I thought we were going to miss it—Austin, Texas was so cloudy the morning of the eclipse. We missed some phases but saw totality.

Totality was incredible. My mind melted, the sky broke; adjectives fail me. I lept to my feet and hooted involuntarily.

I managed to scrounge together the pictures above. You can see a solar prominences and whatever parts of the corona I could pull out of the clouds. The clouds made for crummy pictures, but the experience was unforgettable.

International Space Station (for some reason) makes it sound enormous, but even tremendous things are hard to spot from 542 km (337 mi) away. At that distance, the station appears 1/60th the size of the width of your pinky finger held at arm’s length—51 arcseconds wide.

The picture above is a composite of six photographs, each taken within a single second.

Equipment:

• Nikon D610
• iOptron skyguider pro
• iOptron tripod
• Sigma 150-600mm 5-6.3 Contemporary
• Cheap intervalometer
• Thousand Oaks solar film (gaffer’s taped over my lens hood)

Software

• transit-finder.com
• SkEye (for polar alignment during the daytime—point at σ-Octantis!)
• AtomicClock for accurate time
• Ventusky + skippysky + clear dark sky for cloud reports

A van on fire in Longmont, CO on Pratt St, West of 6th ave today.

I had the day off work today and I noticed there was a good pass of NOAA 18 today so I went to the Izaak Walton park with my BaoFeng UV-5R and tape-measure yagi and came back with this image from a satellite. Radio is neat!

Satellite: NOAA.
Direction: southbound.
Creation Time: 30 Mar 2021 00:56:23
GMT.Satellite Type: NOAA.
Channel A: 1 (visible).
Channel B: 2 (near infrared).
Enhancement: class.
Audio File: NOAA18-11025_2021-03-29T11:09:28.wav.
Software: WXtoImg version 2.10.11.

Single, untracked shot of the comet NEOWISE from Sandstone Ranch in Longmont, Colorado.

I hadn’t planned on going to see the comet–it’s been cloudy the last few days and I was slowly starting to lose hope for a clear night.

An hour before this picture was taken, as I was taking the dog out just before going to bed, I noticed the stars for the first time in days. I threw my camera in the car, grabbed the binoculars, and drove to the highest, closest public spot.

Blazey’s niece is staying with us for a few weeks of this strange summer. We attempted to see NEOWISE on Saturday from the same vantage, but all we found were cloudy skies and roving hordes of teenagers. Tonight was very different–small groups of nerds gathered around telescopes, all there to see the same thing.

Tamar Adler’s book Something Old, Something New is filled with anachronistic dishes reimagined and revised. Gelée di pomodoro is found in a short section on aspic. It’s a gelatin made from tomatoes, basil, jalapeño, olive oil, and salt.

Balancing this piquant aspic atop sourdough, butter lettuce, and center cut bacon was my contribution. It tasted like summer in sandwich form.

Summertime is michelada time.

First attempt at using my webber kettlepizza to make a pizza on the grill. I think it worked out pretty ok. Shishitos, red onion, and pepperoni.

My pizza dough recipe is straight from Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day.

3 different meads I’ve had for a while. From left-to-right:

• Hairy vetch session mead
• Orange blossom sweet sack mead
• Sweet sack blackcurrent melomel

Computational photography fail: this was taken using the Pixel 2’s “portrait mode” that attempts to computationally blur the background of images. Of course, glassware wreaks havoc on this technique

• 8 lb brisket
• Morton’s Kosher Salt + Black pepper about 50/50
• Hickory wood
• Start spraying brisket with beer after 3 hours
• 9am–3pm on smoker, tried to maintain 250°F–275°F
• Kept fire vent open all the time, aiming for complete combustion, opened firebox door when it got too hot
• When I couldn’t raise the temp, I had to empty the ashbox and start new coals
• Stalled at 170°F for last 2 hours (between 170 and 173)
• Pulled during stall, wrapped then moved to the oven
• Moved to oven at 265°F
• Bark didn’t look very dark when I pulled it, but got plenty dark in the oven
• Too salty, other than that: perfect

This is a composite image combining some of the 689 pictures I took of the full lunar eclipse on the night of Sunday, 20 Jan 2019 from the middle of my backyard in Longmont, Colorado. The time span covered in this image spans from roughly 21:00–23:45.

Sunrise looking West towards Meeker from the path around McIntosh Lake.

Interior HDR Vertorama composed of 15 bracketed photos taken hand-held inside Sagrada Família in Barcelona, Spain.

A pretty overcast day, flat altostratus clouds made for a totally boring background that I completely blew out. On the plus side, the Nikon 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6 that I rented was more than up to the task of taking a nice sharp picture of the statue.

Orion cloud complex from my back yard.

Taken from my backyard, bortle 6/7 zone

Had the day off today for President’s Day. Decided to spend it hunched over taking macro photos of snowflakes. This was taken using 3 extension tubes totaling 68mm. I found that I needed auto-focus very much so I decided to forego doing reverse-lens work, although I think the additional magnification would have been nice to have. This is an averages stack of 3 aligned images.