Miracle Mile Shops
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Reflecting on Balance and the Holidays
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As the garbage guys haul off the Christmas paper and the kids' toys have a few days of use, the Christmas ornaments begin to get boxed up as we look to New Years Day; I was reflecting a bit on the Christmas Season and that difficult task of trying to strike the right balance.
I like the idea of the movie, Christmas with the Kranks, "We're going to skip Christmas this year and take a cruise." -- And the social harassment that ensues.
As parents, we of course have the pressures of trying to strike the right balance. Little Johnny shouldn't get more than little Janie. What is Santa bringing vs, what are we getting the kids this year? In years past we've been pretty bad about over-doing it for our kids and under-doing it for everyone else.
As citizens, we start each holiday season with some intentions to give to charity in new ways. To do more than put a $20 bill in the bell ringer bucket but to volunteer in meaningful ways. I'd like to have done more in this respect. It would have been nice to participate in our local Help Portrait, for instance.
Then, there are Christmas Cards. For folks that are in our Daily lives, you want to provide a Christmas Card but they know what's going on, so writing the hand-written year-in-review seems redundant.We have friends we haven't seen or talked to in months, relatives we haven't seen or talked to in years. We love them and it would be nice to sit down and write each of them a letter and at times past we had. This year, we didn't, just couldn't find the time.
Then, you start to think how much of this Christmas card thing is happening out of obligation versus true sentiment. On one hand, we love to get the cards that do come in but on the other hand, the accounting of reciprocity (Jane didn't send us a card this year but we sent her one) is counter-to-the point of the practice.
This year, I think we failed at reaching out to all friends, neighbors and loved-ones but we found a pretty good balance within our core family unit. The sea of gifts wasn't overbearing but everyone received something that made them smile. The typical 'we have to go to your parents and then my parents and then to the office party' was reduced significantly with the only surviving parent living with us temporarily.
Still, I saw plenty of bleary-eyed shoppers, swiping the plastic and griping about this-or-that. Encountered plenty of road-raged drivers and even had to work to keep myself in check when the site-to-store gift pickup at Target didn't go as advertised for one of my kids.
Before December 25th was Christmas, the season was Saturnalia. It was a carnival atmosphere with parties, gift giving and a little charity towards slaves. One can imagine the Roman aristocrat putting to death some servant because a Saturnalia meal wasn't prepared correctly.
That would certainly have made the dried-out-turkey scene in Christmas Vacation go differently, if Cousin Eddie, with the help of the Griswold's, incorporated corporal punishment on the cooking staff over an ill-prepared meal.
So maybe in our Christmas Seasons we are more balanced than those festivals of the past or maybe we are just 'balanced differently' with more focus on commercialism and gift giving than tradition or accepted religious canon.
I still think Luther Krank was onto something with a Christmas Cruise or maybe the President with his annual visit to Hawaii.
Well, there's always next year :)
Happy Holidays!
Geminid
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When the Geminid Meteor Shower was around a few weeks back, I didn't capture much of it but it was still a nice reprieve from the holiday hustle to chill and watch the sky. :)
When We Look, What Do We See?
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The more time I spend at the telescope looking at the fuzzy little far-away balls of light like this, I think about the folks through time that also looked up and away at the points of light in the sky. Many of them reasoned some quite clever conclusions from their observations of the heavens despite their instruments being far more crude than what we have access to, today.
Some folks looked up and applied the motion of the points of light overhead to their own world views. Clearly, the skies were a backdrop for mankind, revolving around the earth. Others made up stories of often vengeful and spitefully character-flawed deities.
An atheist might look at this far-away Galaxy and see a glaring omission from the Biblical account of creation. A creationist might look up in awe of the power and scale of the Grand Design at work through the universe.
Me? I prefer to use the eyes of a kid. "Whoa! That's Cool!"
Andromeda in November
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I spent many-many hours in the backyard w/ my QHY Imager and the telescope tracking on M31 (Andromeda)
I shot 5 and 10 minute subs w. my Baader Planetarium Luminance, Red, Green and Blue Filters from my backyard in Spanish Fort, Alabama.
I then took 5 minute exposures via remote observatory time using their HA, OIII and SII filters and I mapped them in 'Hubble Color Mapping' alongside my LRGB exposures.
The Yellow/ Orange tint that was brought in with the additional filters / exposures, surprised me a bit but I do like the look, it's a bit different than some of the other shots I've seen of our neighboring Galaxy.
Space is awesome.
When Vader's Away..
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May they are researching that pesky exhaust port flaw..
Yay For Drone Season
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I'm excited about the chillier weather. Makes for better times to pull out the drones around area beaches without drawing crowds and risking being part of an ignorant news-cycle :)
Manna..?
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The Ghostly Light of the Pleiades
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Oh, Halloween. What a fun holiday! Kids, costumes and candy. Spooky-scary fun for all!
I know some folks get uptight about this Holiday, relating it to Devil Worship, for the narrow-minded or at best, Paganism. Pfft. Its an astronomical holiday! Sure, it relates back to the festival of Samhain in Celt and Druidic culture. If you think about it, many of our holidays or customs relate back to such festivals and traditions. Heck the date of Christmas itself probably relates back to Saturnalia. Jesus wasn't born on December 25th.
Most holidays, when you think about it are astronomical in origin, as they related to the Solstices or other astronomical movements. Without "America's Got Talent", "Dancing with the Stars" and Daily (Bad) News Broadcasts, folks spent much more time watching the sky than most of us.
Building tales around the movement and stories of the objects in the sky was a thing in those days. As I understand one story behind the Pleiades is that they were seven sisters. One day the Hunter Orion noticed them and drunk with lust pursued them across the countryside for 7 years. Eventually Zeus took pity on them, transforming them into doves and nestling them safely in the sky out of Orion's grasp.
Halloween is the night that the ghostly blue sisters culminate to their highest point in the sky, at midnight.
Wishing you and yours a safe and fun Halloween!
The Serpent Fountain
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I don't know about you.. but when I'm in the garden and a serpent comes up and starts talking to me about tasty fruit from some tree, I get my shovel.
Zapped
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The Last Time I will Moon you in October
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Been trying to work out the tracking contrast / profile on my guide scope camera, so that it can track under the light pollution of an illuminated moon.
The result is, as you can tell, lots of moony-ness. :)
NEO Astrophotography Experiment - The Moon as Seen by an iPhone 6, Lumia 1020 and A7r
/This is very subjective. Of those below, which image do you prefer?
The moon, as seen by the Sony A7R in Cassegrain Focus
(Click here for Full Res)
The moon, as seen by the Lumia 1020 through Eyepiece Projection
(Click here for Full Res)
The moon, as seen by the iPhone 6 in Eyepiece Projection
(Click here for Full Res)This mostly applies to near-earth-object photography, the moon, planets, etc. Deep Sky Photography is a different endeavor, as previously mentioned: http://www.graffitivisuals.com/blog/2014/9/1/astrophotography-that-mortals-can-understand
I decided to embark on a very unscientific experiment last week. When I stepped up the primary optical tube a couple months ago, I decided I'd sell my trusty Meade ETX 125 but I'd send it off to have it serviced, first.
It returned last week from a thorough cleaning and inspection and I took it out for one-last-dance to make sure everything is Kosher with it before listing it for sale on Craigslist.
(In fact it is still for sale at the time of this post, anyway.)
http://mobile.craigslist.org/ele/4702647753.html
But, I digress, this is not a commercial :)
So, the experiment was simple: Of these few available imaging gadgets, when paired with the Meade ETX 125 which grabbed the best images of the Waxing Gibbous moon?
First, the A7R.. So, the A7r *should* have had a tremendous advantage over the other two methods, simply by being in Cassegrain Focus (shooting prime through the telescope instead of through an eyepiece) and by being a generally kick-ass camera.
But, it really didn't 'kill it'. I think a bit of this relates to shutter curtain shake with the A7r when mounted on this smaller telescope. At preview-size it seems sharp but at full-resolution, you can see some softness, especially in the craters along the bottom-right. Surprisingly, the f15 shot isn't consistently sharp across the frame, which could very well be the small aperture of the telescope but was a surprising result (to me, anyway) nonetheless. EFCS (Electronic First Curtain Shutter) would have prevented this softness most likely.
Still, I'm not hating on the A7r. It is still by far the best camera I've ever used (for my types of photography.)
Next, the Lumia 1020. The Lumia 1020 *should* also have some powerful advantages. The 38 effective megapixels, RAW image capability and manual controls in the software and lack of shutter curtain shake *should* make it the stand-out winner.
I must admit that I really can't stand the Nokia Camera App on Windows 8.x. Whenever people try to represent a dial-based interface on a touch screen, it seems to turn out bad.
So, aside from hating the user interface, the Lumia 1020 did give me a nice chunky .dng RAW file to work with. Still, the Lumia 1020 also seems to loose definition in the craters, even at preview-image sizes and it creates noisy images. I would be apt to blame some of these shortcomings on the smaller telescope tube but it isn't the tube, it is some combination of sensor and file-processing.
(these RAW images were not tweaked in Lightroom aside from cropping)
Finally, the iPhone 6. I will freely admit that when an Apple executive stands on stage and does a keynote, describing advances in photography with terms like "more photons!" or "now with focus pixels" that my general response is, "What the heck is a focus pixel?" and I throw popcorn at the monitor. But hey, those people at the fruit-company do make some nice things.
The straight JPEG out of the iPhone is my favorite of this group. The bits that need clarity and definition (the craters) have it while the bits that need smoothness and uniformity, have it. Of course, that super-low expanded ISO doesn't hurt.
The iOS camera app hides the manual features but still gives you the power to do timer-based shooting, batches of shots and makes exposure compensation easy enough. I wish it gave me a RAW file but that isn't in Apple's philosophy.
... Of course this wasn't a purely scientific approach in that different ISO is used, some were RAW and one was JPEG. Different exposure times were even used and then there is the whole camera shake bit.
But, in an anecdotal test of being out with the telescope and wondering, "hey which one of these will be best suited for near-earth-object astrophotography?", I was a little surprised by the results, personally.
Which result would YOU choose?
Footprints on the Beach
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I was cleaning out my Lumia 1020 camera roll and ran across this from earlier in the summer. It's like finding a quarter in the laundry!
The Coming Squirrel-pocalypse
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Like any war, someone had to fire the first shot. In the war of the Dodd family versus the squirrels, the squirrels fired first.
It was more than a shot, heard 'round the neighborhood, it was an invasion.
They came in from all sides, unexpectedly. At first, we were not sure of their intentions until they struck. it started with a pool-net and quickly progressed to other summer-time toys in the yard.
Their appetite for destruction was like a dark wave that passed over our community in the hot September evenings.
As they began to walk the gutter-line seeking the breach the attic perimeter, something had to be done. At last we decided to fight back. In the end it was about hearts-and-minds, about propaganda.
I sighted in the scope on my Ruger Talon .177 pellet gun. It had been years since I had brandished the weapon in shooting sports with the Boy Scouts but it came back to me quickly. Frankly I was pleasantly surprised in the accuracy @ 50 yards on par with my .223 AR15 and the recoil even less than my 9mm HK94 MP5.
(Those other weapons seemed a bit of overkill, however.)
A 11" x 14" target was left near the picnic table. Riddled with holes, it left a clear message that this destruction would not be tolerated.
This weekend, the squirrel nation sent an emissary to negotiate a lasting peace. While negotiations are ongoing, we are hopeful this bitter conflict will come to an end before lives are lost.
:)