Scattered Thoughts . . .

Everyone was in their bunks by 8:30 this evening.  Once it gets dark outside, there isn't a whole lot to see out the windows of the train.  I think everyone is a bit worn out too.  Anyway, I am still awake attempting to edit some photos and type this blog entry as the train rocks and lurches down the rails at about 80 miles per hour (according to my GPS).  Let me tell you, editing photos and typing is no easy task under these conditions so I wouldn't be surprised to find a few typos in this blog entry when I check it at our next destination.  While I'm still up in my lower bunk, I'll get this next blog entry published and linked to Facebook. Early this afternoon, we checked out of our hotel and walked the couple of blocks to the train station so we could catch The Lakeshore Limited.  This train will take us on our second leg from Springfield, Massachusetts to Chicago.   Our walk to the newly renovated Union Station was nice in what could on...

The first leg of our journey is complete!  We arrived in Springfield, Massachusetts only a few minutes late.  We then walked the couple of blocks to our hotel in a light rain and 33 degrees.   The only little problems we had were the weather at home...  a snow squall put us a little bit behind but we had planned to get to the train station about 45 minutes early so we had no problems.  Then, when we arrived at our hotel in Springfield, our keys wouldn't open our room.  Sheila went back down to the front desk...  new keys...  still didn't work.  She then called the front desk from Will and Sue's room (adjoining room to our room).  Someone then came up two or three times to resolve the issue.  It wasn't a big problem and hopefully those will be our biggest problems of this cross-country journey! Okay...  I think I hear a beer calling me from the hotel bar so it is time for us to head to the lounge...

I have a little bit of time before we need to head to the train station so I thought I would try a few different processing techniques on yesterday's solar images.  The sunspot is still obvious in this image as well as a few other areas of interest.  The other areas may be sunspots forming...  time will tell.   These are images capturing white light using a glass solar filter mounted on the front objective lens of my telescope.  I captured the image using my Sony a6000 camera and using a 2.5x GSO barlow.  This particular image, below, is a single frame.  Yesterday's image was the result of stacking 10 images.   I'm actually a bit surprised by the amount of detail I'm seeing here in this image.  This was captured using my smaller Skywatcher ED 72mm refractor telescope.  Also, the glass filter isn't as good as my usual solar wedge diagonal especially when it is mounted on my larger Explore Scientific ED 102mm APO refractor....