Scattered Thoughts . . .

W e have a total lunar eclipse occurring in our area next week so I've been preparing for it.   I decided it would be best to shoot photos of this eclipse through my Explore Scientific APO 102mm refractor telescope.  I'll mount this telescope on my good tracking mount so the telescope will track the moon through the night.  I also decided to use my best camera...  my Sony a7RIIIa. I set up this combination of equipment in the living room this morning so I could test everything.  I set this up early because I wanted to know if I need any extension tubes to get the camera to focus.  It turns out that I actually needed to remove an extension tube.  It is more convenient to get all of this out of the way before I'm outside in the dark and cold.   Below is a photo showing the view through this telescope using this camera.  This is the ridge of a mountaintop quite a distance away (2-3 miles away?)... Unfortunately, all of this is likely ...

O kay, this is the blog entry I've been anticipating for the past month or two.  This was more than likely my last total solar eclipse so I wanted to make sure I document it as best as I can.   I've seen one or two other solar eclipses but not the way we viewed this one.  The next one in our area won't occur for another 30 years so, being realistic, it is highly unlikely I'll be around to see that one especially considering my health.  We got to see this one though and we even got to share this with our two oldest grandchildren, Lukey and Kenzie.  We always enjoy our time with Lukey and Kenzie but sharing this event with them made for an even more memorable experience.   Another thing that made this eclipse special is that we had good weather for it even though it was April in Waterbury.  We are usually socked in under clouds with precipitation falling from the sky from November through April so we got incredibly lucky for this event. _______...

I 've been working on putting together a video of our total solar eclipse for a couple of days and it is in its final edit stage now.   The most time-consuming thing was actually viewing each and every video clip in its entirety.  Once I did that, then I needed to decide how much of each clip to use, where to use it in the video, and whether it should be viewed in real-time, slow motion or fast speed like a time-lapse.   Since this eclipse was a rather long event...  well, things happened quickly but the entire event was pretty close to a half day long, a full day if you include set up and tear down...  I knew that most of the clips would be in some multiple of fast motion.  It turns out that much of the video footage in this video is at around 10x real time speed.  When you speed up video, you can no longer use the embedded sound because it will just sound like Theodore, Simon and Alvin on too much caffeine.  So, the answer to that is t...

I pared down my selection of photos from our day of watching the solar eclipse to a nice, relatively small collection of good photos so I figured I would share a few of these photos here while I continue working on the video of the eclipse.   The video will require some additional time and effort.  I have started working on it but I quickly realized it will require a lot more time.  I have almost 20gb's of videos totaling more than an hour of running time.  Sorting, cutting and splicing video is time consuming.  Since I used multiple cameras with different views, I'll need to spend some time interweaving different views in the proper order which requires a bunch of cutting and pasting.  That sort of messes up a fluid sound track so then I need to get the sound track just right with more cutting and pasting as well as adding some background music.  In other words, compiling a video from so much data from multiple cameras requires a lot of time and...