Low ebb?

6/29/2026. What the hell's with me? It's been weeks since I've gotten out under the stars. There's a still-to-be-really-setup Wave 100i and Mele 4C sitting right over there. OK, on June 11, I did get out for a daylight Venus occultation and an appulse that evening using the R6 and 400mm on a full-manual rig --some nice photos, but only barely worth the bandwidth.

25 frames just before occultation stacked, 1/2000s ISO 800.
400mm F2.8 at F5.6 for reduced vignetting. Sure. Click it. Why not?

Mostly I've been messing about with the boat (prepping it, not rowing it, not yet). It feels like it's just been one thing after another, though I suspect I am simply at low ebb. In an effort to bring the tide back in, I've ordered a hand controller for the Wave 100i, the better to put that mount to work without all the computer-controlling, application-syncing, bluetoothing, remote accessing wifi-ing falderol. These bright skies and my fast glass will let me do quite a bit with unguided 30-second subframes. I can get the solar kit running again, too. My appetite (and my tolerance) for frustration just gets less and less, so I aim to reset through simplification. I can recomplexify step by step (or not at all), but at least I can get out under the sky again.

7/09/2026. Another week, another Starlink launch. I got by on short sleep for this SpaceX Falcon 9 which launched about 45 minutes ahead of the Sun. That's a little too late for a great jellyfish up here where we view them in profile but not too late for some fun. Click to admire at scale.

Canon R6, 105mm F1.4, 1/80s x 65, ISO 6400.

Canon R6, 105mm F1.4, 1/200s x 54, ISO 6400.

7/16/2026. Last evening, I put a new-to-me TC-301 extender on the 400mm F2.8. I expected much brighter Earthlight on this 44-hour Moon. More to the point: I expected to find the young Moon higher in a darker sky. Stacked frames and careful histogram management pulled it out. The Moon will stand higher as twilight falls tonight.

R6, 400mm F2.8 + TC-301, 1/5s x 12, ISO 1600. 7/15/2026.
Earthlight is easier to see if you click to make it big, but whatever.

The next night of moonsetting yielded some good stuff, too, first with the Moon high in a cirrus-streaked sky and later setting through a thin haze of what was likely smoke from western forest fires:

Same hardware, 5-frame stack of 0.5s and 0.25s exposures, 7/16/2026

Same hardware, stack of 10, 0.5s exposures, 7/16/2026

It turns out that I was using the TC-301 with a 1.4x extender attached on the camera side. I'd clipped the two extenders together to simplify storage. These are not really 800mm F5.6 images but 1120mm F8 images instead. It's nice to know that can work, but now I want to try it "right." There was an issue internal reflections which I hope is absent when the TC-301 is used by itself. (Note to self: the 1.4x extender is stashed in the storage drawer with seldom-used lenses to keep this from happening by accident again.)

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