Then & Now

Photography Division

PAPAGENO writes: “Much has been said about our selfie-obsessed culture, but I thought I’d add some perspective.

“I’ve been scanning my parents’ photos and 8-millimeter movies. (Both of them passed some years ago.) I just went through more than a hundred photos from their 1987 trip to China. And I kept exactly three — because those were the only ones that had my mother in them. None of them had my father. The rest were endless discardable shots of landmarks and scenes that meant nothing to me.

“If we were traveling today, we would take landmark shots, perhaps, but we would know that you could always find better photos of Tiananmen Square or the Forbidden City on the Internet. It may be a subject for ridicule, but it’s actually much more interesting for our friends and especially our children to see pictures of us enjoying those trips.

“‘Would you like me to take one of you two together?’ Nobody would have ever offered that in 1987, yet now it happens all the time. Say what you will about modern times, but that has to be a plus. (Bulletin Board says: That offer might well be more common nowadays, but it was surely not invented after 1987.) My travel photos now have as many shots of me and my partner as they have discardable scenery shots that will mean nothing to anyone else.

“I wish I had more photos of my dad. And I wish I could tell him: ‘Move in closer! I want Mom to fill the frame!’ So many people shots have a fingernail-sized person so tiny you can barely make them out with a magnifying glass.

“I sometimes joke that on family trips, Dad would say: ‘Get out of the way! I’m taking a picture!’ Of all the thousands of family-vacation photos and movies I’ve been going through, how I wish more of them actually contained family.”

BULLETIN BOARD SAYS: Perhaps just coincidentally, we recently ran across this fine article about Anatol Josepho, the man who invented that original selfie generator, the photo booth: tinyurl.com/photo-booth.

Then & Now

Just a Coincidence? Division (Architectural Subdivision)

GREGORY J. of Dayton’s Bluff reports: “Subject: A tale of two churches.

“I’ve been doing research into the history of St. Mary’s Catholic Church, which is located in the Lowertown area of St. Paul.

“As sometimes happens when digging up the past, something unusual turned up. This is a very brief version of the story of two churches separated by 10 miles and a hundred years, and how they are connected.

“The first St. Mary’s Church was built in 1865 in the fashionable residential area of Lowertown, at Ninth and Locust (now Lafayette). It was an impressive building constructed of blue limestone, with an 80-foot bell tower and an attached chapel. At its dedication, it was declared to be ‘the handsomest church in the city’ and ‘a gem of architectural beauty.’

“It was a sturdy church, and it survived, with only some damage to its roof and windows, a tornado which in 1904 blew down a nearby church, many houses and trees, and destroyed the High Bridge. However, the church could not survive the growth of the city of St. Paul. Its neighborhood began to change from residential to industrial as railroad tracks and businesses displaced homes. In 1921 a new church was built to the west at Eighth and Rosabel (now Wall). It is still in use today. The old church was sold to a lumberyard in 1922 and eventually was torn down.

“One of St. Mary’s very loyal and active parishioners was Mary T. Hill, wife of James J. Hill — yes, the James J. Hill. James wasn’t Catholic, but Mary was. During the summer, the Hills would move way out into the country to escape the heat of the city, to a farm they owned called North Oaks. Mary, her children and grandchildren would then attend Sunday Mass at St. Mary of the Lake Church in nearby White Bear Lake. Mary died in 1921, just as her own St. Mary’s Church was being replaced with a new one.

“At about the same time, St. Mary of the Lake was planning to build a new church. Three of Mary Hill’s very wealthy daughters decided to honor their recently departed mother by providing the funds for the new St. Mary of the Lake Church in White Bear Lake. But as we very well know, the rich can be an eccentric and quirky class of people — so the girls also stipulated that the new church would have to be an exact replica of their mother’s beloved St. Mary’s in St. Paul.

“Money talks, and thus it came to be that in 1926, an identical St. Mary’s Church came into existence in White Bear Lake, where it still stands today, a century after the original St. Mary’s ceased to be a church.”

The Permanent Family Record

Including: Then & Now (responsorial)

CHEESEHEAD BY PROXY, “back in Northern Minnesota”: “I enjoyed the stories from READS THE FUNNIES FIRST (Sunday BB, 1/16/2022), whose dad spent time with them when they were little.

“We used to play a similar vehicle game from the car while on road trips. Our kids would choose a low number and take turns as cars drove by on the opposite side, seeing which car was ‘theirs.’ One time my husband played along, and his car was a real junker, with smoke billowing out of the engine as it rumbled along. We all went into hysterics about ‘Dad’s car.’

“This was over 30 years ago, and I can still laugh about it!”

Random harvest?

RAMBLIN’ ROSE: “Subject: What Are the Odds?

“I don’t consider myself a particularly lucky person at games of chance. If there is a raffle, I know my ticket purchase is going to charity; I won’t be going home with anything new. I was once at an event where 25 door prizes were given out to about 150 attendees. You’d think my odds would be pretty good at being awarded one of those beautiful new books or lush plants, but no. Every ticket number within 10 numbers of mine was called, and there I sat, smiling for all of the cheering winners, and wondering if I had done something terrible in my childhood that caused me to be fated this way. And yet, perhaps luck is all in the perception.

“I got an envelope in the mail the other day. I knew instantly that I’d won a drawing, and I admit I wasn’t totally happy. Nope, this was the drawing for jury duty, and I’d won again. Now, our constitution guarantees you a trial by a jury of your peers, and I think that’s certainly better than what happens in other parts of the world. It is our civic duty to participate when called upon, and I will answer this summons. But really, I might have won this drawing too many times. This is the sixth time I have been chosen and summoned.

“The first time, I was in college in another state. I had taken up residence there, so I was in the pool of potential jurors. I was excused, though, as classes were in session at the time; I thought that was reasonable. They didn’t call me again.

“However, Minnesota seems stuck on me. I was called within a year of returning to our great state. They will deny it, but deep in my brain is the idea that new residents are somehow given their own special pool. Just saying. Anyway, I served. And I served again several years later when I was called by the U.S. Federal District Court. Just a couple of years later, my county called me, but excused me when they saw how recently I’d served. But they later called again, and once again I served. They’ve learned how to space it out so they don’t have to excuse you. And now I’ve won again. I will serve, but I am not looking forward to sitting in a room full of strangers during a pandemic.

“I wanted to calculate the odds of being called so many times in a 30-year period. The pool, or universe, is made up of registered voters, licensed drivers, and those with a state ID card within your county. My county has about 266,000 residents; I couldn’t find data on how many licensed drivers and registered voters we have, although I’m sure it’s out there. There are several more variables that would come into play, and I don’t have that information. The Math Nut happily assures me that being called repeatedly, while others are never called, is an indication that the process is truly random. OK, that’s a good thing. He, though, has been called only once in his life, and never in this county. He was called while in college, and Hennepin County didn’t excuse him even though classes were in session; he missed several days of school. I hope that process has changed.

“So, the moral is to do your civic duty and to be happy that the opportunity exists in this country. But really, I’d be happy to share.”

TRIMMABLE IN WHOLE OR IN PART:

This ’n’ that ’n’ the other ’n’ the other ’n’ the other

AL B of Hartland: (1) “I sat at a table with friends. As we ate breakfast, I noticed I had an elbow on the table, one man wore a hat and another looked at his cellphone. I wondered what my mother would have said. ‘No elbows on the table.’ ‘Take off that hat!’ ‘What in the world is that thing you’re looking at?’”

(2) “The feeders were bustling. ‘You eat like a bird,’ an aunt was fond of telling me when I picked at my food when I was a boy. I was trying to locate and disarm anything that might have been good for me. But I didn’t eat like a bird. A chickadee may eat 35 percent of its weight in food each day, and a blue jay might eat 10 percent of its weight. Generally, the smaller the bird, the greater percentage of its body weight is its daily food intake. They need more calories in cold weather.”

(3) “A fox squirrel found its way to the roof of our house. It began running laps and sounded like something between an immense buffalo herd and wingtip shoes in the dryer.”

(4) “I watched through my binoculars as a crow flew down to a rural road and picked up a McDonald’s bag and flew away with it. I hoped it was a gift-wrapped French fry.”

(5) “I was on stage at a storytelling festival far from home when an audience member asked how I’d become a storyteller. I told her the story of a neighbor’s barn fire that occurred during my boyhood. The frightened cattle scattered. One male calf was found 30 miles away. I learned a little bull goes a long way.”

Now & Then

Leading to: The highfalutin pleasures

RANCID BEEF of South St. Paul: “Subject: Can you play ‘Mr. Jaws’?

“Growing up in the 1970s, I listened to music on AM radio. WDGY and KSTP and KDWB are the stations I remember listening to most often.

“When my young friends and I called a radio station to request a song, the DJ would ask how old we were. We always said 14. The rumor was that radio stations wouldn’t play your request if you were under 14.

“I wonder sometimes how many requests the radio stations received back then from squeaky-voiced ’14-year-olds.’”

Unstuck in time

Everyone’s a Copy Editor Division

Email from DONALD: “Subject: NFL time-travel.

“From the ‘ON THE AIR TODAY’ section in Monday’s Sports section of the paper west of St. Paul:

“‘FOOTBALL’

“‘NFL playoffs: Arizona at St. Louis 7:15 Ch. 5, ESPN’

“Someone, alert Roger Goodell!”

BULLETIN BOARD SAYS: Roger Goodell? We’re going to alert Paul Tagliabue!

Hmmmmmmmm

Here’s The Mighty Wickard, “hailing from Blaine, where the driveways seem to grow longer each winter”: “Subject: Now Hear This.

“Today’s random thought: How come all the people who ‘hear voices’ that tell them to do bad things never hear stuff like ‘Go Shovel The Mighty Wickard’s Driveway’?”

Band Name of the Day: Hearing Voices

While my first love is still visual astronomy, I’ve also fallen in love with astrophotography over the last dozen years or so. While you can get a great view of the heavens with your naked eyes or through your telescope, visual astronomy has limitations, especially when seeing fainter detail and color. I’m not knocking our eyes, nor am I knocking telescopes. Both are highly efficient at gathering light. The problem is that our eyes only process a limited amount of light.

However, a camera can accumulate and store much more light than our eyes, even if you’re using a telescope. Photos can bring out a lot more detail and color. In all honesty, one of the biggest disappointments people have when they buy a telescope and look through it is that they don’t see the same detail and color that’s seen in astronomical photographs. Again, it’s not your telescope. It’s because your eyes cannot accumulate light the same way a camera does.

In the old days, astrophotography using film was real drudgery. Among the many limitations, you had no idea how good or bad your shot was until you developed the pictures, and most folks had to pay somebody else to do that. After personally experimenting with film astrophotography back in the early ’80s, I concluded that it just wasn’t worth the time and expense. Many others felt the same. In the ’90s, digital photography changed everything. You could instantly see your results. No more waiting for days to see how your shots turned out.

One of the simplest forms of digital astrophotography with a telescope is taking a smartphone or any other camera and shooting right through the scope’s eyepiece. You can get some amazing photos, especially with brighter celestial objects like the moon, planets, or even some bright deep-sky targets like the Orion Nebula, now available in the evening sky.

The biggest challenge is holding your phone steady enough over the eyepiece. On some of the latest models, you can set the camera app on your phone to night mode to significantly reduce or even eliminate camera movement. I can tell you from personal experience that the iPhone 13 has this option. You can also purchase adapters that will steadily hold the lens of the camera or smartphone over the eyepiece of your telescope. You can buy these adapters for anywhere from $25 to $100. Most of them are universal and will fit most phones. I’m a real fan of the Orion Telescopes SteadyPix Pro Universal Camera/Smartphone eyepiece mount. You can purchase one directly from Orion Telescopes for $49.99. As the name indicates, you can attach a smartphone or a small digital camera to it.

With some of the newer smartphones, it’s also possible to take wide-field images of the night sky without a telescope and get some amazing results. You can capture entire constellations, especially in the darker countryside. You don’t absolutely have to, but it helps to use an adapter to attach your phone to a tripod.

Another thing to consider when taking astrophotography with a smartphone and telescope is the exposure time. You won’t need any more than just standard exposure time for images of the moon and the brighter planets. But to get more details and better colors from fainter objects, you’ll need more exposure time. Unless your telescope has a drive system that keeps up with the Earth’s rotation, your absolute limit for exposure time is 30 seconds, which may be pushing it. With too much exposure time, your targets will appear blurry and streaky. You can usually get by with an exposure of 10 seconds or less. With most phones you need to download an app to control exposure time, ISO, and focal ratio. Since phone cameras, and telescopes, vary so much, you should play around with the values to get the best pictures possible. I use an app called ProShot on my iPhone.

Higher-level astrophotography with longer exposures and more quality requires sizable investments of time, money, and patience but can be very rewarding. Many astronomy outlets around the county can help you get started and get you deeper into the realm of astrophotography. I think one of the best places is Starizona in Tucson, Ariz. Dean Koenig, the owner of Starizona, developed a unique adaptive lens, the Hyperstar. It’s a tremendous advancement. It allows your telescope to gather light into your DSLR camera or astrophotography imager much faster. That makes it possible to get some really nice images even in places plagued with light pollution. To learn much more about the Hyperstar lens and astrophotography in general, check out starizona.com. They’ve helped many people, including yours truly.

Before taking the giant leap into heavy-duty astrophotography, though, have fun with your smartphone — with or without a small-to-moderate size telescope. Capture the light, but be patient!