We did get an inch-and-a-half of rain and the landscape is greener. During the storm, I tried out the video feature of the Canon 60Da because we were getting quite a lightshow. The camera was running at 59.94 fps. The CMOS sensor reads out from top to bottom, so it records only partial frames of … Read more
A light rain is falling, hopefully ahead of the much-needed downpour they’re getting to the west. All Summer I’ve been eyeballing the radar and hoping the storm trajectory intersects our farm. We’ll see a nice red blob pass just to the south, they get an inch, we get nothing
Here’s the result using the Canon 60Da on my little tracker head. I spent a lot of time fooling with these in Pixinsight and then Photoshop. Unusual for this part of New Mexico, I had problems with gradients due to smoke from wildfires in Arizona. (See https://www.jjmcclintock.com/?p=139) I believe this is stacked from 5-180 second … Read more
This gas pump at a Marathon station near my home in Morrow County, Ohio is a living usability experiment. It looks as though customers have pushed everything except the actual button at the bottom. The plastic window over the price LCD has actually been broken by fingers trying to start the pump!
The inch or so of rain that came with the Derecho is making the beans happy. while they look (to me) like they would be attractive to insects, soybeans are self-pollinating. And they are very accommodating to summer conditions. Only about 30% of the flowers will produce seeds, the rest aborting due to dry or … Read more
Here’s what the fields are looking like today. Wheat is still a bit green, but heading up nicely. Gonna get some rain!
I spent a lot of effort trying to figure out where in Ohio would be clear enough to see the transit, and ended up heading toward Sandusky because it looked like a hole might open. When I got near the lake, a nice blue patch was developing, with a stiff East wind which made it … Read more
The normally great skies at Rancho Hidalgo were somewhat marred by aerial haze from fires burning in Arizona. Here’s a picture from the El Paso- Phoenix plane showing the source of some of the aerial haze. We’re at about 36,000 feet. I showed this to Dan Klinglesmith, who is studying astronomical seeing at the … Read more
At Rancho Hidalgo, I set up the Canon with my standard 28-135 zoom and the tracker head. The tracker has a small polar scope, and the alignment just uses that. I shot constellation scale tests, mostly at 28mm with ASA from 1600 to 6400. Here’s a 3 minute exposure of the Scorpius region at 6400. … Read more
That’s the Quote of the Week from NAB 2012. I went to the FCPX “Boot Camp”, presented by Steve Martin (Ripple Training), the guy in the Tekserve video that we looked at a while ago. He’s very good, and might be a person to consider to bringing in for on-site training. I picked up some … Read more