A brief snowstorm blew by evening before last just before sundown, passing over Thatcher before heading straight for Tremonton. Snagged some fair photos of it. The panoramas here are reduced to 10% full size.
Mar 082017
Mar 072017
Last evening while out photographing a snowstorm that blew by (panoramas to follow), I happened to see a jetliner heading towards the moon. I got the standard lens swapped out for the telephoto lens just in time to not quite catch the jetliner not quite crossing in front of the moon. Pretty sure it’s a 787. Anybody recognize the livery?
Mar 072017
Buttons is by far my friendliest cat. Friendliest cat I’ve ever known, in fact. Part of his friendliness is expressed in his sleep preference… right next to my head, purring like a machine. He’d sleep *on* my head if he though he could.
One of the more unusual things he does, though, is to sleep “hand in hand” with me. *Many’s* the time I’ve woken up to find him sleeping next to me with a paw outstretched, resting on my palm. Of course the circumstances of this are such that it doesn’t exactly lend itself to photography… as soon as I move he withdraws the paw. So that explains the craptacular quality of these cameraphone shots taken a few days ago.
I have n particularly good explanation for why he does that apart from “he does it because he wants to.”
Mar 072017
Some time back I took possession of a mess of aerospace documents. Tucked in among them was a black and white glossy photo showing a Douglas DC-8 with just a hint of a structural issue…
Mar 042017
While I’m usually pretty good with cats, the fact is that cats are *generally* untrusting of humans they don’t know… and for good reason. So I was not overly offended a few days ago when, going for a walk, I happened across this feller on the bank of an agricultural ditch and he gave me the stink-eye. I don’t know if I interrupted a mouse hunt, but it was clear that he didn’t want me there. Shortly after, he took off like a shot.
Feb 272017
Moar:
Feb 272017
Here’s some foteygrafs.
Feb 222017
The Orion nebula lies real close to the celestial equator, which means that satellite sin geostationary orbt will tend to pass quite close to it. Here are some videos some people shot that show just that happening. It seems that the satellite I managed to photograph gong through the nebula was probably a geo-sat. Which is honestly rather astonishing… my new camera, a bog-standard commercial model that is a few years past being brand new, was capable of capturing a chunk of human engineering from a distance of more than twenty two thousand miles.
Feb 222017
Weather began moving in a couple nights back, which added some variety to the night sky. As always, 1/10 scale panoramas from Thatcher, Utah.
Looking west:
Looking south, with the lights from Salt Lake City at center (behind Little Mountain) and Ogden at left.
Feb 172017
First night I took astrophotos I tried to see what I could get of the Pleiades. Sadly, they don’t come through all that well compared to telescopic photos, but at least you can see ’em. On first glance I could see a satellite pass reasonably close to them – not as close as the Orion satellite, not really worthy of note. But on closer review, you can make out a second satellite trail… much shorter streaks, much fainter, much less uniform in brightness, sometimes not visible at all. This indicates something at a higher orbit and probably tumbling. I expect it’s less “satellite” than “piece of debris,” but who knows. This particular trail *did* pass through the Pleiades, but I didn’t catch that, my first photo being several seconds after the passage.
The second satellite is just barely visible shooting out of the right of the Pleiades. It seemed that the best way to display this so it was visible was with an animated GIF. Since it turns out to be a 2 megabyte image file, I’ve put it past a “read more” break so it doesn’t clog up the blog. The animation is a bit clunky since the series of photos was a bit stuttered.