Scattered Thoughts . . .

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

I slept away much of the day since I didn't sleep at all last night. Fortunately, my spinal pain has subsided a bit... down into the 4-5 range, at rest.  I'm about to head to bed but wanted to post a photo here first. I worked on processing this image this evening... selective dodging and burning... luminosity masking... selective sharpening... etc.  I shot this photo during a trip to New York City in 2013. The RAW image remained on one of my hard drives untouched. I hadn't even sorted it into one of my "best" folders as I do with the best images in most of my daily folders! When I was searching through the folder looking to pull out this image this evening, I saw a few others which might make some decent photos as well. For now, however, it will be only this one image to add to my collection of finished photographs. I love the contrast of this image... the sun rays... the clouds... the sun reflecting off the buildings in the center of the frame... and I esp

The kids visited us a couple of weeks ago and, as always, we had a nice time. We're overdue for a visit with them again but the house has been a dangerous construction zone the past couple of weeks. Grammy read them a book and then they started watching "Nemo" ... It didn't take long before they were both snoozing and drooling on the couch. Once they fell asleep, I grabbed my camera to get a few shots of the sun falling on their faces during their naps...