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The problem I
have with blogs is that they drain a lot of creativity and effort
that could be better invested in, oh, I don't know, photography,
or writing, or web design for clients. Remember clients? Not
to say that blogs are bad. I'm just saying that in the wrong
hands they turn into creativity sinks (tar pits for creative ambitions). So whenever I start worrying
too much about just how to say or display something here, I'm
going to just get it posted and get out. This is also a good
place to stash URLs, tips, and other things I don't want to
misplace. Maybe others will find them useful, too.
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This is an archive of 'Slowblog' notes from prior years.
[click here for current entries]
2011
11/24/2011. From 14mm ultrawides to a 2000mm F8 telephoto, From 1/1000 sec by the light of a nearby star to 14 hours in the dark night sky... All the action lately has been in the star- and sungazing sections.
10/11/2011. The Anti-Amy-and-David fall break vacation gave me a chance to indulge my ultra-wideangle fetish in some spectacular venues. As for the 14mm Rokinon, there's a lot to learn.
:: more ::
08/27/2011. Things have been happening inside "The Starry Night" section, but it's been kinda dull here at the top level. All the action has been out in the backyard. OK, here's a little something: I've found a combination that looks wide enough even for me. Try a Canon 5D and a Nikkor 16mm full-frame fisheye rectified using PTLens:
:: more :: :: more ::
06/18/2011. The sun puts on a pretty show today after a few weeks of intermission. There's not much X-ray action to speak of because all these active regions are well behaved, with simple, symmetrical, uncomplicated magnetic fields.
:: more ::
06/16/2011. An homage to Dr. Edward Burke, Jr. who passed away yesterday.
:: more ::
06/14/2011. Deploying some extra aperture under the starry sky. A 10-inch Ritchey-Chretien, a CCD camera, a solid and reliable mount. The almost full Moon? Brilliantly lit Hickory right over the ridge? Piffle. Who needs a decent sky with equipment like this?
:: more ::
06/06/2011. Silliness with Charlie Sheen and other exploding stars. A type II Supernova has erupted in M51 and it makes an irresistable target.
:: more :: :: more ::
05/31/2011. Bagged 'em! Just a few years ago, the existence of planets orbiting other stars was a matter of conjecture. Last night, using a 5-inch refractor and a CCD, I "saw" the shadows of two planets orbiting distant stars in Corona Borealis and Hercules. Here in the future, we have such lovely toys!
:: more ::
05/07/2011. Looking for the shadows of hot Jupiters, finally imaging Lord Rosse's spiral. All in a night's play for the modern amateur astronomer...
:: more ::
04/26/2011. I got a flat. And I couldn't be more pleased about it. I built an electroluminescent lightbox for taking flatfield images throughout the night rather than just at twilight. Cheap and easy. Here's how. (Now with examples!)
:: more ::
03/29/2011. Blink and a month goes by, eh? New workflow for Desert Exposure, may get to design a book for _________ (with Reny & Jack Higgs's buddy ________), have the new computer humming along nicely. Saw a chiropractor for "back trouble" and he fixed an out-of-position sacroiliac joint in a single visit -- I walk better today than at any time in two years, and no more leg pain! This week, I got felled by a stomach flu, but after a couple of days stood up, wobbled outside and found a clear sky, steady air, and the Sun far enough north to clear some pines and wildly active. The solar scope was still set up, under plastic and fleece from last week's visual inspection, none the worse for wear from a few days of mist. Have a look.
:: more ::
03/01/2011 Calibrating etc. Just a block of words to say that I am still alive. Computer meltdown and replacement; lots of software recovery and reconfiguration. Then three projects came over the transom each of which really needed a calibrated monitor. My old Spyder doesn't work under Win7 (it's ancient so I'm neither surprised nor perturbed). I bought a Spyder 3 Pro and it appears to work like a charm on this Inspiron 17r notebook and an attached secondary display (a big box, non-specialized Samsung 24-inch display). So far, so good. More to tell by and by..
02/02/2011 Lots of snow, lots of
clouds. Nothing much for show and tell. Work backward from
the link to see what there is to see. Worked out a carrier
for the telescope; got tired of not being able to indulge in staring
@ the sun for half the year so reworked a grab 'n go mount for that
(details here, along with photos of an M6.6 flare and notes abour running Focus Magic on 64-bit Windows -- it's a trick but it works); messed with the never-ending effort to use the
cul de sac as an observing station. The usual.
:: more ::
2010
12/24/2010 I
began Christmas Eve by photographing the birth and death of suns. There
is nothing allegorical or mystical about that: it is the literal truth.
At midnight, I was photographing Messier 1, the Crab nebula, the wreckage
of a star destroyed in the year 1054. Then I finished the night's
session with several photographs of Messier 42, a huge, star-forming
region in Orion.
:: more ::
12/09/2010: Incremental improvements matter
a lot. Better
filters, flatfields, practice with focusing aids, remote operations, combination
technique, etc etc. Take it all together, and it feels
like a new endeavor entirely: now, when I aim at something faint
and far away, it does not feel so much like a gamble, an experiment,
or a wish. Remove enough contingency and effort is often rewarded.
Now there is time to refine technique rather than resolve calamities.
When I open the shutter, I expect to
finish with a decent photograph. The trick is to make them better.
:: more :: :: more ::
11/09/2010: Clear nights in the backyard have
let me set up the 5-inch again and put it to work gathering tri-color data
on some deep sky standards. Refining technique, courtesy
of the Veil Nebula and the
Pinwheel Galaxy...
:: more :: :: more ::
10/10/2010: One weekend at North
Carolina's Doughton State Park near the Virginia border on
the Blue Ridge Parkway. Famed among amateur astrononmers as a dark sky
observing site, it's a little ironic that grazing evening sunlight put
on the best show for me. Here are first looks at the first cut of photos
made on three days in October in no particular order. More details,
bigger versions, and more photos to come, by and by,
:: more ::
9/25/2010: Re-arranging deck chairs... I
seem to be doing what I said I wouldn't:
spending time
better spent on clients' work re-arranging things here. Still, I think
a lot of
good stuff is getting lost or going missing owing to inconvenient and
"hidden" linking,
so I'm going to try to address that with a new menu up top. The rudimentary
item there for now has just three subsections (for the Moon,
the Sun,
and the stars) while everything
else is just salted down below. The menu should probably offer an "Out
West" section and a "Technical
Issues" section. There should also be a "Messing
About
in
Boats" section. Where would it end? I'm going to experiment some
with the simple menu and see what happens next.
Some recent highlights have all been filed
in a new subcategory ("The Starry
Night")
which I intend to use for all things telescopic that are not directly
related to solar and lunar sport.
Some good
solar stuff has ended up more or less hidden in there. So has one
of the best astrophotos I've made
in a couple of years. But that's
it for now. Really. I need to gather up the last year or two's night-sky
stuff (which means images, notes on preparations, projects, mods,
etc) and organize
that under the
TSN banner. A dark-sky prospecting trip should go there, too. And, and,
and. But little of that's going to happen today.
9/1/2010: For the last couple of months, I've been Staring
at the Sun. Now I've taken up Howling at the Moon. The same techniques I've
been learning and refining for hydrogen-alpha solar imaging pay off elsewhere
in the solar system. I'm not sure how I'm going to organize and provide navigation for different subjects
within The Slow Blog. Let's worry about that when you get back from the Moon.
:: more ::
8/7/2010: An M-Flare on the awakening Sun. I got a good
look at the Sun in the middle of the afternoon just as clouds began to move
in from the south. Did a double take. A very complex, very large, very bright
flare was wrapped around an intricate region of chromospheric detail (AR
11093). And then a cloud covered the Sun. Thirty-five long minutes later,
when the cloud moved on, there was still plenty to see. Six weeks after taking
up solar photography, I got a prominent mention for these images on Spaceweather.com.
:: more ::
8/2/2010: Baseball on the back of an
envelope. A couple of days ago (which is to say in the summer of
2010), the Colorado Rockies enjoyed a run of eleven consecutive hits against
the Chicago Cubs. An 11 hit streak has never happened before, it says right
here on the sports page.
:: more ::
July 30, 2010. Mulligans R Us. Focus
Magic is a wonderful product! I tried it out for my
solar images where it worked very well in that esoteric arena. Today
I put it through its paces on a terrestial panorama I attempted at City of
Rocks State Park in New Mexico in November 2007.
:: more ::
June 2010. If your skies are too bright
for deep sky viewing and your days are routinely clearer than your nights,
then maybe it's time to remember what Hank wrote at the end of Walden ("The
Sun is but a morning star...") and do some of your stargazing by day.
6/16. Getting (re)started.
I've been using a Lumicon 1.5A prominence filter for many years, and
this week have taken steps to improve my sungazing. :: more ::
6/17. I Found a good combination
of aluminum and glass to produce full-disk prominence photos with a Canon
20D or 50D and a Lunt 60mm solar kit. :: more ::
6/18. On the third day, I developed
a workflow to capture decent disk detail, too. :: more ::
6/19. Focussing, going all Ansel
with the color, avoiding slap-takes, refraining from starving the chip,
and playing music at frequencies humans cannot hear. :: more ::
ETC. Staring at the Sun is getting to be a habit, and
it's clearly not going to end any time soon. Dive in via any of the "more's" above
and see where it goes. There's navigation at the top of each page.
4/30/2010. I've been away from this for a while, but
I've got good stuff to come back with. I've upgraded from my Losmandy G11 telescope
mount to an Astro-Physics Mach1GTO. The first link goes to the third night,
when there was much rejoicing, and the second link goes to a nice (though flawed)
effort on Messier 3 a few days later. There are links forward and back to other
nights and notes in case anyone wants the deep skinny (probably tedious and
unhelpful unless you are similarly obsessed and afflicted).
:: more :: :: more ::
1/25/2010. Later that same day: When
the December snow melted, it saturated the ground. All day yesterday and all
last night, heavy rain fell -- as much as 5 inches in the watershed of the
upper Catawba. The highest water levels since 2004 sent the river into our
yards and over Rhodhiss Dam. Rhodhiss Dam is 65 feet high and 1,500 feet long.
Put a few feet of water over the top of that and it makes a considerable sight
and a mighty roar. Also a photo opp, since I missed the show in 2004 when the
lake got just a little higher than this. Have a look.
:: more ::
Fresh Tracks (1/25/2010): Wrapping up
my tenth CD (!) for the Caldwell County Traditional Musicians Showcases. I
love working on these since I get a lot of latitude to indulge some graphic
fantasies, so to speak. Some samples after the jump.
:: more ::
2009
In the
shop (12/27/2009): When I use my 5-inch refractor for just looking
(that is, when I'm not making photos through it), it's often mounted on
an alt-az mount that's simpler and easier on the back than the equatorial
I use for photography. The alt-az mount is on an old tripod which needed,
among other things, new feet. I know an excuse to play with an old lathe
when I see one.
:: more ::
Snow at Last (12/19/2009): We have
snow in Rutherford College. I put a calibrated wine bottle out last night
(I put piece of tape down the side marked off in inches — 2, 4, 6,
8, 10, 12). The bottle was 13.5 inches tall. 14 hours later, at 1 AM,
there was a mound on the table where the bottle once was.
:: more ::
A place Out West (12/14/2009): Here's
the latest notion. I buy a nice used RV (say, from a dealer in Arizona) and
drive it to a nice RV storage lot in (say) Belen, NM.
:: more ::
The Monty Hall Problem (12/10/2009): See,
there's this set of logic problems, or maybe it's one problem with many instances.
Anyway, it's come to be known as the Monty Hall problem. There's a really
good book about it called, reasonably enough, The Monty Hall Problem,
by Jason Rosenhouse. That's Dr. Rosenhouse to you and me. Allow
me to summarize.
:: more ::
Vintage Digital? (12/05/2009): I seem
to have gone a little retro. I switched to Canon a few years ago,
but lately I've been using an old war-horse of a Nikon. I miss the breed.
:: more ::
Nothing particularly dramatic tonight (11/27/2009): Mostly just making sure that what worked before is repeatable. So I aimed
at the North America nebula with the 200mm F2.0 on the Hap Griffin Canon
20D with the Astronomik 12nm H-a filter. I did not refocus. Three changes...
:: more ::
 It's
not all night work here (11/23/2009): A friend and former colleague
asked if I'd shoot some publicity photos for a duet, The Clear Branch.
We met up on the Blue Ridge Parkway and shot for a few minutes at the Cone
Manor. The results aren't bad, especially considering the main lights consisted
of just two small strobes. Most of my work went into finishing some restoration
projects that the Cone Manor had undertaken (see the gap in the white beadboard
ceiling)...
:: more ::
(11/10/2009): I'm using thick clouds
and heavy rain sent from many states away by tropical storm Ida to prepare
a vintage, manual-focus 200mm F2.0 EDIF Nikkor for action under the stars
during the next clear spell. Almost exactly one year ago (see 11/18/2008),
I was messing with this glass for daylit use, but now I remember why I bought
it.
:: more ::
:: even more ::
:: son of even more ::
Two thousand seconds (11/05/2009): that's
how long the shutter was open to get the photograph above. It was shot under
a brilliant, almost-full Moon. On a dewy night when I could barely see two
hundred stars from one horizon to the other, this thirty-three minute exposure
shows nebulae in a rich, 14-degree wide swath of the northern constellation
Cygnus.
:: more ::
A really eclectic note (10/24/2009) which
will may at first seem to have little enough to do with photography. But
that's the way things go: you do x to help with y. So I've been rebuilding
gear to regain access to some of my favorite places. Once I get there, Lord
knows I'll make photographs. First, the November National Geographic does
not have my shot of the Moon and Venus. Casserole, casserole (quoting Doris
Day). Next time. Second...
:: more ::
A really esoteric note (8/2/2009) which
will mean something only if you, too, are waging a battle against your
neighbors' nightlight fetishes, and recognize and can string these terms
into a sentence without breaking a sweat: "Baader 7nm hydrogen-alpha filter,"
"parfocal," and "Epoch 2010."
:: more ::
We turned left at Albuquerque instead of again
going right (7/24/2009). Which means that as soon as I get caught
up on some clients' webwork, I'm going to reward myself by working up a
new folio of photographs from SW New Mexico, including the Gila Cliff Dwellings,
stars and storms over the Casitas de Gila, a quick look at El Malpais National
Monument, hummingbirds, an honest to God wild rattlesnake, and whatever
else I can mine from 28,000,000,000 bytes of raw images I hauled home.
If I promise to put it here, eventually I will.
Night
at the Casitas de Gila, Gila, New Mexico.
210 sec total exposure, 10-22mm EFs Canon @ 13mm, F4; Canon 50D
Seven, 30-second exposures ISO 1600, aligned and averaged. Foreground
and background processed seperately to retain detail in each.
National Geographic Magazine (6/16/2009) just
asked me if I "would be amenable" to having one of my photographs
considered for their "Visions of Earth" series. These are double-page
spreads that run in the front of every issue. Well, gee, I guess I wouldn't
mind.
:: more ::
I scored another APOD a couple of days ago (4/26/2009) using the 5-inch A-P mounted on that trailer I
was on about down below. Lots of updates to that tale, so let's just link
again. Scroll down if you've already been there. Is this cheating in
blogoville? Sue me. And now... Hello,
Dolly!
:: more ::
I went stargazing in New Mexico this morning
(4/2/2009). Steve Cullen offered a get-acquainted promotion: spend
an hour using a remote-controlled 20-inch Ritchey-Chretien his company, Lightbuckets,
maintains in the Sacramento Mountains between Cloudcroft and Mayhill. I
found his offer just before it expired and got my observing run set up
just under the wire. The last week of March was cloudy and windy in the
Sacramentos, so Steve moved the last few guest sessions to the company's
observatory in the New Mexico bootheel, near Rodeo, in the afternoon shadow
of Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains. The Rodeo instrument is 20% larger and
feeds a far more efficient camera; retail on the telescope, mount, and
camera is somewhere north of our mortgage (and the usual rent is $100/hour).
While the sun came up in North Carolina and miles of clouds dropped inches
of rain, "my" telescope
mined 218 megabytes of deep sky data just ahead of the New Mexico dawn,
here distillled using Maxim DL for this quick look:
|
Messier 3, 18 minutes luminance plus
6 minutes each in R, G, and B. Additional 10s, 30s, and 60s luminance
frames retain core detail. 24-inch RCOS carbon-truss Ritchey-Chretien,
Apogee Alta U42 CCD. Thanks to Lightbuckets for the hospitality! |
:: Not much more to tell just yet. Will add an enthusiastic
jump by and by. ::
So I've been working on a trailer (3/21/2009). Not
the kind I worked on a couple of years ago ("book trailers," where
we tried to sell books using a tool designed by and for people who'd rather
wait for the movie; that was bright, wasn't it?). But the kind that will
let me haul a telescope up 'n out from under these piney woods into the
big clearing at the top of the driveway. There'll be some nifty metalwork
and crude woodwork involved, and I'm going to love spending some time down
in the shop rather than here at the computer, where life has been way too
busy. Recession, what recession? They're killin' me!
:: more ::
Who has a time-lapsed lunar eclipse? (1/16/2009). My
year began with an interesting request. A filmmaker working on a PBS project
asked if I had images that could be used to put together a time-lapse film
of a total lunar eclipse. Well, maybe...
:: more ::
2008
|
| Messier 31, the Andromeda galaxy and
companions: a 62 minute exposure through a 5 inch F6 A-P refractor
with a Canon 50D, ISO 1600, 60-sec subframes. Data aligned in DeepSky
Stacker, histogram-stretched in Photoshop CS4. Please click
the image for a 1024-pixel version. (Or get lost
in the stars with the next effort.) |
One billion pixels under the stars
(11/30/08). Live view on a Canon 50D and some new alignment and stacking software renew
my years-long effort to do truly decent astrophotography without having to
transport and rebuild an observatory every single time I want to shoot something
way out there in the dark.
:: more ::
Addendum to "Fast Glass" (11/18/08) You know, at the end of the day, rather than mess with the 135mm F2 and the
200mm F2, would I rather just buy a 70-200mm F2.8 IS Canon zoom and have done
with it? That's the way I'm leaning after another day of walking around irritating
the cats by clicking at them while they sleep, bathe, walk, fight, play, and
otherwise provide lens-testing fodder. Day before yesterday was all about fast,
fixed, manual-focus lenses -- he-man Magnum Life Black Star straight-shifting
muscle-car photojournalist glass -- and today I've been using the 70-200mm
F4 plain jane Canon L-lens for comparison. And you know what? Crank the ISO
to 2000 and let autofocus take care of sharpness, breathe carefully, shoot
straight... and the results are usually just about as good or better. So I'm
thinking a good investment would be the faster, image stabilized version of
that lens. IS to stop my shake; a stop faster to help stop subject motion....
is this a case of taking back in the footnotes most of what's been said in
the text? We'll see.
Fast Glass (11/16/08), anyone
who's known me for more than four years knows I've always been a Nikon guy
(Nikon FTn, 1971, too many to count since then). There are places I can turn
up with my Canons and earn doubletakes. The point being that I have decades
worth of good glass that hasn't seen a lot of duty lately. This is about to
change. Here's why.
:: more ::
All day yesterday, into the night,
and through one pot of coffee this morning (11/12/08), I've been
trying to get Photoshop CS4 Extended, part of the Design Premium upgrade
from Adobe, to do its thing without throwing a program exception ("The instruction
at '0x0_____' referenced memory at '0x0____'. The memory could not be 'read'.")
I tried several solutions recommended by experts and by novices all the
way back to CS2. Reinstalled, made a dedicated account, dumped old DLL's,
got rid of disused programs, cleaned out the registry. Etc. But what worked
(and worked completely) was turning off hardware acceleration on my video
cards. Thus does photography resemble systems analysis. Maybe I'll re-accelerate
the cards incrementally after I get some work done; maybe I won't. I have
nothing to add to this, so there is no jump.
Starting about three A.M. (10/19/08), I've been working up some photos I want to work on like this homage
to Ansel Adams from last week's travels in northern New Mexico. Nevermind why
I am disgusted with the arc of my projects right now, but I really need to
work on some photos that I still care about. While organizing last week's take
(see The Slowblog's entry about 8 and 16gb
CF cards — we're talking several thousand shots), I realized
that a great number of A-list photos from Wyoming from last year had never
been worked up either (I'd only skimmed the cream for a first look, as
shown on the year-old link on my home page). So there's still that to
look forward to. And there are some in situ studioesque shots for a local jewelry
designer to work on for his new website, and some weddings to prepare for,
and, well, there's probably still reason to pick up a camera tomorrow. I'll
be back into it soon enough. More fresh New Mexico stuff after the
jump, and no more whining. Maybe.
:: more ::
The only thing special about this
photo (10/14/08) of an old Chevy pickup truck is that it is the first
of a thousand or so RAW images recorded beyond the 8GB mark on a
16GB compact flash card in a Canon 20D. Just before Amy and I flew to New
Mexico for a few days, Amazon offered a Transcend 16GB CF card at a ridiculously
low price. (It's twice as big, 3x as fast, and 4x cheaper than my trusty
8GB Lexar card.) The night before we left, I shot a few frames with it to
verify that the Canon could see its full size and could write to it. Then
I routinely erased the test frames by reformatting the card... and cut its
size in half. The 20D saw it as an 8GB card; Windows saw it as an 8GB partition
and 8GB of unallocated (and unallocatable) space. None of the partition managers
I had or could download could restore its full size. After wasting a couple
of hours trying to get the space back, I found the solution.
:: more ::
When Good Drives Go Bad (9/9/08) There
was this sharp "tink!" and my G: drive disappeared. Of course
I knew better than to try to restart it, but I did anyway, and all I got
was the soft periodic click of death as the heads tried to get oriented...
New rules to live by and a question to ponder more seriously: how many
pictures should I
keep, anyway?
:: more ::
Something
Completely Different (8/2/08) A tip for would be WebYep users; a return
to websites for writers; Flash-encpsulated DVD for a client's website; and
down to the sea in (very small) ships...
:: more ::
Color Calibration
(7/25/08) In the previous note, I parenthetically carry on about this Samsung
243T monitor. It's about three years old; it originally sold for 6-8x what
I paid for it. It worked very well right out of the box; I fixed the base
(although it worked OK with the broken base, as my eBay seller promised it
would) with just $6 worth of JB Weld epoxy; and I just now calibrated it....
:: more ::
Technology
Tempest (7/20/08) Monitors, iPods, and car stereos... Three years
ago, the Samsung 243T was a $1,600+ monitor. I just bought one on eBay for
$243 including shipping (oddly enough). It has a cracked base, but so what?
At worst, I'll put it on a monitor support arm, and I might try that anyway.
By all accounts this is a far better monitor for Photoshop [it's
fabulous! 7/25] than the one I bought a couple of weeks back for twice
the money.
:: more ::
Lightning
fried another monitor (7/14/08), so I'm now down two Viewsonic 19-inch
screens in a few months. BreezeBrowser is making quicker work of the second wedding
I've used it on (but I'm still learning some basic stuff about making it work
well). My BVS batteries worked a treat for a studio shoot for a CD and book cover BUT something
is awry with the company.
:: more ::
Keep
up with the domain names you give a damn about! (5/31/08) I've
just spent a week getting one back for my wife . . . The
real lesson is that I need to triple-check the status of those I maintain
for others.
:: more ::
BVS
Pulsar battery packs (5/30/08): I got really tired of
having to wait for my studio strobes to recycle, and I hated having
to look for outlets and string long power cords all over creation
at remote shoots. Killing two birds with one stone, I bought a BVS
Pulsar 3.1 kit and prepared my Canon Speedlites for location
duty . . .
:: more ::
Alert!
Chipset heat sink not detected, system halted! (5/25/08) With
four websites and two portfolios begging me to work on them, a major
monthly update for Desert Exposure just days away . . .
This. Was. Unacceptable. I rebooted my machine (a Dell 4600C) to
finish an XP update cycle and that's the message it gave me. 2 seconds
into its boot cycle, it just stopped. Again. Then again. So I took
out my soldering iron and went to work.
:: more ::
Going
a little retro (5/16/08): I took some of
the take from the big wedding over to the parents of the bride. Nice
Flash gallery built in Photoshop. It looked good on their computer
and I do enjoy the company of happy clients. Except that the navigation
was cropped out by their tiny monitor which made it a lot less elegant
to view than it should have been. My first thought was to adjust
the settings. But my second thought was that this is just a specific
instance of a general problem . . .
:: more ::
Reinventing
wheels (5/12/08): So a couple of things
have come out of my being overwhelmed with wedding shots. First,
it's not like this is a new field to anyone but me. There's software
and there are specialized vendors out there who exist to make this
profitable. I looked at a couple of software packages and went with
the simpler, cheaper of the two . . .
:: more ::
Managing
worry (4/26/08): I shot a big wedding last weekend. Big
for me, anyway. 3000 files to sort. Had some scares. First, it was
supposed to be an outdoor affair. I'd walked the grounds ahead of
time with the father of the bride, so I knew just what to expect.
Ha. . .
:: more ::
I GET QUESTIONS....
DID I SHOOT THE ECLIPSE LAST WEEK? You bet. Looky:
February 20, 2008. There were clouds moving in fast,
sucker holes to the north of me, sucker holes to the south. I was
going to let this show go by but thought, you wuss!, all that gear
just sitting here and no more total lunar eclipses until 2010. Now
get out there and see what you can get. So... this. I put the telescope
on a Losmandy G11 mount, roughly polar aligned it (I couldn't see
Polaris), then waited under roaring pines for a sucker hole to move
over Moon's place in the eastern sky. Didn't take long. Didn't last
long, either: I got two frames, and I never saw the Moon again. This
is the better of the two clicks.
Techstuff: Astro-Physics 5-inch F6 |
Canon 20D | RAW mode | 2 seconds @ iso 200
Five minutes before totality.
|
