Congrats to Mr. Jones!

I had to miss this year's Texas Star Party. First time I missed since 2002. And, yes, I was a little down about that!

But word is that my good buddy, Phil Jones, won the TSP award for the best Deep Sky Photograph in the annual astrophotography contest. His image is a brilliant shot of IC 1396/Elephant Trunk, a hydrogen-alpha and RGB blended image. As you can see here, Phil does a masterful job of processing this most difficult type of astrophoto dataset: I've mentored Phil a little bit, so some of his processing choices have a little hint of my own signature. But really, the result speaks more to his ability to achieve excellent data and his understanding of what makes for an aesthetically pleasing image.

In other words, Phil isn't afraid to break the rules a bit. This image is cropped from a much larger field taken with an AP 160 refractor and his amazingly large chipped Apogee U16 camera. Because he does not have a field flattener for the scope, the scope produces a large amount of unusable real estate around the perimeter. Thus, despite the prevailing thought that you need all those pixels to make an image, in fact, you can get remarkable images with even fractions of a larger chip.

Therefore, Phil has proven something I have preached for sometime - that with good composition skills, you can produce world-class images with smaller chips - or croppings from large chips.

Congrats, Phil, on this award-winning effort!

-- Post From My iPhone!

Peyton at 6 Years Old

Well, she doesn't have phases or craters, and we don't count her age in term of days anymore (like with Luna in my last blog entry), but Peyton did manage to make it all the way to six years old today.

Pictured here, Peyton opens some of her presents this morning, though her real birthday "party" isn't until next weekend. By the way, how do you get a kid to understand the difference?

"Yes, little Bitty, you are 6 years old today, not next week!"

Peyton shares her birthday with her grandmother Lori, so happy birthday to Grossmutti as well!

Luna at 6 Days Old

As my astronomy friends know, I've never been much of a lunar fan. Now there's nothing wrong with the moon. I mean, it's actually quite remarkable. And while none of us has ever seen any other than the same face of the moon, the play of shadows at differing phases makes for an always changing perspective that is good for a lifetime of observation.

For me, when the moon is out, it's harder to see all the faint deep sky objects that I like to photograph and observe. So, it's not so much that I don't appreciate good ol' Luna, but rather that I desire to see other objects more.

But in the early process of setting up the TOA-150/AP900 combo at the house, I thought I'd catch this simple shot of the moon, taken through a hydrogen-alpha filter for increased contrast - also functioning as a neutral density filter for the very sensitive STL-6303e camera.

It's just a single image of .01 seconds, taken at the full 1100mm focal length of the TOA-150 (f/7.3). Processed in Photoshop CS2 to bring out increased contrast and sharpened to really make the craters "pop," even away from the terminator.

I'll add the image to the main site soon, but for now, I hope you enjoy it here on the blog.

Facebook Report

Well, I'm up to 70 friends now. Isn't this Facebook thing just awesome?

Who'd have thought that 70 people would care so deeply about me to want to be my online friend! I mean, surely, it has nothing to do with bragging rights. There'd be nobody out there padding their FB friend stats just to feel better about themselves, right?

And what an honor it is to be invited by somebody on Facebook to participate in "Mafia Wars." How wonderful!

Oh, and I'm glad somebody cared enough about me to send me a plant!

But most of all, it's awesome that I can answer 10 of 10 questions correctly on an IQ quiz and score a 137! I have the same IQ as Einstein!!!

(Nah, I'm not being sarcastic right now...not at all.)

Meh.

There is something cool, though...and, of course, it's iPhone related......pretty cool to be able to do the Facebook thing with an app! I can even screen shot my wall for you!

Oh, and yeah, as my updated "status" implies, I was kinda nasty to Helen while ago. Sorry about that, Honey.