As usual, Thursday was evil dex night. It was also a moonless night, so I headed out to Anza Borrego again for the first real tryout of my new equatorial mount. For those of you wondering why I don’t go out to Joshua Tree instead, it’s because that’s a 4-hour drive. Anza is more like 2½ hours, which is plenty long enough. The final half hour looks mostly like this:

I got out there around midnight, and when I stepped out of the car, I discovered that it was—warm. Really? What’s up with that? It was also gusty. It turns out there was a Santa Ana-ish wind blowing up there, and blowing pretty hard. In fact, hard enough that I was wondering if my camera would stay steady. But I went ahead and set everything up, got what I thought was a good fix on the north celestial pole, and pointed my camera toward the Milky Way. I picked a shot with a single tall plant jutting into the sky, and opened the shutter. It turned out not to be a plant at all:

It’s a power pylon, with a bunch of power lines strung across it. I was disgusted. So I packed up and drove to a different spot. When I got there, I set up the camera in the lee of my car so the wind wouldn’t toss it around, and then went hunting for the NCP again. Before I could get started, however, I was viciously attacked. I still don’t know what it was, but it was about the size of a golf ball and packed solid with the most unbelievable thorns. It stuck to my shoe, and when I bent over to brush it off it stuck to my hand and delivered about a dozen razor-sharp thorns into my skin. I yelped, tried to brush it away, and it ended up sticking to my shirt. So now I had this monstrous thing stuck to my shirt, my hand was bleeding, and I was trying to figure out how to get rid of it. Finally I did, and pulled out all the thorns too. Eventually the bleeding stopped.

I didn’t realize this was such dangerous work. But I soldiered on, got confused about which star to sight on, and eventually found Polaris about half an hour later. Then I looked up and saw the moon rising just barely above the horizon. The moon? I didn’t think it was due to rise until about 4 am. I must have read the chart wrong, because it was 2 am and it was coming up. But even though this was bad news, I will say that it was pretty magnificent. The wind was kicking a lot of dust and dirt into the sky, which made the moon glow a bright rust color:

The resolution is lousy thanks to the dust, but the color is pretty amazing—and it was even more spectacular in real life. Unfortunately, this now meant that I had both a hazy sky and a rising moon to ruin my pictures. But what could I do? I wanted to test the equatorial mount, so I took some pictures. Here’s the Milky Way again:

Thanks to the moon and the haze, the picture itself isn’t that good. However, shooting at a low ISO with a long exposure on the equatorial mount definitely produced a less noisy image. What’s more, the mount worked pretty well. It wasn’t quite dead on, but it did well with a 5-minute exposure.

On the other hand, I failed completely with the RAW images. I took five RAW shots, and they were noisy as hell—including some regular red streaks all over the frame. I stacked them using DeepSkyTracker, which worked fine but didn’t remove the red streaks. I also found myself unable to do much editing on the image after it was finished. There’s obviously something I’m missing here, so I’ll keep looking into it.

Hopefully I’ll do better this week. I’m headed up north on Thursday to visit a friend in Chico, and since I’ll be up all night I plan to drive into Plumas National Forest, which is supposed to be one of the truly dark spots in California. If the weather cooperates, I should be able to get some good pictures. We’ll see.

UPDATE: I almost forgot! I was also going to try stacking the RAW frames in Photoshop to see how well that worked. Answer: it seems to work pretty well. Here are the five stacked RAW images, aligned in Photoshop and then image processed:

The alignment worked well, and when I look at the full-size images it’s clear that the stacked version has far less noise. However, the red streaking is even worse. I’m not sure what’s going on here. If these are hot pixels, then (a) my camera has a lot of hot pixels and (b) they aren’t appearing at the exact same spot in each frame, so the noise reduction process isn’t catching them. For now, I’m still puzzled. I may need some pro advice here.

I’m also still unsure of which produced better results: the stacked image using the stacking algorithm’s noise reduction, or a simple JPG image using the camera’s internal noise reduction. Hopefully I’ll get some really nice, clear images next Thursday without moon or haze. That should help the comparison.

Carolyn Kaster/AP

Compare and contrast:

The Washington Post on trade: “Trump’s confrontational behavior has left America’s allies — and many Republicans and Democrats at home — aghast. But setting aside his approach and mannerisms, there’s some truth to what he’s saying.”

The New York Times on North Korea: “When President Trump declared that he did not really need to prepare for his legacy-defining meeting with North Korea’s leader, he drew sighs or snickers from veterans of past negotiations. But he had a point: In his own unorthodox way, Mr. Trump has been preparing for this encounter his entire adult life.”

Can we just stop this, please? The fact that Trump occasionally says something sort of partly true in the middle of a hailstorm of ignorance and lies is really not worth a headline.

Here’s a fascinating chart on an obscure subject. I can’t imagine what prompted me to look this up, but here you go:

The barely-visible red bits represent US quotas on dairy imports, part of the wildly complicated array of policies that govern the dairy industry in the United States. The International Trade Commission described it in 2001, and nothing much has changed since then:

The U.S. dairy sector is also characterized by heavy government intervention. U.S. dairy policies center on four major areas: federal marketing orders, federal price supports, dairy compacts, and international trade policy….U.S. trade measures restrict imports mainly through the imposition of TRQs….TRQs apply to fluid milk as well as processed and high value-added products. High over-quota tariff rates restrict imports within quota levels, except under exceptional market conditions.

TRQs are Tariff-Rate Quotas. We set very tiny quotas for the amount of dairy product that can be imported at low or zero tariffs, and above that the rate is so prohibitive that imports cease entirely. For example, the price of dry skim milk currently runs around 80 cents per pound, while the over-quota tariff is about 50 cents. The price of butter is $2.30 per pound, while the over-quota tariff rate is about 80 cents. No one can sell dairy into the already glutted US market with tariffs like this, so the TRQs essentially act as hard quotas on dairy imports.

In total, US import quotas amount to about 2 percent of total dairy production, and it’s only that high because of cheese. For other products, the quotas amount to well under one percent of production. For all practical purposes, then, this is US dairy trade policy:

• We allow a little bit of foreign cheese to be imported.
• Everything else is subject to tariffs so high that we allow no imports at all.

Just thought you’d all like to know this. Roughly speaking, this is the way every country works. Everybody protects their dairy industry, though the details vary considerably in how they do it. We’re no different.

BY THE WAY: I don’t doubt that Donald Trump’s outrage over Canadian milk tariffs is real. I’m sure he hasn’t the slightest clue that the US restricts dairy imports far more than Canada does.

This is news:

PM Justin Trudeau of Canada acted so meek and mild during our @G7 meetings only to give a news conference after I left saying that, “US Tariffs were kind of insulting” and he “will not be pushed around.” Very dishonest & weak. Our Tariffs are in response to his of 270% on dairy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2018

I feel so out of touch. I thought our tariffs were put in place for national security reasons. I guess I must have heard wrong.

Michael Kappeler/DPA via ZUMA

Apparently our president decided he was starving for some badly-needed media attention last week. Here’s the rundown:

• On Thursday announces he will be leaving the G7 meeting early.
• On Friday announces he will pardon Muhammad Ali even though Ali has nothing to be pardoned for and Trump surely knows it.
• Follows up with an obviously prepared provocation that Russia should be readmitted to the G7 even though Russia itself doesn’t care.
• Arrives late to the G7 meeting, forcing the postponement of his bilateral meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.
• After pissing everyone off with his “national security” tariffs on steel and aluminum, announces that he thinks the G7 should just drop all tariffs entirely.
• Tells reporters his relationship with G7 leaders is a “10,” but then blasts them for their trade policies. “It’s going to stop. Or we’ll stop trading with them….We’re like the piggy bank that everybody’s robbing, and that ends.”
• Promises to control Iran’s nuclear ambitions “with or without them”—whatever that’s supposed to mean.
• On Saturday morning, arrives late for an 8 a.m. breakfast held with the G7’s Gender Equality Advisory Council. Since we know Trump is an early riser, this is obviously a calculated insult.
• Skips out early as promised, missing sessions on climate change and clean energy, as well as a working lunch to discuss protecting the world’s oceans.

Mission accomplished! It’s all meaningless spectacle, but Trump has completely dominated media coverage for days and demonstrated that he’s an alpha male who couldn’t possibly care less about other world leaders—and if they don’t like it, then fuck ’em. Now he’s going to Singapore, where there will be lots of pageantry and red carpets and they know how to treat a guy right. As a bonus, he has also confirmed to the folks back home that he doesn’t care about gender equality, climate change, or any of that environmental crap.

For Trump, this is the definition of a successful meeting. He literally got every single thing he wanted out of it.

And do check out this photo. Sure, Trump’s expression is priceless, but it’s really Shinzo Abe who tells the story here. He knows exactly what Trump is up to:

Will this little girl's love of marshmallows doom her to failure later in life?Image Source/ZUMAPRESS

You know all about the marshmallow test, don’t you? A researcher shows kids a marshmallow and tells them they can eat it now, or, if they wait a bit, they can have two marshmallows. If the kid waits, it shows excellent self-discipline and the ability to delay gratitude, which helps in later life.

There’s only one problem: the studies demonstrating this are kind of crappy: small sample sizes, upper middle class kids, etc. Recently, though, a professor at NYU came across an old NIH study that administered the marshmallow test to a thousand diverse 4-year-olds. When the kids were recontacted at age 15, the results were dismal: there was hardly any correlation at all between doing well on the marshmallow test and doing well later in life. But over at Vox, Brian Resnick tells us there was this:

His paper also found something that they still can’t make sense of. Most of the predictive power of the marshmallow test can be accounted for kids waiting just making it 20 seconds before they decide to eat the treat. “So being able to wait for two minutes, five minutes, or seven minutes, 2 min, 5 min, or 7 min, the max, it didn’t really have any additional benefits over being able to wait for 20 seconds.”

That makes it hard to imagine the kids are engaging in some sort of complex cognitive trick to stay patient, and that patient. It makes it hard to imagine the test is revealing something deep and lasting about their potential in life. And perhaps it’s an indication that the marshmallow experiment test is not a great test of delay of gratification or some other underlying measure of self-control.

I disagree! First of all, 20 seconds is a long time for a four-year-old. What’s more, those first 20 seconds are the most important. When it comes to emotional control, the biggest difference is not between the person who waits a few minutes to make a decision vs. the person who sleeps on it overnight. The biggest difference is between either of them and the person who’s always popping off instantly over something. That could be something as small as an impulse purchase or as large as getting into a bar fight over an imagined slight. In either case, if you make the effort to think for even a few seconds, you’re miles ahead.

That said, I doubt the marshmallow test really tells us much. But if it tells us anything, it’s probably about the value of not being a hothead.

Carl Bildt tweets some good news:

Risk of war between Denmark and Canada over Hans Island receding. We need good news these days. https://t.co/7boTSX1Hyc

— Carl Bildt (@carlbildt) June 8, 2018

I dunno. I just completed some extensive research on this thorny issue, and here’s my conclusion:

Sorry, Canada, this rock belongs to Denmark. Please remit “loser pays” fee of $100,000 (US dollars, mind you) to Drum Mediations LLC, Irvine, California. Failure to recognize this decision will brand you a lawless state in the court of public opinion and may even precipitate a nasty tweet from President Trump. You have been warned.

I’m so glad I’m not one of the poor schmoes rocking one of these license plates. Too late for a refund now, sorry about that.

A few days ago a duck was wandering around the street outside our house and Hilbert was ON IT:

Jim Thompson/Albuquerque Journal via ZUMA

The Trump administration has added a question to the 2020 census asking if you’re a US citizen. A lot of lefties think this is terrible because it might make undocumented immigrants less likely to be counted. That’s a legitimate concern, but probably not a large one—and it’s not why Trump is doing it. Ari Berman gets the story right today:

At a congressional hearing on Friday, another potential motive for the controversial census question was on full display: using the data to allocate political representation on the basis of the number of citizens in a district or state rather than the total population. Such a move would mean a fundamental shift in the way representation is determined, dating back to the country’s founding, when the framers of the Constitution decided the balance of representation would take into account populations that didn’t have the full rights of citizenship, such as slaves and women. It would also significantly diminish representation for areas with large numbers of immigrants and shift political power to whiter and more Republican areas.

As Berman points out, the Constitution requires the census to count “the whole number of persons in each State.” There’s no way of getting around that. But it doesn’t require the government to allocate congressional districts based on the raw census count. It’s just that we’ve always done it that way, and the Supreme Court has ruled that district lines have to adhere to the one-person-one-vote rule because “representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible to vote.” But do they serve non-citizens? Even those who are here illegally? There’s a possibility the court could rule that they don’t. The only way to find out is to have the data available and then give it a go. If they fail, maybe someone else will succeed later—but only if the noncitizens have been recorded separately in the first place. So that’s what they’re doing.

Republicans have displayed an impressive amount of creativity in finding ways to reduce the influence of people likely to vote for Democrats. First it was crack-and-pack; then trial lawyers; then hyper-gerrymandering; then voter ID laws; and now this. It never ends.