Merry Christmas 2024 & Happy New Year 2025
Merry Christmas 2024 & Happy New Year 2025!! We hope that you had a fabulous year and are prepping for an even more spectacular 2025! Our year went by way too fast – filled with flying, astrophotography, beekeeping, a prolific grape harvest, and fun friend times.
October dark skies adventure: 2^3 targets!
After a crazy month of September spent crossing the globe on business travel – a week in DC, two weeks in Australia, and a week in Boston – and looking forward at the (equally crazy) calendar for the rest of the year, we decided to take advantage of the October New Moon weekend. I got home late Friday night from Boston and we took off as early as we could get packed up for the dark skies of the Comanche National Grasslands in Southeastern Colorado. We’ve been focused on Base 2 math – with my 2^6 birthday in October 2024 – thus the 2^3 theme of this blog. Two nights of imaging, with two telescopes each planned to image two targets is two raised to the third power, or eight images!
Powderhorn July 4th dark & clear skies!
We finally had a forecast for clear skies at a dark skies location during the New Moon weekend! (You may recall that the last time we had that was in January – for one windy and cold night!) So we packed up the Beast – with both the Southern Cross and Big Bertha (and all their paraphenalia), all our camping equipment, gourmet meal fixings, and Zeus – and headed to the Gunnison, Colorado area. We camped for three nights over the 4th of July long weekend very near to the spot we camped last June on BLM land near Powderhorn. We had windy days, but gloriously dark and still nights allowing me to capture data on seven (YES – 7!!) targets.
Milky Way over SPACE Atacama Lodge
The processing of the deep space objects from the Chile trip and then the processing of the total solar eclipse images from the Texas trip got ahead of my processing the Milky Way images I took while in San Pedro de Atacama. While the Southern Cross was imaging the IC2944 Running Chicken, Danita and I both imaged the Milky Way, that was stretched low across the southern sky.
Total Solar Eclipse – San Saba, Texas – 8 April 2024
The Great American Eclipse, visible in totality from Texas to Maine, was an event not to be missed! We, like many others, put our bets on Texas weather being clearer in early April than anywhere else in the country. But…in a weird twist of fate, those in Ohio and Maine had clearer weather. From our vantage point in San Saba, Texas we had clear skies right up until a big cloud rolled through about 15 minutes prior to totality! But it wasn’t completely dense, so we were able to see and photograph all the major phases of totality, get some interesting “eclipse in the clouds” images, and have another fun-filled and amazing adventure!
The most AMAZING astrophotography trip to the Atacama Desert!
Over two years in the making – planning, re-planning, provisioning, testing, packing – the most amazing and perfect astrophotography trip came to fruition in the gloriously dark and clear skies of Chile’s Atacama Desert in early March 2024. I couldn’t have dared to dream that the skies would be so dark and so clear – but they were – six nights of imaging, capturing the beauty of the Southern Hemisphere skies. …and days filled with touring adventures!
FINALLY – A Night in the Beast in Dark Skies
Mother Nature was doing her best at detering us from a January 2024 dark skies trip. BUT, when she opened a one night window assuming, like we have in the past, we wouldn’t take advantage of it, she didn’t understand just how desperate I’d become…
A November Dark Skies Night at Starry Meadows
Again Mother Nature vetoed our planned November dark skies trip. So, in a last-minute desperate move to get at least one night in dark skies – I went to CSASTRO’s property near Gardner, Colorado for a single night of imaging on 4Nov2023 – “sleeping” in the Expedition in between attending to the Southern Cross who captured two DSO’s and the Canon 5DSR on the star tracker that captured the Milky Way.