Could be better, could be worse


So, if I had to pick something dramatic to get back into taking photos, the total lunar eclipse of 2019 really isn’t a bad choice. And it was certainly better than most of my other options, which are bare trees, overcast skies, and mud. We’ve really had too damn much rain lately.

The title has a double meaning. In part, it refers to the conditions: we had reasonably clear read more

We now go live to Walkabout Headquarters


I’m doing this mostly to thumb my nose at the Insouciant Mr Bugg, who likes to bray that he’s doing more than me and putting things up first. This was taken eight minutes ago as I type this, at 10:58 pm EDT, or 3:58 am Zulu (otherwise known as Greenwich Mean or Coordinated Universal Time, UTC.)

More will be coming, but it’s wickedly cold out there right now with a stiff wind, so read more

Per the ancient lore, part 27


We be in the Space folder now, looking through squinted eyes (or at least I am) at a not-very-good photo of the moon taken through a telescope, but I include it because it’s one of the first that I took. A friend loaned me her 800mm Galilean telescope, a novice-level entry for reflector scopes, and I had endeavored to create a rig that would allow the camera to be mounted. read more

Let’s do it again


Today, October 6th, is International Time Warp Day, and to celebrate, I’m going to use the oft-ignored option in WordPress to publish this post at a random date, either ahead of or behind when I’m actually typing it. I couldn’t ever find a use for the function before, but I realized it was handy for this holiday.

Last night, the Insurmountable read more

Oh, now he sends it!


One (or perhaps eight) more from Jim, showing the progression of the eclipse, with two curious traits.

These were taken with a fixed camera, shooting with a wider field of view than the images from the earlier post. An intervalometer was used to snap a frame every 150 seconds, and the resulting eight frames were stacked read more

Had my back

I was aware of the total lunar eclipse scheduled to appear last night/this morning (there’s that stupid “it changed day in the middle of the night” thing again,) but after a week of clear and accommodating weather, the front pushed in yesterday and we received solid, low overcast skies, meaning the only thing I could see was how many places nearby waste electricity by throwing read more

Listen to that voice


For some unknown reason, I have a desire to capture sunrise on Tycho, the prominent rayed crater on the moon. Since it’s unlikely I’ll be able to afford a trip there anytime soon, I’ve been pursuing this remotely, but what it means is capturing a particular phase of the moon at just the right time. Shown above, we have the moon from yesterday evening and tonight, read more

Quiz time!



All right, so today marks the second anniversary of my first blog post, with this being the 148th actual post. No, this doesn’t call for a celebration, because I’m not only not into relatively meaningless milestones, I expected to be seeing more visits than this by now. Ah well.

So instead, I’ll provide a quiz question (mostly because I feel some need to put something up here today.) read more

Just because, part two


The image above was originally selected to illustrate this post from last year, but for obvious reasons I decided on the image that now resides there (or whatever it is that photos attached to posts actually do.) But I keep running across it in my blog folder, and always stopping to look at it. So now I’m going to make you do it ;-)

This is not in any way an altered, ‘shopped, or tricked read more

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