Not too shabby at that

Why yes, I was out early this morning in pursuit of astronomical shenanigans, to see if our impish little moon was playing hide-and-seek. Well, there was no uncertainty about that, since we’ve possessed the knowledge of orbital mechanics since before we called a hashtag a pound sign – it was definitely going to happen. But there remained the question of whether I read more

Not that lazy

Two posts back, I mentioned the Leonids meteor shower, and how it might be useful to go out earlier than the peak of the 17th/18th to see what could be found. I will smugly inform you that this was not a case of, “Do as I say, not as I do,” because I did go out to a dark sky location nearby, in the wee hours of the morning on the 11th (so, an hour or so after posting that,) and made read more

Found, um, kilobytage, or something

Funny, my spellcheck doesn’t like ‘kilobytage.’

Anyway, what we have here for this here post here, is a small collection of images that, during sorting, showed details that I was unaware of when shooting or unloading. It’s not found footage of course, because it’s not film, and we should be doing away with imperial units of measurement anyway, and how do you measure read more

Try and try again

Went out last night as the crescent moon was coming close to setting and tried a few shots, especially trying to get earthshine in there, with poor luck – just not nailing focus, and the necessary exposure for the earthshine was allowing too much vibration. However, I did capture a neat little detail, creating what I call my album cover.


Those lines of light are from an airliner, read more

Average: average

Oops, I’m one behind on my ‘daily’ posts, or at least one for every day of the month should correct that soon enough. In the meantime, various things are progressing – some usefully, some not so.

For instance, the car is back together and on the road, one of those deals where the work that needed to be done would normally be mildly involved, but due to an incredibly bad design, read more

On the negative, and positive, side

Doing a little recordkeeping last night, I found that I already have 190 posts for the year, not counting this one, while last year’s total number of posts was 233, a personal record (the dumbest kind of record.) That means, in order to beat this number, I’d have to post at least 44 more times, or eleven posts per month. Given that I’m still doing the Profiles read more

Are you kidding me?

I’d seen the skies looking quite clear yesterday evening, the first time in days, so I thought I’d try for the meteor storm, and early this morning (like a little after midnight,) I drove down to Jordan Lake, the best night sky spot in the area, to see what I could see.

The first thing was, the humidity was very high and the haze had rolled in, so only stars of higher magnitude were visible read more

Closer than meteors

… in more ways than one.

On this recent trip, we had one good electrical storm come rolling in with plenty of warning, and being on the open lake meant that we could see it in the distance while approaching. Ah, the perfect opportunity to get lightning that would normally be hidden by ‘the horizon’ of trees, buildings, and basketball players! Except that it was before sundown, so read more

Just so you know you missed them

In a few days at the end of the month, both the southern delta Aquariids and the alpha Capricornids (both meteor showers, and that’s apparently the way you should capitalize them) will be peaking, though I really should have told you about this earlier, because now the moon will be still a bit bright and visibility thus greatly reduced for all but the brightest meteors – both were ‘active’ read more

New York: Meteorology

While in New York, I was again staying on the banks of Cayuga Lake in a Gatsby mansion, which gave me ready access to sunrises, sunsets, and a decent view of any storms that might happen along, especially since the best view was westward into the prevailing winds. I was only there for a read more

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