The Geeky Atheist

This week has been interesting. Although my wife and I came out to my parents back in March, we haven't mentioned anything to my wife's parents. On Saturday, they flew in to visit us for 9 days. After doing a cursory tweet about a slip-up I did tonight, I wanted to expand on my thoughts of when to come out of the closet as an atheist.

A little background. My parents were much less fundamentalist than myself or my wife's parents. My wife's family is fairly fundamentalist, centered around Pennsylvania and Virginia. These are the same group of people that we heard call Obama the antichrist, amongst many other things. While we did civilly talk politics tonight briefly, I don't really want to delve into that.

A couple of reminders for those stumbling across my blog for the first time. My wife and I deconverted recently and both were calling ourselves atheists by January of this year. We married just over 3 years ago, when both of us were fundamental, young-earth creationists. More about that here.

A few interesting things came up tonight:

• My stepdad mentioned to them that it was so nice to have a daughter-in-law that was a believer. I didn't ever know he said this to them.
• They said how nice it is for my wife to sing and me to play the piano at church (I did this as an atheist last Christmas). My wife and I are trying to schedule the Thanksgiving trip such that we just can't quite make it to church, "darn."
• They were asking me about some details they hadn't heard from me about what I was looking for when I met my then-to-be wife on Match.com.

The last one is where I made a small slip up. In passing I used the phrase, "I was a Christian." This is what I tweeted about:

GeekyAtheist: Slipped up a little with the in-laws tonight. In the middle of a conversation, I said, "and I was a Christian." They didn't catch "was."

A few interesting comments came in, and I realized what I then tweeted: "Trimmed tweets trigger terse thoughts." Thus, I decided it was time for a blog post.

The basic response I go was about coming out of the closet to them. While I am trying to be more and more open and never lying about my true convictions, I try to avoid the subject with some people. My in-laws are some of those people. It's not for fear about debating them -- it wouldn't be much of a debate, they are emotional people and would probably explode and not be able to actually discuss it. It's purely for the only reason I think religion has any merit. For some people, their faith that a guy in the sky is keeping an eye out for them is the only thing keeping them going. My in-laws are some of those people.

My father-in-law has been struggling in the job market for the past couple of years, but after getting a decent job last fall, he was laid off back around March again. He does several interviews every week, but nothing seems to come through. He has hopes that an interview he has lined up for Tuesday after they travel back will be a bit more fruitful. They wanted to support their child in her career and came out here to support her, and had to sacrifice a lot to do it. They are the type of people that won't take a handout, so our pitching in is more subtle -- I've been doing a lot of cooking, and leaving very little opportunity for them to pick up any of the tab.

But to them, God is a support structure. The last thing I would do to them is shake their support structure by asserting there is no God. While I obviously feel that I'm right, I don't think this is an opportune time to express our convictions. Since we only see them two, maybe three times a year, it's not that hard to structure our visits such that we can avoid being at church on a Sunday (not because we wouldn't sit through it, but purely because they always expect us to perform). Also, it's been surprisingly easy to deflect or avoid comments about God. For example, a friend from high school that I didn't really feel like debating the other night had this conversation with me:

me: just go with who's successful and do what you love
me: it'll work out
him: yeah
him: and the most important thing
him: stay in God's favor
him: one thing about being back in X... I've been cleaning up my life a little bit at a time
him: and that's probably the best thing for me
me: Yeah, X was a nice, laid back place to be
me: I don't know if I could live there anymore though
me: too remote

While I will definitely come out to him one of these days, it's fairly easy to avoid the topic at all. And the interesting thing about believers is that they just assume you are a believer, especially if they knew you were in the past. That's why my "was" comment earlier didn't ruffle any feathers. That's why my complete avoidance of the God subject in the chat above didn't raise an eyebrow. That's why I don't think I'll have any problems avoiding the topic.

If they do find out, it's not the end of the world. This is who we are, and we are proud of who we are. We are happy to talk about it, or to not talk about it. The only thing we ask is that we are respected, and we will continue to respect those that respect us with few exceptions.

So what does everyone else think? Anyone else in a similar spot?

Last night as many of you know was the peak of the Perseids. I had driven up into the mountains on Monday night as well, but left my tripod mount back at the house. I set back out again last night with all of my gear in tow. The results were spectacular. After my comments and pictures, I'll give a few tips that I didn't read anywhere else on how to best set up your camera to capture meteors.

The view from up at roughly 10k feet is absolutely spectacular. Here's a 30 second exposure of my view of Santa Fe. According to another observer, the lights at the very edge of the horizon is actually the start of Albuquerque. I believe that's true because between Santa Fe and Albuquerque is pretty much nothing.

You'll probably have to click to enlarge to see it. The boxes help guide you to it. The full size image is available here

Full size image

Full size image

I had a great time, but photographing meteors can be tricky. Here's some tips to ensure a few exposures:

1. Use a tripod. A must for anything nearing a 1 second exposure, let alone 30 seconds.
2. Either have a cable release, IR remote, or set your camera to shoot delayed on a timer. The pressure from you hitting the shutter button will nudge your camera causing a shake. You need to have the exposure start when you're not touching the camera.
3. Long exposures are great, but at a low ISO setting (ie, 200) the meteors won't register. I experimented with ISO 1600 and 2500 on these exposures. I was still able to do 30 second exposures without things being blown out.
4. Snap lots of pictures.
5. Pick a spot in the sky and try for 5-10 minutes. Don't rotate between every shot.
6. When sorting through the images, you can compare two shots of the same area of sky by using the arrow keys back and forth. This helps spot the faint ones.
7. Don't use built-in noise reduction. Even software noise reduction really affects the quality of the streaks.

Lastly, don't get too frustrated. As we all know, karma plays a large role in this, and obviously my karma is low. Nearing 2am, I told myself, "Last picture" about 4 times, and then finally started taking things down. By the time I had my tripod fully packed up, I had seen 3 bright meteors. That's really frustrating when you know you didn't capture any big ones in your exposures.

But then I realized, this was my first time, and I still loved it. Anyone else have any good exposures?

I've had a great summer for astronomy. At some point last year when I began to grasp the universe's true age, it filled me with a sense of wonder. But when I look back, I think it must have been the winter vacation home my wife and I rented out in the mountains of Virginia. The moon wasn't out and with the nearest town miles away, the view of the stars was simply stunning. I point to that moment as being what rekindled my love of the stars.

I began listening to several podcasts about astronomy:

• AstronomyCast
• 365 Days of Astronomy
• Blueshift

I yearned to watch the stars. Back in February when Comet Lulin was becoming visible, I tried unsuccessfully to capture it on camera. I knew I needed a telescope to satisfy my desires.

Fast-forward to The Amazing Meeting 7, I was part of the winning group of the auction to have a private planetarium and observing trip with Phil Plait.

This was a great experience, and I learned a lot. We did see a few globular clusters, binary stars, Jupiter and Saturn, but the biggest disappointment of the night was that this observatory was next door to two baseball fields. Despite not having a game on that night, the lights were on. Overcoming the odds, Phil and the great people at the planetarium helped guide us to things we could still see. This was the first time I had actually looked through a decent telescope at the sky, and I got hooked.

Returning back to my humble summer abode, I've been hunting for telescopes when I finally decided to see if there were any astronomy clubs in Santa Fe. There is one, but their site is horribly out of date. However, in searching I found another person who has a great domain name: Cosmonut.org. And he has a 20" Dobsonian. I was sold.

Unfortunately my wife just wasn't going to have a chance to make it out there with me because of her busy schedule, so I booked a trip myself. I drove 45 minutes out into the desert/mountains and we were at a lovely dark sky spot. The only thing impeding the view was that it was a full moon.

Despite not being Phil Plait, Peter Lipscomb had a mastery of the sky and we saw nearly everything on my list. If it weren't for the brightness of the moon, we would have been able to check off "galaxies" from my list. With his scope, we saw clearly the bands of Jupiter (including seeing roughly where the red spot is, even though the color contrast wasn't good enough to actually make it out), four moons of Jupiter and a 5th impostor (it's in the constellation of Capricorn), several globular clusters, a few nebulae, and we even were pointed to where the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon.

After the family of three left, I stuck around for a moment to try to take a few moon pictures, and Peter and I began chatting. I was picking is brain about astronomy, telescopes, and more. I wasn't completely useless -- I helped him load his scope into his truck. While we were chatting, I saw a meteor and he informed me it was one of the Perseids. I was a bit shocked because I thought it was too early. I asked him for his favorite, public dark sky spot, and he pointed me up the mountain through the Santa Fe National Forest up into Hyde Park. He was spot on.

I drove up there last night shortly after midnight. I arrived at the lookout point I had been to during the day two months ago. On the way up I was reminded I truly was in the forest. Deer lined the roads, and I could have sworn I saw a bear cub climbing up a hill as I came around a bend. I could have been mistaken, but the shape and proportions looked pretty spot on, but the darkness could have easily fooled me. Finally I arrived at the lookout point and stayed in my car. At first I didn't see much, and then a lone motorcycle came up and parked at the spot with me. It was silly of me to be scared, but honestly I was. I stayed in my car for a bit and noticed he was just standing off looking into the sky as well. I finally got out of the car and chatted him up a bit.

While we were chatting, I saw at least 30-40 meteors. It was beautiful. This was the perfect dark sky spot. Unfortunately in haste I left my camera tripod attachment at the house, and so I wasn't able to take any good pictures. I'm returning there tonight to try to get good pictures.

What amazed me was that with the roughly half-moon last night, I could see the faint cloudiness of the milky way in the sky. It was spectacular. Off in the distance I saw the lights of Santa Fe and then even further my new friend pointed out was the beginning of Albuquerque. The view was spectacular, not only of Santa Fe but of the sky as well. I want to experience this every night of my life.

I'm hoping to get some pictures tonight to share. Without the tripod mount, it was futile trying to take any pictures of the sky. If I get any good ones, I'll be posting them here. Hopefully I've inspired the itch to go look at the sky. I highly recommend doing it tonight, as the Perseids are in their peak. My personal viewing tips:

• Go out at least 15 minutes away from your nearest decent sized city. Light pollution is killer.
• Give yourself 20 minutes with no lights on for your eyes to adjust.
• Look into the north-eastern section of the sky.
• Do this slightly after midnight and watch for at least an hour. You'll see them.

Best of luck in your observing!