Scattered Thoughts . . .

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 to go through all the video clips in real-time

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 effort so I need more time bef

F or a few days there, it was looking like Waterbury was the place to be for the solar eclipse.  Tomorrow is the big day.   I set up a couple of telescopes this afternoon and we did a bit of solar observing with Lukey and Kenzie.  We also spent some time explaining things about the sun, moon and Earth using some visual props.  Today was a beautiful day.  It was clear and would have been a great day to observe an eclipse.   I just checked tomorrow's forecast to see if anything has changed...  well, now things aren't looking so great anymore for tomorrow after around noon.  We could still get lucky but we could also be socked in under overcast skies.  The truth is, I had forecast that this new weather system would hit us on eclipse day but none of the forecasts were indicating the same so I was hoping my forecast would be wrong.  Now...  things are iffy and the forecast is looking more like my own forecast that I had compiled about four days ago.   It was nice to be outside with

S ince it appears as though our weather will be great for the solar eclipse, I've been focused on getting all my astronomy and photography gear prepped for the big couple of minutes of total solar eclipse.   I also raked the part of the backyard where we will be setting up for the total eclipse.  Everything seemed to be going well and then we had well over a foot of heavy, wet snow dumped on us...  again.  The same thing happened less than a week earlier! So, two large amounts of snow followed immediately by temperatures in the 40s and 50s...  extra showers after getting soaked in sweat due to cleaning up the yard, driveway, paths and backyard, then extra loads of laundry to clean the sweat-soaked clothing, then Saturday came along when Sheila cleans the sheets and does all of her own laundry...  this resulted in a backed-up septic system.  Naturally, it is a weekend and we don't want to call to have the septic pumped out on the weekend so we're making-do with a very slow a

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 telescopes outside

I had been very slowly recovering from my long-lingering COVID symptoms but things drastically worsened again this past weekend. We had about 13 inches of snow Friday night into Saturday so we had to head outside to at least clear off the roof especially since the snow wasn't supposed to stop falling for another 12 hours or so.  We didn't need a collapsed roof on top of all my health problems so we headed outside for a painful couple of hours.  It turns out we had another three inches of snow through the night on Saturday night after we cleared off the roof so it is good that we took care of the roof when we did. I started up the snowblower and made my way toward the driveway.  I had just broken through the deep snow with one slowblower-width path when it started making a terrible noise.  I noticed that one of the four augers was no longer held in place with its pin.  Fortunately, I had two spares on the control panel of the snowblower so that was a quick fix.  I started up th

I 've made a couple of homemade solar finder scopes in the past and have written about them here in this blog.  I made two additional solar finder scopes over the past few days out of unused parts for two reasons...  first, I could always use an extra solar finder scope for a second or third telescope, and second, we have an upcoming solar eclipse and I plan to have a few telescopes set up for viewing that day.   The upcoming solar eclipse has prompted me to jump on this little project just in case the weather is good enough for us to view the eclipse (which still does not look promising).  I plan to have a few telescopes in the backyard so that a few people can view at the same time and there really should be a finder scope on each telescope to make pointing the telescope at the sun much easier.  You'd think it would be easy pointing a telescope at the bright sun but the sun is so blindly bright that this usually becomes an exercise in frustration.  I've had two small 30mm

A bout a week ago, I wrote about an eclipse viewer that I made out of a discarded cardboard box for us to use during our upcoming eclipse.  I adapted this old shipping box to become a pinhole projection viewer.  The sun is projected through a pinhole and onto a screen at the bottom/back of the box so the person viewing the sun isn't looking directly at the sun but is instead looking at a screen with the sun projected onto it.  Actually, the sun in the sky is at the viewer's back so the person isn't even facing toward the sun.  There is no getting blinded by the sun using this little homemade viewer. This little project turned out well.  I have a large cutout to peer into the box toward the screen at the opposite end of the box and another cutout to mount a pinhole plate made of black construction paper.  Making the pinhole in construction paper made it quick and easy to test different sizes of pinholes.  After some experimentation, I sized the pinhole at 1/4 inch and that s

I 'm feeling well enough this weekend (not to be confused with feeling well...  I was just feeling well enough) to cook a larger than average meal today so we're having corned beef and cabbage today, St Patrick's Day. I put the corned beef in the oven about an hour ago and it will be in the oven almost all afternoon.  The house is already smelling delicious! Most recipes call for simmering corned beef on the stove but I'm not much a fan of boiled meats.  Back awhile ago, I tried a Dutch oven...  that was better than boiling but it still was lacking.  Besides, neither one of us likes cleaning the Dutch oven either! Then I decided to slow cook the corned beef in the oven, covered, with spices and fresh onions and garlic.  I add a bit of liquid to this too (beef stock, watered down to cut the salt a bit) and then seal it up in foil.  It slow cooks for at least an hour per pound. This is the same way I slow cook pork so I don't know why I didn't always cook my corne

I haven't mentioned much about my health in the last few blog entries so I thought I would add an update since my health has been quite lousy in recent months.  No news definitely does not mean good news.  A select few of those who read this blog might be wondering how things are going so I figured I would add a blog entry just about my current health. To start...  I have long-COVID and actually have been struggling with long-COVID since mid-2020.  This is on top of a rare myeloproliferative disorder and extensive spinal injuries.   For those of you who may think that this long-COVID stuff is nonsense, I can advise you that this long-COVID stuff is relentless, severely debilitating and, usually, intensely painful.  Anyone who thinks long-COVID (or even COVID) is nonsense or "like the flu" or "like a cold" is an ignorant fool.  Anyone who doesn't see the dangerously dark direction this virus is headed for humanity is blissfully and selfishly blind to what is