Who wants some Spad (AD-1) photos?

 aircraft, awesomeness, history, photography, Utah  No Responses »
Feb 172017
 

As previously hinted at, some time down the line I have a project going that required the acquisition of a new camera. It has proven good at taking photos of the night sky, but that’s incidental to the project at hand. Relevant to the task was a short trip a week ago down to the Hill Aerospace Museum, where I took a bunch of photos. By “a bunch,” it’s somewhere in the area of just short of 400 photos of Hill’s AD-1 Skyraider, and around 140 photos of other aircraft. These are all 24 megapixel (6000X4000) shots, about 11 megabytes each (yes, I’m lame enough to point out that the first digital camera I ever worked with could squeeze half a dozen shots onto a single 1.4 megabyte floppy disk). The photos were uploaded to Dropbox, a process that took a day and a half (yay, old-ass netbook).

The photography and the uploading was all part of a test. The photos are going to someone who can hopefully do something pretty interesting with them… assuming the photography is up to snuff. If this all works, the project to come later should prove to be pretty interesting.

So, to the point: the camera cost money. There are a few more lenses and hardware I’d like to procure, which costs more money – a couple grand. The Big Contract Job that came along last summer finished a month ago (as in the contract was complete to everyones satisfaction), so spending like a Trump on equipment is out. So… capitalism! Who wants about six gigabytes of airplane photos? How’s five bucks sound? Use the “Tip Jar” PayPal link below, select at least $5 (what the heck, select $100 just to show up your buddies). There *should* be an opportunity to leave a note; if so, make sure to mention “Spad Photos” or something like that. I’ll then share the Dropbox folder with the email address associated with the PayPal payment.

 


Photo Tips


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 Posted by at 7:35 pm

Flyover Country

 awesomeness, Hmm..., photography, spacecraft  10 Responses »
Feb 172017
 

So once again I was puttering around outside tonight, pointing the new camera at those mysterious lights in the sky. Most interesting result came from pointing the new camera fitted with the old  300mm lens at the Orion nebula. With the old Nikon D5000 camera and this lens, the nebula was recognizable, but looked like garbage. Now it’s recognizable and still nowhere near publication-worthy, but for just lookin’ at purposes, it’s not half bad. In order to get the shot with only a few seconds exposure, the ISO on the camera was cranked up to over 20,000, which is moderately impressive.

These photos might have been worth a single note on this blog, but you’ll notice that there are three essentially identical copies posted below. The reason why there are three is this: if you look kinda close, you can see a satellite pass straight through the nebula. I suppose it’s no more special than a satellite passing through any other patch of the sky, but actually  nailing a known astronomical object just seems kinda cool.

 

Stacking the three images produced a slightly improved-quality version, reducing some of the noise. To really improve the image quality would require a motorized equatorial mount to track the motion of the stars; this would allow a longer exposure at lower ISO.

So is this sort of amateurish astro-photography of interest?

 Posted by at 2:06 am

The Hood

 art, awesomeness, photography, Utah  8 Responses »
Feb 162017
 

Panorama taken a few nights ago showing the Thatcher, Utah, megalopolis with Venus and Mars. This is reduced in size to 10% of the original… yeah, it’s a sizable panorama.

 Posted by at 4:01 am

Peculiar behavior for a satellite

 Hmm..., photography, spacecraft, Utah  14 Responses »
Feb 152017
 

In advance of a project a little ways down the road, I have procured a new camera (Nikon D5500), and have been running it through its paces. Last night I did some night sky photography, catching a whole lot of satellites. Upon reviewing the photos, one satellite seemed to do something a little odd. As far as I can tell it’s not due to the camera screwing up in any way.

 Posted by at 8:37 am

Ring closeup

 awesomeness, news, photography, science, spacecraft  2 Responses »
Jan 302017
 

The Cassini Saturn probe is nearing the end of its life. And NASA is sending it out in the best way possible, with increasingly close passes of the ring plane. They’re getting some fine imagery out of the process. The image below is a closeup of the A ring showing density waves caused by the moons Janus and Epimetheus. There are also a lot of little artifacts in the image… specks and streaks, caused by cosmic rays smacking into the CCD during imaging.

 Posted by at 9:05 pm

Pareidolia

 Hmm..., humor, photography  1 Response »
Jan 032017
 

Which is the human talent/feature/bug for seeing faces (or other recognizable concepts) in things where faces objectively aren’t… clouds and tortillas and such. It’s a function of the need to see patterns, handy as a survival skill in a world full of bears and wolves and snakes and enemies all trying to kill you. These days it’s mostly just entertainment. Witness the Twitter page for:

Faces In Things

Examples:

And some where you have to look at it just right, but when you see it, you can’t unsee it:

 

 

 

 Posted by at 9:29 am

Lake Bonneville Returns

 awesomeness, history, photography, Utah  2 Responses »
Dec 272016
 

Long ago, what is now the Great Salt Lake in Utah was much, much greater, stretching north of the Idaho border. But about 14,500 years ago, a natural dam broke loose at the north end and the lake spilled out, and through drainage and drought over 500 years it receded to more or less what we see today.

The former extent of Lake Bonneville can still be easily seen around here in the form of the level “benches” several hundred feet up on the sides of hills and mountains. The uppermost bench is about a thousand feet high.

Yesterday morning weather conditions were such that from certain vantage points the lake almost seemed to return. The temperature was around 15 degrees, and a vast fog formed in the region; down in the valley it was just an obscuring mist, but if you went up a few hundred feet on the local hills you could see the fog from above. Not a perfect match for what the lake must have looked like, of course, but still, quite a thing to see.

2016-12-26-pano-4

This is looking east towards Tremonton, Brigham City and the Wasatch Mountains from just west of Thatcher.

 Posted by at 11:36 pm

Throwin’ it in reverse makes all kinds of sense here

 AARRRGH, awesomeness, Crazy, Gah., news, photography, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  1 Response »
Dec 212016
 

I don’t know what the story is on the driver and passenger in this vehicle, but I can understand why they decided that backing the frak up was a good idea. This is the fireworks market in Mexico that went FOOOM yesterday, with, last I heard, more than 30 dead.

I’ve never been anywhere near an inadvertent pyrotechnic event on this scale. I’ve been not quite this close to *advertent* pyrotechnic events of greater scale than this… Shuttle boosters being tested, old propellant and explosives being burned off, that sort of thing. Close to 20 years ago when I lived near Denver I happened across a truck on fire on the road up to Boulder… a small pickup truck with a crappy fiberglass camper. Normally such things make a lot of smoke and some fair flames, but this one was a rampaging inferno. It had some sort of high energy accelerants toasting it along. I don’t know what, exactly… but there was one of those fly-by-night fireworks revival tents just a few hundred yards down the road behind the truck. And *that* fire was sufficiently energetic that it was like the laws of physics had taken physical form and set up a “do not approach” sign. Interesting, as I was inching my way past it (note: I wasn’t first on the scene,  but probably half-dozenth, so it would have been counterproductive to stop), the first official “first responder” showed up: a fireman tear-assing down the road in a fire-engine-red Porsche with the fire department logo on the doors and emergency lights permanently bolted to the roof.

 Posted by at 7:15 pm
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