Scattered Thoughts . . .

Sony a6000, Canon 400mm f5.6 L lens               First, while my dislocated thumb heals I'm limited in what I can get accomplished around the house so I wanted to write a little bit about a photo of the full moon that I shot a few months ago.  I belong to a few different astrophotography and astronomy groups and someone was asking about lenses for photographing the moon so I helped them out with a few tips. Afterward, I got to thinking that the info I shared with that astronomy group would probably be good to share here too.  The main reason for the request for help was to help the person choose a lens that would be good for photographing the moon. For this type of photography, most people recommend a 70-300mm lens but I've never been happy shooting with a standard 70-300mm lens. That being said, I have managed to get a few decent shots over the years using a 70-300mm lens on a smaller 4/3-sized sensor. The advantage of the sm...

The sun can be seen illuminating the back end of the Wedge. It has been difficult for me to get out at night lately to view the night sky with a telescope. We don't get crisp, clear nights all that often and especially in the summer. My health problems don't help in this cause either because quite often I am left too exhausted by the time we finish dinner. The real icing on the cake lately has been a roaming bear in our neighborhood at night and I really have no desire to bump into a roaming bear in the dark! Needless to say, it has been difficult to get out at night for some astronomy in recent weeks. The aforementioned nighttime viewing problems got me wondering about giving daytime solar astronomy a try. To make a long story short, I found that all I need to do to view the sun is replace one part of my telescope with a part that is designed specifically for viewing the sun... then add a filter or two... then I can view the sun with my own telescope and shoot images w...