{"id":39356,"date":"2025-07-17T11:41:26","date_gmt":"2025-07-17T15:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=39356"},"modified":"2025-07-17T11:41:26","modified_gmt":"2025-07-17T15:41:26","slug":"im-an-idiot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2025\/07\/im-an-idiot\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m an idiot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Actually, it’s hard to believe that, in over sixteen years of posting, I haven’t used that title before…<\/p>\n

So early this morning, the ISS was supposed to pass in front of the moon again, at least in my location, and I was all prepared to go out after it again. I didn’t have visibility here at Walkabout Estates Plus, so I packed my gear down to a spot just off the waterfront, making sure I had the tripod and cable release and 2X teleconverter, and checking my watch against the online atomic clock for accuracy.<\/p>\n

The moon was still low and semi-shrouded in haze, not the best of conditions, but I changed camera settings to ensure that I could pull off a reasonably fast shutter speed to halt the motion – this meant going with a very high ISO and thus introducing lots of grain, but you do what you have to.<\/p>\n

All set up and dialed in ahead of time, focus down as tight as I could get it with the haze, watching the clock, and fired off a long high-speed sequence of frames as the time reached just before zero, to try and bracket any slop that might have occurred.<\/p>\n

Back home, I’m carefully examining the resulting images for signs of the space station, not finding any hint (noting as I did so that the camera’s clock was about three minutes off, but I wasn’t using that to time the shots.) Then I thought to check the site again, not exactly sure why. But it revealed to me that the transit was at 00:42<\/em>:19, not at 00:49<\/em>:19 when I actually fired off the frames. I even had the reminder in my calendar for the proper time – I just got it switched in my head sometime during the run-up and never corrected myself.<\/p>\n

\"waning
So this is what the moon looks like exactly<\/em> seven minutes after the ISS passes in front. In case you were wondering…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Actually, it’s hard to believe that, in over sixteen years of posting, I haven’t used that title before… So early this morning, the ISS was supposed to pass in front of the moon again, at least in my location, and I was all prepared to go out after it again. I didn’t have visibility here […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,45,6,3],"tags":[6562,5231,5888,8200,8201,7538],"class_list":["post-39356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy","category-frustrations","category-humor","category-photo","tag-gibbous-moon","tag-haze","tag-international-space-station","tag-not","tag-stooopid","tag-transit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}