Super 8

The history of motion pictures dates back to the second part of the 19th century with photographers like Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, who, among others, were the first to take several images per second in one effort—all for scientific purposes back then—to study the locomotion of birds, animals, and humans. For example, Muybridge was the first to take a series of photographs of a galloping horse in order to prove that in one single instant of time all four horse legs are not touching the ground. More or less at the same time on another continent, Marey created a shotgun-shaped camera capable with one trigger pull of capturing 12 images in a row within one single second and storing them all on the single 90 mm film. He used his gun to study various motions of animals, fish, and insects within his so-called 'animated zoo', including dropping cats from different heights and filming them always landing on their feet.

ELMO Super 106, 8mm movie camera

It was not long after initial chronophotography efforts and enthusiasm in the 19th century that the 'evolution' of motion pictures diverted heavily into entertainment and cinematography. The history of films and fun started almost with the start of the 20th century, but in the spirit of today's title, 'domesticating' films within ordinary people and human homes waited another 65 years for the invention of Super 8, or, to be precise, the improvement of Kodak's standard 8mm film from 1932 into a more efficient surface with a bigger width for the frame itself and significantly smaller perforation on the film's right edge. After they introduced it at the 1964-65 World's Fair, Super 8 instantly became the very first home video format with light cameras capable of filming 18 frames per second and more than 3 minutes of the movie per small film cartridge.

To say that my father was a film enthusiast in the second part of the sixties and the entire seventies would be an understatement. It was natural for him to go the step further and, in addition to the several analog SLR cameras and darkroom equipment for developing photos, to invest in home movies. Spending time in the darkroom and hanging photos on the wire were some of the most thrilling experiences of my childhood, but when Super 8 came, another world opened. I was too young to operate the camera, but on the occasion or two I remember, I did hold it and press the red button, especially during our vacations in Greece. Well, aside from those rare moments, most of the time my job, with being a kid and all, was to be in front of the camera and not behind it.

Tondo Super 8 Projector and LG Nexus 5 in action

But to cut the story short, this month I did something I was delaying for a long time. During the last two weeks, every night I was descending into my own customized darkroom equipped with a tiny Super 8 projector and digitalizing our family films. Twenty of those survived over time, and with a speed of two per day, I projected them on the wall and filmed them all with my smartphone. It was far from being an ideal setting, but this was the best I could do. I tried different approaches, filming from different distances, using different settings, and using my DSLR Nikon in the beginning. I even tried to project the film directly into the DSLR, but all my efforts failed due to not having proper lenses and objectives, and in the end, the smartphone was the chosen solution, and it did a better job in the dark than the Nikon.

With more expensive equipment, I am sure the results would be much better, and probably the weakest link was the cute and old Italian Tondo projector, which was my father's portable cinematic projector. I did try with a bigger 'player' first, but despite all my efforts, I couldn't manage to repair the old and superb Crown Optical Co. Ltd. Auto-P, a silent Standard and Super 8 film projector, our primary projector capable of displaying big and crisp screens on the large walls and with much better quality. To be honest, it's more than half a century old and built with nowadays rare parts, especially the missing lamp that is hard to find these days, but I didn't give up, and perhaps in the future, if I stumble on some solution (read it: an eBay sort of solution), I will repeat the effort, at least for those videos filmed indoors.

Nevertheless, all twenty rolls now come with twenty MP4s, and for this occasion I decided to create two movie collages with six movies each. They are all filmed in the late sixties, during the seventies, and in the early eighties with an ELMO Super 106 camera from the first image. The first one, embedded above, contains six films from our early vacations in Greece, and in chronological order, they are filmed in the Acropolis of Athens, Zeitenlik, the World War I memorial park in Thessaloniki, vacation resorts in Kamena Vourla, Asprovalta, Katerini Paralia, and two vacations in the vicinity of the port city of Volos.

The second collage is from our home and village in Niš and Guševac in Serbia. Mostly it focuses on my sister's and my babyhood and early childhood, birthday parties, family gatherings, and excursions. Also our old house that is now gone and the old shape of our country village front yard. This video also contains one of the rare black-and-white films from our collection that probably originated from different cameras and settings.

This entire effort triggered lots of memories and emotions from almost forty years ago, and seeing people live, especially those that are not alive today, is something extraordinary that regular photography cannot induce. Perhaps we today, with all of our pocket gadgets, are taking video clips and home photography for granted, but before, in the Super 8 era, this was a completely different experience. What we today do with just two taps on the screen, before you had to do in a more complex manner, including purchasing film cartridges, carefully planning (directing) filming sequences for a 3-minute film, sending it to development, organizing cinematic sessions...

One thing is for sure: Super 8 was the origin of what we have now in our homes. It was eventually replaced with VHS tapes in the 80s, but at the dawn of the 21st century, the analog period came to an end, and old-fashioned home gadgets were replaced with home digital camcorders first and, in the very last decade, with smartphones. To tell you the truth, it is nice to have a camera in your back pocket, it is, but somehow, with me, as I witnessed the origin of the entire process in my early childhood, the nostalgia for the analog days gave me another layer of the entire experience. Something special and extraordinary for sure.

'Super 8,' a sci-fi movie by J.J. Abrams

Perhaps for the best conclusion for this post, it would not be fair not to mention one of J.J. Abrams' greatest movies from 2011. Simply named 'Super 8', it tells a main sci-fi story about an alien encounter, but everything is perfectly wrapped within a background story of school kids trying to film a short movie for a Super 8 festival. It was really a great movie, and if you liked E.T. before, this is definitely a decent sequel and one of my favorites.

Refs:
http://www.kodak.com/id/en/consumer/products/super8/default.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_formats
http://www.retrothing.com/2009/09/tondo-super-8-projector
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/super-8-jj-abrams-says-194908

History of (d)SLR

The year was 1975 when I was browsing a small dusty workshop located next to the garage in our backyard. It was a perfect combination; I was about to turn 7 years old, eager to explore the darkest corner of my childhood realm, and the dark workshop was the most mysterious chamber in our entire family estate, no bigger than four cubic meters, occupied by a heavy and old greenish oak cabinet with a couple of drawers and compartments filled with tons of different tools, mechanical devices, and various interesting stuff whose origin and purpose I didn't know. It was, more or less, the year when I started to break things in order to find out what was inside or to find out how something works, foolishly believing that I would be perfectly able to put things back together.

Well, from this point of view in time, I can't remember if there was at least one mechanical device I "inspected" in such a manner that I successfully restored after unscrewing all the bolts and junctures or by simply breaking the metal hood. One thing is for sure, though. What I found that summer morning in the workshop I definitely never managed to restore. I simply succeeded in dismantling the old thing beyond any possibility for repair. But the knowledge I gained from what I found inside was priceless. It was something I had never seen before. When I broke the hard metal hood of an old binocular I found hidden in one old bag stored in the old oak, at first glance I thought I had found a treasure. Two shiny, perfectly aligned, and beautifully shaped objects smiled at me from the inside of the optical instrument. I was too young to understand what their purpose was, but in the following days I learned everything about it. That very day I discovered a prism. Two of them.

Needless to say, I instantly became attached to my newest discovery to the point that I kept them with me all the time. I was carrying them to the school and bragging about their almost magical abilities of bending light in different directions. Well, I wasn't any different from any other kid at that age. Only in this case with a little twist. Guess what the twist is? I still have one of them (above photo).

Leica IIIa, rangefinder camera, 1935-38 (responsible for the kiss photo**)

After almost 40 years, one prism survived and is more or less in the expected shape after four decades, still playing with photons the same as years before. But this is not the end of the story about this particular prism. The history of the little thing goes even more into the past. Actually this binocular belonged to my grandfather, who brought it directly from World War II. Some 30 years before I found it hidden in an old cabinet, my grandfather was experiencing the final year of his captivity in one of those German camps for military personnel imprisoned back in the year of 1941. After German capitulation, he was traveling half of Europe on foot, trying to find his way home, carrying these binoculars with him. Sometimes, I wonder what exactly little prism saw in these turbulent years, changing who knows how many owners during the war, and how many untold stories are lost forever and hidden in little crystals now perhaps more than 80 years old.

But to get back to the title story, basically the technology behind the acronym is connected to the camera's solution of how the photographer's eye is monitoring the shooting object. In the history of photo cameras, way back in the 19th century, the first professional cameras were designed with two objective lenses, perfectly aligned and with the same focal length, one for taking the light to the photographic film and the other toward the viewfinder. The single-lens system was a natural step forward, where a mirror-prism system mounted between the lens and film forced light to make a couple of sharp turns and to end directly at the viewfinder. The result is obvious: the framed image shown in front of your eye is the one forming the final picture after the mirror is lifted up and the photographic film is lit during the desired exposure time. What is also obvious is that the more quality the objective lens, mirror, pentaprism, and eyepiece are manufactured with, the better the image you see in the viewfinder before the final moment of triggering the shutter mechanism. The other non-optical part of analog-era SLR photo cameras directly responsible for the quality of the final product is, of course, the sensitivity of photographic film as well as the quality of embedded microscopically small light-sensitive silver-based crystals responsible for the contrast and resolution of the film. Back then, in the analog era, the photographing process didn't end by clicking the button. The film needed to be chemically developed, and with another optical/chemical process of illumination, the negative taken images are finally transferred to the photo paper.

If you were a photo enthusiast back in the seventies and eighties of the previous century like my father was, you might imagine that having a proper camera along with a photo laboratory with a darkroom was not a very cheap hobby. But thousands of images were worth all the effort. My favorite memories from those days were all connected to spending hours in a dark photo room with a red light producing pictures on paper. The moment of the image appearing on the surface of photo paper submerged in a dilute solution, followed by washing the photograph with fixer liquid and water, was my favorite part. I was typically in charge of these final steps in the process along with hanging wet photos for final drying. In this part of Europe in those times, the best amateurish and semi-professional cameras and all the equipment needed for a photo laboratory for hobbyists, with all the chemicals and supporting devices, came from East Germany and Russia. My father owned a couple of those-day cameras, and the one I remember the most was the Zenit E/EM (pictured to the left), manufactured a couple of years before the Olympics in Moscow in 1980. Zenit was made by KMZ (Красногорский завод), a leading Russian enterprise in the area of optical and electro-optical engineering, and you would be amazed how nice photos this little fellow made 25-30 years ago.

In conclusion, after a little history and technicalities, in the final chapter of this blog post, let's talk a little about digital SRLs. Basically, optical systems used in old cameras are the same. Two things changed, though. The quality of manufacturing of all optical parts in nowadays photo cameras is far more advanced than before, and all aspects of the final image are increased to the edge. There is a software term in the early digital era called WYSIWYG, meaning "What You See Is What You Get", which initially referred to printing documents looking the same as seen on the display of your computer. I guess the photo industry today reached the same goal, and with not even too expensive lenses and moderate DSLR cameras, final photos reached the quality of the image appearing in viewfinders or the one seen with your naked eye. The second major change is in the simple fact that all the chemical industry and paper photos are replaced by pure digital systems. Film is removed by a light sensor in the form of an electronic chip filled with a matrix of millions of tiny analog-to-digital converter dots capable of instantly saving an image into a fast memory card. Perhaps the third change is the fact that each DSLR device today is also a specialized computer, and compared to old systems, they are now able to perform various post-processing procedures to assist you with intelligent zooming, face recognition, adapting to shooting conditions, filming entire video clips, and maintaining a detailed database of taken images.

Nikon D5200 dSLR and Zenit EM SLR*

Considering all the features of one DSLR, I can surely say that this one device replaces my father's entire environment, from the camera through the darkroom for developing photographs to the bulk photo albums where final photos are stored. And all that with a smaller price, and what's more important, with far more space for creativity and for taking photos in a professional manner. To me, today's worldwide market is taken by two big players, Canon and Nikon, Japanese multinational corporations, both specialized in the manufacture of imaging and optical products, especially in the market of digital SLR cameras. It wasn't easy to choose one of their models, and I took several days of browsing stores and reading about all the specifications, but I eventually chose the Nikon D5200 that fits all the requests and budget I had in my mind.

At the very end let's speculate a little about how the future of photo cameras might look. Will it be further development and improvement in optical and digital systems or with the upcoming ultimate speed of future computer circuits or with the introduced quantum computers that the digital system will "evolve back" to the analog world? It remains to be seen. One thing is for sure though: miniaturization of optical systems is still not possible by the simple fact that the more photons you get in the sensor, the better the image is saved, and in this case, size really matters.

Ref:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/viewfinders.shtml

*
http://www.theothermartintaylor.com/moveabletype/archives/cameras/000005.html
http://www.nikonusa.com/en/nikon-products/product/dslr-cameras/d5200.html

**
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2313418/Times-Square-kiss

Streets of Corfu

Long ago I started to experience that one extremely memorable dream. One of those that doesn't fade out with the first morning sunshine. Instead, it was regularly popping to the surface of my mind, making me wonder if these vivid images, haunting me every now and again, were just a product of my imagination or perhaps there was something more hidden beneath. In the dream I wander the narrow streets of an unknown city, one after another, and after a while I stumble to the big square with large monumental buildings decorated with dark reddish bricks with no signs or any familiar markings I can recognize. I was always wondering where all these colorful images originated from and somehow always had that feeling that I am probably missing an important link to fully understand the whole picture.

Recently this final link suddenly appeared, and during our vacation last week I accidentally found my dream site, and all missing pieces finally placed together, forming a memory almost 40 years old. Somehow, subconsciously, I have always known that it wasn't the dream at all and all the streets and buildings were very real and instead represent one of those almost forgotten recollections hidden deeply in my memory banks. What I saw in my night vision was the lost memory of the city of Corfu.

It all happened when I was the age of my son today. I was about 7 years old when my parents chose to spend vacation on the island of Corfu in the northern part of the Ionian Sea, just about 100 km away from the southern cape of the famous heel of the Italian peninsula. While waiting for the ferry in the early morning, we took a walk to the empty streets of Corfu (Greek: Κέρκυρα), the main city named after the island itself, and what was once one small walk under the morning sunshine now is just one almost faded memory for some reason refusing to die and from time to time reminding me of a beautiful site I experienced so long ago.

A couple of days ago, almost four decades after my last encounter with the island, I decided to take my wife and son on the tourist cruise to Corfu. The ship was medium-sized and filled with approximately 300 people of different nationalities and a not-so-small group of Serbian tourists. During the final two years of World War I, the island of Corfu served as a refuge for the Serbian army that retreated there on Allied forces' ships. More than 150,000 soldiers, royal government officials, and civilians established Serbian administration in exile during 1916-1918, while in Serbia under occupation of Austrian and Bulgarian armies, only women, children, and old men stayed. We started browsing the city in the street of Moustoxidou, where next to the French Consular Agency lies the honorary Consulate of Serbia, or simply the Serbian House, the museum completely dedicated to the WWI events that happened on the island and the island of Vido (Greek: Βίδο) across the harbor (first three images above).

The center of the city is a labyrinth of narrow streets, and it requires great orientation skills to remember where you are or where you were in order to find the place of interest. While we waited in front of Sorbonne's office of the French consular building, I got the idea to use the extremely elongated portrait size of the 16:9 aspect ratio of the digital format and start taking photos of small stone alleys. Generally I don't like this format compared to its landscape counterpart just because the image looks too narrow in the vertical direction, but in the case of the streets of Corfu, I could say this is an ideal combination. We didn't have much time until the ship departure time, so I chose the "Scene Selector" feature on my Coolpix camera (which is a somewhat improved automated mode in Nikon's software for digital cameras) and started clicking at the beginning of each street we crossed. After little post-processing (mostly minor changes in brightness, contrast, and sharpness), this blog post is the result. I included on this page 36 images of beautiful small and narrow streets, all taken in the center of Corfu.

When I was 7ish years old, I was a lot smaller, streets were empty, and everything looked large to me. This is probably why I remembered the whole site and its mystical appearance in the early hours. Especially when we stumbled upon big city hall with loud church bells echoing through the streets. Today tourism changed the scenery a lot, and streets are full of various stores, coffee shops, and restaurants. Compared to the 70s, now walking the colorful streets full of people and friendly salesmen brought a familiar environment of other Greek towns. However, the unusual city's topography, with up and downhill streets oriented in all directions, provides Corfu with little authentic feeling and a small glimpse of the old times when civilization was still knocking on the doors of all Greek coastal towns. My wife chose some small, authentic Greek tavern run by an old couple where we experienced even further travel to the past, where traditional Greek hospitality was still not influenced by modern times and Wi-Fi hotspots and where time flowed much slower.

Our free time in Corfu was between 2 and 4 PM, and photographing empty streets or scenery was mission impossible. Still, I managed to find a couple of empty streets and alleys or ones with not too many people inside. These photos (in the above last segments) ended probably the best, showing Corfu's special mixture of Venetian, British, Italian, Greek, and Byzantine architecture that mainly originated in the 18th and 19th centuries.

At the very end of this special photo story, I can only recommend this part of the Balkans highly, along with Parga—a small town where we settled for 10 days in a family villa next to an amazing olive-tree forest. I am sure this part of western Greece hides many more interesting places to visit and photograph. If you add the crystal-clear waters of the Ionian Sea and friendly faces wherever you look, I am sure spending just one vacation on the island is way too little time. I will definitely come here again in the future, and this time I am not going to let new memories fade again to the point of haunting dreams like before. I have to say, though, that when I was walking the same streets again after a long time, I didn't experience the typical déjà vu feeling like I described in the blog post last year. Even though there were some glimpses that looked familiar, too much time passed, and I guess I wasn't able to recognize exact spots and views, probably due to the fact that children and adults experience events and scenery differently, and not just because of different points of view but also because a child's mind is a lot emptier, and they simply don't have much data to compare with, especially if they are experiencing something for the first time. Nevertheless, the whole experience with my lost memory was at least unusually unique, and I doubt I would encounter many more like it.

Streets of Corfu (Full Photo Album):
https://photos.app.goo.gl/TLw83qgV8ZmMe1Gi8

Parga:
https://www.mpj.one/2013/08/parga.html
https://photos.app.goo.gl/vSM1DFFafrfvMxU96

Corfu (Wiki and Web):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corfu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vido
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_Campaign_(World_War_I)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Serbs_Corfu1916-1918.jpg
http://www.greeka.com/ionian/corfu/corfu-architecture.htm
http://www.pargagreece.co.uk/

Earthlings

A couple of months ago, in the middle of December last year, just before "Mayan doomsday" on the 21st, my favorite text editor asked me to approve its regular update. I clicked the link to see what's in the new package, and it immediately redirected me to the page describing new features and fixes. My fellow software developer of great Notepad++, Don Ho*, conveniently named the update "New release (v6.2.3)—End of the World Edition". It brought a series of chuckles to my face that simultaneously morphed into a big smile when I read the description below the title. Referring to the Mayan prophecy, he wrote exactly this: "Even though I don't believe this bullshit, I'm not against resetting our shitty world". Well, I don't know what exactly he meant with the word "reset", but certainly there are days when I can completely agree with him and describe our world exactly the same way.

Viktor and his 6th Earth Day

Anyway, today is another edition of "Earth Day", and at least today we should try and put away all the pessimism (or realism, if you will) and remember those other days capable of filling our lives with at least a small amount of happiness and try to find all the optimistic thoughts we can pack into a message for the future world that will have no need of rebooting itself every now and again. Those who follow my blog probably know that my son was born on Earth Day, so I have another reason to celebrate today. He is turning 6 years old, and recently his childhood has been successfully extended with his first year of school, lots of new friends, and his first new obligations. I can see he is exiting with all the changes, and I truly envy him. Childhood is something special. Every day is bringing something new, and the empty bucket in his head is permanently filling slowly and inevitably. Also, a child's mind is pure and not burdened with adult stuff. I can't remember exactly in which episode, but I think Yoda once said, "Truly wonderful the mind of a child is", when he was trying to explain how children perceive reality very differently and sometimes much better than adults. We simply tend to complicate the world around us without any possible need.

Just to prove my point, let me add a small glimpse ofone of our annual things we do. My wife is a schoolteacher, and with other teachers, every year she is taking her class to the nature resorts, usually mountains, for one week. Viktor and I hook along every year and spend wonderful time with hundreds of other children. Believe me or not, these weeks recharge my batteries better than any vacations at the seaside or any holiday days off. During these weeks, the adults are severely outnumbered, and you can feel it. The air is always full of joy, optimism, happiness, and pure enlightenment. This week is one of those weeks. I took days off and drove six hours to this distant mountain in western Serbia to join the class, and the feeling is again there. Even at this very moment while I am writing this sitting alone in our hotel room, children are loudly singing in the discotheque situated a floor above, and I don't mind at all. Just the opposite. Silence would be disturbing.

Neil deGrasse Tyson**

Sometimes I truly wonder what goes wrong with people when they grow up. Why do they change that much over time? I don't know. Is it in our genes, written somewhere, how to spoil all the magic happening in the first decade or two of our lives, or is the society we live in the one to blame? I don't think anybody has a valid answer, so I will just quote my favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who once said, "Children do not read horoscopes. Children are perfectly happy counting through the number 13. Children aren't afraid to walk under ladders. They see a black cat cross their path, and they say, 'Look! Kitty, kitty,' and want to pet it, not run in the other direction. Children are not the problem here. You say you’re worried about children? I’m not worried about children; I’m worried about 'grown-ups'. Kids are born curious. They are always exploring. We spend the first year of their life teaching them to walk and talk, and the rest of their life telling them to shut up and sit down." Keeping all those optimistic words like this one in mind and also all those pessimistic tales like the one from the beginning of this post, I decided to use suitable wallpaper I found online and put it as the background of the montaged image honoring this year's Earth Day and, of course, Viktor's 6th birthday. The image represents two very distant parts of humanity, or, metaphorically speaking, the dark and Jedi parts of the world as we know it. Of course, in the middle is one of Viktor's most cheerful recent photos with a clear message representing the innocent childhood of all Earthlings out there.

This year Earth Day 2013 is themed as "The Face of Climate Change". I am sure our planet, looking at her as a living organism, has her own cycles and climate changes that are sometimes simply unavoidable events, but humans over the years have grown up to the point of being a big player, fully capable of selfishly contributing and producing climate changes of their own. Following the motto where one picture is worth a thousand words, please see the official video:

"Climate change has many faces. A man in the Maldives worried about relocating his family as sea levels rise, a farmer in Kansas struggling to make ends meet as prolonged drought ravages the crops, a fisherman on the Niger River whose nets often come up empty, a child in New Jersey who lost her home to a super-storm, a woman in Bangladesh who can’t get fresh water due to more frequent flooding and cyclones… And they’re not only human faces. They’re the polar bear in the melting arctic, the tiger in India’s threatened mangrove forests, the right whale in plankton-poor parts of the warming North Atlantic, the orangutan in Indonesian forests segmented by more frequent bushfires and droughts"

I've already posted about this topic, and if you are eager to learn more about Earth Day and Biodiversity, please follow the blue links. The problem is not only complex, but also, even though awareness is there, the solution seems to be as far as the distance from here to the horizon itself.

Divčibare, Crni Vrh, 1098m

Are we too late to act and already stepped over the edge? I don't know, but like today when I am in the company of one hundred and thirty children visiting the highest peak of the mountain 'Maljen' near to the small ski settlement called 'Divčibare' and looking at the world with children's eyes, I have little faith.

*Don Ho
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/contributors/author.html

**Neil deGrasse Tyson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDFgLS3sdpU
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson

Earth Day 2013: The Face of Climate Change
http://www.earthday.org/2013/about.html

Divčibare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divcibare

Celestia, Campfire and Astronomy

I remember every little detail from that weekend trip. From the very first moment when we stepped into the bus that took us to the mountain base, throughout the rest of the first day when we climbed down into a small cave with narrow hallways toward the small chamber at its end. I vividly remember the glorious, endless, and hard-to-find second cave we stepped in the very next day, followed by an overwhelming feeling and little fear when we passed through cave chambers, cutting the darkness with handy tools and small flashlights. I will always hate myself for not having a camera to capture the surrounding scenery when we traveled by train later that afternoon, which looked like it came right out of the 19th century with wooden benches rolling the railways slower than Usain Bolt. All those rock formations and abandoned train stations were slowly losing their battles with nature and were looking exactly like a background from Sergio Leone's spaghetti western movies.

Viktor at Rundetårn observatory, Copenhagen

But what I will remember the most is the first camping night between the caves. It was an extraordinary experience only a campfire can provide.

It was the hot middle of the summer, and the forest was mysterious and kind at the same time. I don't remember the exact year, though, but it surely was during my late teenage years, most likely in July or August of 1987. Along with a couple of my peer friends, I was lying down in the middle of a forest clearing on top of my brand-new sleeping bag, hypnotically staring toward the nightly sky. I glimpsed the watch and saw that midnight passed just an hour ago. The campfire was vividly glowing around the small glade surrounded by dark trees. It was the perfect time, and soon it was about to begin. As planned, the first one came on schedule, leaving a straight line in the sky for a millisecond or two. Shortly after, another one fractured the nightly sky, then another one and another and another...and then it was a shower. The Perseids. The icy fragments entering the Earth's atmosphere every summer are body parts of the comet Swift–Tuttle, which travels in this neighborhood every 130 years, providing lots of meteors for our camping TV. That particular year we planned our adventure by the moon's motion, or, to be precise, we wanted to go on the trip when there was no moon in the sky most of the night during its crescent phase. Without light pollution from the Earth and the Moon, the sight was amazing—perseids, thousands of stars, nebulas, galaxies and planets, the Milky Way in the center of our view, planes, and artificial satellites passing by throughout constellations with their leader of the time—the Russian space station "Mir", which was probably one of those brightest moving dots we saw that night. If you didn't see such a sight, you would be surprised how the night sky is actually dynamic. If you add to the scene strange sounds coming from the surrounding forest made by sleepless birds and wild animals, you get perfect entertainment for the big portion of the night. It was our first camping trip, and the fear of the unknown a little spoiled the event, but in our defense, without any experienced guides or team members, I can assure you that every suspicious sound that came from the forest sounded like the ultimate wild predator hungry for young humans. Anyway, little because of the fear and much because of active heavens, we finally fell asleep a little before dawn and successfully slept for an hour and a half, ready for the next day.

Space station Mir (1986-2001)

That really was one great summer, and this trip would stay on top of my adventurous history, from many perspectives. But it wasn't the one that triggered my interest in science and astronomy. I couldn't say what it was for sure, and probably, among many things, at the very beginning, it was one scientific toy my parents bought for me when I was really young. It was one toolkit box**—an optical set of plastic parts and various lenses allowing you to build different gadgets such as a microscope, binoculars, a spyglass, a kaleidoscope, a diapositive magnifier, prism tools, etc. It was my favorite toy for many years. The other equally important trigger is my failure to comprehend the word "infinite" and my everlasting desire to understand its meaning. It was bugging my mind ever since I started to look up at night. Even today, after dozens of courses of various mathematics I had to pass during my high school and university education, infinity is staying the biggest unknown, lying right there, far beyond my scope. There were years in my youth when I was convinced that infinity actually doesn't exist at all. I loved the idea that the cosmos is curved to 360° in all directions. I desperately wanted to believe that if you go with your spaceship straight up, eventually you will reach the same spot only from the opposite direction, just like the surface of Earth and its two-dimensional fully closed curve. Of course, today within the mainstream scientific thought there is much evidence that the expansion of our universe is real, but still it doesn't solve the infinity of it. At least in my mind. Even though the probable fact that our universe is just a part of a multiverse neighborhood where our cosmos is expanding into something bigger, to me it is only stretching the infinity out, only this time far beyond our borders. Maybe one day we will find the definite answer.

From the other perspective, if we are looking at the 'infinite' trouble only from our rational mind, we have to admit that the human race is extremely young, evolutionarily speaking. The real handicap is that we are living in a 'finite' world. Everything that surrounds us has its beginning and the end. At least it seems so, and even though we today learned a great deal about our position within the celestial realm, we only scratched the surface of it. We only managed to set a foot or two (or 12 to be exact) on the Moon, and we only started to explore our own solar system. Due to our own limitations in the form of our unwillingness and hesitations to deal with the unknown and/or our own animosities for each other in the form of militant behavior throughout our history, this is still a very slow process, but inevitably, one day, in the not-so-far future, the time will come when, lackingenough energy to sustain humanity as we know it, we all will have to start looking up, not for searching for the divine but for our own pure survival. Then our own evolution will speed up and skip some gears toward answers to many inconceivable questions.

Night Sky and Perseids by Brad Goldpaint (Goldpaint Photography)*

Anyway, astronomy is one of few scientific playgrounds simply because it contains many unanswered questions. There are plenty of proposed theories that will surely stay in their theoretical phases for many years until we finally get ultimate proof. It is entirely based on studying electromagnetic radiation we are picking up on the surface of Earth and several instruments in orbit. All possible frequencies within electromagnetic radiation are telling us many stories from its origin point and the path it is traveling through. Of course, studying full spectrum requires big and even large instruments in both size and money needed for their manufacturing. Especially if they require being lifted into orbit in order to avoid atmospheric disturbances. Secondly, it is amazing what must be done in order to look up one particular spot in the heavens simply because everything in the cosmos is in motion. We need to solve the rotation and revolution of the planet and, if posted in orbit, compensate for the extremely fast speed of the spacecraft carrying the instruments. As the monitoring object is farther away, the less amount of radiation is picked up by the sensors, so astronomy is one of those indirect or asynchronous sciences where we need to collect the data for some time, which could be years or even more time, and then for an equally considerable time analyze the data, compare the resulting images, and conclude science out. For example, take the Kepler orbital space laboratory. It orbits the Sun following the Earth in order to get a clear view toward the monitoring stars, and it is simply continuously taking images of 'nearby' stars (about 145,000 stars) and sending the data to the Kepler team for analysis. Over time, the team and their sophisticated software measure slight brightness changes during possible orbits of potential planets, and only by these small changes in brightness of the main star is it possible to roughly determine the size and orbit of the planet causing the dimming of the light from the star. However, in order to get all those facts out of the data, Kepler must take lots of images and cover the planet's full orbit. That means in order to confirm the planet, Kepler must take at least two images separated by time in order to confirm the revolution time of the planet. It's a slow process, and considering lots, and I mean LOTS, of received data, I am sure we will hear about more and more planets found by this technique.

Among all possible wavelengths within the full electromagnetic spectrum, the coolest one is the one situated between infrared and ultraviolet waves. The greatest visible light. The one we can see. Even though it is just a tiny portion of the full spectrum, this is the one we can enjoy with our own eyes. This is the one we see every night we look up toward the amazing heavens. Thanks to relatively cheap optical instruments, we are able to enhance the view and zoom it in and see further. Some time after I enjoyed my optical set toy I mentioned earlier, I got my own first refracting telescope. It was small without any tripods and fully mobile, but looking at the moon for the first time was something I will always remember. Discovering the fact with my own eyes that Venus, like the Moon, also has phases and seeing it in its crescent shape was the next best thing I experienced. I still have it, and every time I grab this small piece of optics, I can't help myself and instantly remember the times when I was fixing it on the ladder positioned on the top of our garage and spending hours looking toward the stars.

Transit of Mercury over Sun by Sky-Watcher 150/750

Today I have in my possession an educational reflecting telescope with a respectable mirror size and focal distance mounted on an equatorial tripod along with a motion tracking system capable of fixing the spot on the sky for hours. Unfortunately, amateur astronomy requires lots of free time, which I regretfully don't have enough of. In addition to a lack of free time, watching the heavens requires an unpolluted environment, and life in big cities is beneficial for everything but astronomical observation. Sometimes I feel like that character from the Michael Keaton movie—I don't remember the title now, but in the movie he found a way to clone himself in order to get finished various tasks in his life... Similarly, I would like to have one me for work, one for astronomy and science, one for family and writing... Simply, the day is too short, and to support the family and life, the work is always number one. But it is a good thing to have spare moments and spend them in the most enjoyable way. Even today, from time to time, I point the scope up and peek a little. Sometimes I take photos out, like this one of Mercury transiting the Sun disc.

To conclude with some short 'observations', if you want to do some amateur astronomy, you will need star maps. Before they were black and white and printed in the form of atlas books. Today all that changed with the speed of the internet and graphic tools on the average personal computer. They are all online, and you can access them with many apps. I recommend 'Celestia' and 'Stellarium'. Even without a real telescope, they provide endless fun.

Image refs:
https://amsmeteors.org/2017/08/viewing-the-perseids-in-2017/
* https://goldpaintphotography.com/

Kepler project:
http://kepler.nasa.gov/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fnbJ1hZik

** Toolkit box (~1978):


Refs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
http://www.stellarium.org/