Twenty years ago today, the space shuttle Discovery carried a brand new telescope aloft into space, to be settled into orbit the following day. And this was a significant delay over plans – the Challenger accident had occurred only eight months before the tentative launch date of Hubble in October 1986, and set its schedule (as well as everything else) back several years.
The telescope was
It’s been longer than I planned since my last set of posts, and I actually had something else intended this weekend that didn’t work out – basically, my telescope was way the hell out of collimation. For a reflecting scope to work properly, the mirrors have to be precisely aligned, otherwise you can’t get properly sharp images. It’s still not up to
I’m looking at the posts here and realize it’s been a month since my last one, which isn’t good. So to make it up to my remaining one (maybe two) readers, I’m going to throw up some quick stuff before I get to a much longer post picking on religion again.
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been doing little more than experimenting. One a foggy night recently, I went out
This one has actually been sitting around for a while as I got up the desire to type it out. I figured I’d do it as a follow-up to Darwin Day. What you’re looking at here (or will be, as you stop reading and gaze at the image) is the caterpillar stage of the spiny oak-slug moth, which is a pretty horrendous name so let’s just stick with the scientific Euclea
As threatened, I did indeed get out and do some more night shots, both during the snowstorm and after it stopped. We got a significant amount here for NC, roughly seven inches in my area I think, and the temperature peeked above freezing only for a couple hours today. It’s made standing outside late at night/early in the morning (whatever you call 4 AM) interesting, to say the least.
Above,
Everyone has been in a frenzy here in NC over the approaching storm, which is supposed to deposit anywhere from 4 to 15 inches of snow on us, and it’s off to its start now. I realize this isn’t impressive by northern standards, and since I used to live in New York (the state) I’m not impressed either. But you also have to consider that no one knows what
Sometimes, things get a little too surreal. Probably about ten years ago or so, I was driving around Florida looking for good photo subjects, and out on Merritt Island. If you’re not familiar with it, you should know that the middle portion of it is more popularly known as Cape Canaveral. North of the Cape, however, it’s a nice wildlife refuge. But a mite damp.
Okay, it runs the line
Maybe I should amend that title to, “Part One.” Is this likely to be an ongoing thing?
Looking for some specific images the other night, I stumbled across this one that I had completely forgotten about. Back in April 2004 (isn’t EXIF info great?) I was living in Florida and maintained a small saltwater aquarium, but not the usual kind. I lived near the Indian River Lagoon, a largely
This is a topic that’s hard to illustrate effectively, so in order to fully appreciate it, you’re going to have to do at least one outside exercise yourself. But let’s start with, do you do any photography yourself? If yes, good! Now, do you have a film camera? It’s my suspicion that a pretty good percentage of answers (if I actually had readers, anyway)
In consideration of the full moon on New Year’s day (well, okay, New Year’s night,) and with recognition of not having done a damn thing for the International Year of Astronomy, I ventured out on the evening of January 1st and tried for some moonlight photos. No, not photos of the moon itself – I have enough of those: full, crescent, eclipses, and so on. I mean
