Aaron Adams’s Lame-ass Blog

As I wrote in the previous entry, our attempt to take pictures of the moon last night was met with some thick fog. Tonight, however, the sky was very clear. So I set up the digital camera on a tripod in my driveway, set the camera to the maximum optical zoom (8x), and pointed it at the moon.

Using the automatic settings, here’s the result.

The cool thing about this picture is that by over-exposing the lit crescent part of the moon, the dark part of it becomes clearly visible. You can see a tad bit of detail there if you look closely. The drawback is, as you continue to expose the bright part, noise builds in the camera’s CCD chip, as you can see.

This next picture is much better. The shutter was open for 1/250th second at f/2.8. The detail really comes out. I’ve applied a slight unsharp mask to the picture, but nothing else has been enhanced.

That’s more like it. Again, it’s a simple point, zoom, and shoot with the camera mounted on a tripod.

Pretty cool.

About an hour ago, Tim and I placed the Sony DSC-F828 on a tripod and snapped some pictures of the moon. Because the recent 20-some inches of snow is melting, we’ve had some very thick fog here today, and this evening was no exception. So in order to gauge whether the camera would be suitable for eclipse pictures come March 3, we went ahead and shot the moon, so to speak, through the fog.

And we’re very happy with the results.

As large as the moon may appear to your eye and brain, it’s only 1/2 degree wide, and the entire sky is 180 degrees. Using the camera’s 8.9x digital zoom, we got a picture like the one below. I present it here to demonstrate how small a target the moon is. I’ve significantly compressed the original for display on this site. Click the picture for the full size file.

Now here’s the moon cropped out of that first picture, at native resolution.

For shooting with only the camera’s zoom on a simple tripod through very thick fog, that’s a great result. All camera settings were auto.

We were going to try some shots through the telescope, but because of the lousy weather we didn’t think it was worth the setup effort.

On March 3 when the moon is full and yellow-red, and the weather is (hopefully) clear, we expect to get some good pictures of the eclipse, both from the standalone camera and through the scope.

My friends at Your Mac Life have a new URL: http://www.yourmaclifeshow.com. Shawn and I spent a large part of the day setting up the new site with the new CMS, so be advised that there may be a rough edge or two, and we’ll smooth those out as we go along.

Additionally, my previous post about the upcoming lunar eclipse piqued Shawn’s interest, so I’ll be a guest Wednesday at approximately 9:20 PM EST to talk about the eclipse, astrophotography, some general astrophotography concepts, and how you can use your Mac for amateur astronomy.

From Violent Acres’ “Dining Out: How To Serve and Be Served“:

A Word About Dining With Young Children

If you are the patron…
Get a fucking babysitter. If I wanted to listen to shrieking children, I would have had my own. Don’t cry to me about how you need a break but you can’t afford one, either. You should have thought about that before you had children. The very least you can do is take the little fuckers outside when they start acting up. Do not ruin the evening of an entire restaurant of people because you couldn’t figure out how to properly utilize a condom.

I completely agree, and I wish my own frustration didn’t prevent me from focusing my disgust into such articulation.

About a week ago I wrote about a swimming pool in the neighborhood where I grew up and the pictures a friend of mine had from the 1950s of the pool being built. I’ve obtained the rest of those pictures and I’m posting them here for those who may be interested. If you’re from the Kettering, Ohio area and you want to know more specific information about each picture, leave a comment and I’ll reply to you.

Click the links for full resolution (very large) pictures.

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Tim and I want to reproduce as many of these pictures as we can this spring when the weather improves to show how much things have changed in half a century.

I found out last week that the area of modern Kettering where Indian Riffle Park is located was known as Oakdale. Looking at these pictures and seeing the trees around the pool, I can understand how the area got its name. Many of those trees still exist in the park today.