed somewhat to enhance the contrast).

My first serious attempt at astro imaging - taken from just outside my back door. This is the galaxy M31 in Andromeda. Stack of 50 luminance, 25 red, 25 green, and 25 blue frames, along with 25 dark frames. Exposures were 15 seconds (the mount is not polar aligned). Camera is a Meade DS3, at prime focus of an Orion ED80T-CF 80mm F/6 apochromatic refractor. Mount is an iOptron MiniTower Pro. Images were acquired and stacked with Stark Labs Nebulosity. Final tweaking in Photoshop. Thirty years ago this fall, as an undergrad, I took an astronomy class at NMSU. As part of that class, we got to try astrophotography. At the time, that meant loading a large, heavy, fragile glass plate with photo emulsion coating into a 16" fixed-mount Cassegrain telescope. I chose M31 as my target. I then had to stand at the eyepiece and manually guide the exposure. The whole setup probably cost $300,000 (it belonged to the university), and I spent about two hours hunched ov...

Our solar array has been up and running for a year now.  Since we have micro-inverters from Enphase , I'm able to log data every 5 minutes on how much solar power we're producing (you can browse a summary view of this data at Enphase's public page for our system ).  I've saved this data over the entire year (over 70,000 data points).  Here are a few visualizations of the data.  First, a simple contour map of the raw data - blue is 0-2000 watts, red is 2000-4000 watts, and green is more than 4000 watts of instantaneous power being produced by the array: This is the same data, but smoothed with a 5x5 box filter and viewed in perspective - it lets you see the longer weather events we've had (multi-day winter storms, extended summer cloudy intervals) - it gives the data an interesting "array of stacks" view: And here is a chart showing the average-per-time-of-day and maximum-per-time-of-day power production (note that in all these charts time-of-day has ...

This blog post is a call to action for those of you who care about the integrity of Fort Collins' protected natural areas.  I urge you to please help by reading this message. Platte River Power Authority (PRPA) has received approval to put 90-110 foot high-voltage transmission towers through one of Northern Colorado’s pristine and most popular natural areas — the Pine Ridge Natural Area, on the west side of Fort Collins.  These towers are necessitated by projected new growth and will primarily benefit areas outside Fort Collins, including Loveland and Longmont. These huge towers are already installed along Trilby Road between Taft Hill and Shields and heading west into the foothills.  They have also been installed along Overland Trail Road north of Drake.  These towers have already created a major eye-sores in our views to the foothills and mountains, including impacting the views from our open spaces and community separators.  Now the proposal ca...

Last night (December 20, 2010 in Colorado), there was a total eclipse of the moon.  I was watching the weather with trepidation - it had been mostly cloudy all day - and as night fell, I was pretty pessimistic about the chances for seeing anything.  But I dutifully put the telescope outside to cool, and got the camera equipment ready, just in case things cleared up: Wonder of wonders, the sky cleared up during the eclipse.   There were clouds coming and going all evening, but nothing that diminished the enjoyment of the event.   Here is a shot of the fully eclipsed moon north of Orion, with Taurus and the Pleiades in the shot (and some tree branches in the foreground).  A cloud, illuminated by Fort Collins city lights, drifts in front of Orion.  This was taken with at 18mm focal length on a Canon EOS 40D (1.6x crop factor): Switching lenses, here is a shot at 100mm focal length on the same camera: But the real exciting shots were taken throug...

Yesterday, I announced that I am running for Mayor of Fort Collins in the upcoming April 5, 2011 city elections.  You can see my website and press release at Ross Cunniff for Mayor.   It should be an exciting few months! PS - if you want to see my old home page for some reason, look here .

I went to China this week for business.  Unfortunately, I did not get much time for picture taking in China.  However, I had one extra day today that I spent in Hong Kong.  Here are the best pictures from my excursions. I got to Hong Kong about noon.  This is the view out my hotel window: After getting settled in, I took the ferry over from Kowloon (where I'm staying) to Hong Kong island proper.  I wandered the streets, and eventually  made my way to the tram that took me to the top of Victoria Peak (this picture was actually taken by a professional; I bought a digital copy): The glowing tower on the far left is the International Commerce Centre tower - 1588 feet - fifth tallest in the world. I hung around there long enough for the sun to set over the South China Sea: ...so I could take some pictures from the top of Hong Kong by night: I made my way back to the ferry, stopping for a few pictures on the way.  This is the Legislative Coun...