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.
Flying: Paul and his son, Chris, flew the newly re-numbered Cardinal from Colorado Springs to Green Bay; then on to a picture-perfect landing on the pink dot at EAA! While the Cardinal was up in Minnesota for its annual inspection, Paul added a tail-dragger certificate to his flying credentials. Zeus is loving being Paul’s 1st class passenger – enjoying the view and periodically napping!
Astrophotography: Early March was my first (to be annual) trip to the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile, to capture the Southern Hemisphere skies. It was fabulous! Danita, all my gear, and I traveled without issue. The Southern Cross set-up behind our Atacama Lodge (pictured still in my traveling clothes) had six spectacularly clear nights! The images on the right side of the collage are from that trip: Fighting Dragons, Running Chicken, Blue Horsehead, Carina, and the Milky Way. Early April had us eclipse chasing with Jan & Dave to San Angelo, Texas. We had clear skies until a few minutes before totality when a big cloud rolled through (the background of the eclipse collage is a wide-angle image of the sky), adding “interest” to the images. The fringe benefit of that trip was a pin-on ceremony for our USAFA cadet, turned Captain Stephanie Williams! Images are from our dark skies trips in the Beast… July to Powderhorn (left side: Lagoon, Gecko, Trifid, Eagle) and October to Comanche National Grasslands’ Camel Rock (center: Jellyfish, Pleiades, and Elephant Trunk).
Half Circle House (HCH) Flora & fauna: This spring half of the bees in our existing hive decided to swarm – the photo is Paul and his bee-mentor, Bill, rescuing them. Despite that…the hold-out part of the hive and our two new hives produced 19.5 pounds of honey! Early September harvest of just the grapes from the experimental vines yielded 350 pounds of grapes…the Estrella Marquette wine was processed by the 1st Church of C2H5OH producing 6 cases of wine! (…and yes, my astrophotography images are featured on the labels!!)