Scattered Thoughts . . .

M y health has been improving this past week, finally, after a lot of physical therapy to build up my strength enough to walk around normally (mostly, anyway).  I'm still struggling with breathing problems due to the long-COVID thing but my long-COVID inflammation seems to finally be improving.  Since I had some strength and the sun was out, I thought it would be a good day to head outside with some astronomy gear.   The sun was penetrating through a lot of haze and high thin clouds today which is better than overcast skies so I decided I should take advantage of this unusually nice weather.  I could use all the practice I can get in preparation of the eclipse.  Unfortunately, I definitely overdid it today so I'm back to having difficulty walking and even standing.  This isn't great weather for solar observing nor imaging but I needed to take advantage of the fair weather with no threats of precipitation. I was thinking that I'd just take a couple of t...

When Lukey and I were using the microscope a week or so ago, I noticed a few nagging problems that needed to be resolved before I attempted another microscopy session and especially a session that included photography and/or videography.  I spent the past week or so trying to resolve these problems and thought it would be best to document it all here. My first problem was that what I was seeing on my camera (and on the 32" monitor connected to my camera) was not nearly as crisp as what I was seeing visually in the binocular eyepieces.  This was really frustrating.  I had been using my Sony a6000 camera in a prime focus configuration.  Prime focus imaging involves no additional lenses including eyepieces.  This type of imaging works very well in astronomy but I was not liking what I was getting in microscopy.  The images and video were very soft, sort of mushy, un-crisp.  They looked really terrible on the 32 inch monitor. The next problem was figuring ...