Ok, well not literally, but she is getting quite expressive. She has all the motions for crawling too, but hasn’t put together the right sequence yet. Any day now.
Here are some samples from a bunch K snapped earlier this week.
Last weekend we took a ride out to visit my folks in PA. After picking 18 quarts of blueberries (with two bushes untouched), we spent the time moving furniture, launching water rockets and just enjoying the family time.
Here are some pictures of Mom’s flowers (and their visitors) and a few of the family on the swing.
A few more in the gallery.
So Nate recently inherited my in-law’s old point and shoot digital camera. The LCD doesn’t work anymore, so he fires away old school by looking through a tiny grungy viewfinder with absolutely no feedback on what he’s managed to capture. I’m not sure he cares. Here are some of my completely unedited favorites from the Nate’s eye view of the trip to Maine.
For more, check out Nate’s new gallery in Impressions.
Reaching back a bit before my last posting, the fam drove out to visit friends in Troy for their son’s 1st birthday party. It worked out nicely, as this was the weekend K had already planned to take the kids up to Maine. We drove out separately so I could return home and save precious vacation for later ventures.
It was rather fun to see more of our college friends with kids of their own. We weren’t exactly first adopters of the whole ‘start-a-family’ thing amongst the college crowd, but we’re also far from the last. To the parents at that party, and you know who you are, I have a rather nice portrait of the birthday boy and the sweet little baby girl in the strawberry hat. I feel somewhat odd about posting your kid’ pictures to my website, so instead here are some lily’s from the garden. [1]
On the way home, I dodged thunderstorms which literally flanked me on both sides. It made for a slow drive, not because of the rain or wind but for the many stops I made to take pictures of the sky.
And finding spots to get lightning pictures… like this pagoda in West Winfield.
Rachel is in the extremely photogenic prop-up-and-look-around phase. Here are some pics.
I seem to be settling into a biweekly cycle of photo updates. That seems to be the threshold where I just can’t bear to leave all those images unlabeled and unprocessed.
So, for here is your reward for staying tuned.
First 4th of July:
K’s folks came out for the weekend. Grammy helped Nate decorate the big red wagon for the Teddy Bear Parade.
Rachel was decked out too.
We both ran in races on the 4th. K finished the 5k in 35:01 and was quite happy with that. I ran the 10 mile in 1:26:29. Considering the heat, that wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as good as last year. I felt pretty horrible down the last two miles, but finished without walking so it’s hard to complain.
After a quick party stop I played with the Cazenovia Community Band during the parade. We didn’t ride/march/move we just added ambiance by playing marches in the village park.[1]
FInally, that night we took Nate up to Stone Quarry hill to watch the fireworks and catch some fireflies.
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After it was all over, we watched the phoenix[2] rise from the flames.
The other night R once again caused me to be awake at 2AM. It was pretty clear, so I again went comet hunting. My loss of sleep is your gain.
This time I was better prepared. I mounted the camera on the telescope and hand guided some shots. The camera was set up with the 70-200mm f/2.8 and the 1.8x teleconverter. These are full frame shots post stacking (9×10 second exposures at ISO 3200) and level adjustment. The big bright blob is the massively overexposed Capella shining through the horizon haze. Capella was barely above the local horizon thanks to Stone Quarry Hill. I forgot to note how many of the exposures were actually used, some were tossed because my guiding was poor. My guess is 5-7 of the images were ultimately stacked.
At one point a cloud obstructed the view, so I swung the telescope up a bit and took a look at the Andromeda Galaxy. I took about 14 shots and kept 7: so 7×10 second exposure. I have to confess I’m rather happy with how this shot turned out. You can see the small satellite galaxy clearly and the dust lanes are visible, exposing the spiral.
I’m getting the hang of the stacking software, and I figured out why my saturation was getting wrecked. I’ll be doing my level adjustments in Photoshop from now on. I’m certainly not going to win any prizes for either of these shots, but the M31 represents a personal best on this target… and only about a minute worth of total exposure time. With a bit more tracking practice… a reticle for my eyepiece… an actual sidereal drive… a telescope I can actually shoot through…
Mmmm…. upgrades.
I used a program called DeepSkyStacker to create stacked versions of the images I took this morning. I’m still a novice at this, but the reduced noise is certainly worth the effort.
The first is a series of six five-second exposures at ISO 800. I didn’t get a dark frame,[1] so the hot pixels on the CCD are apparent as little series of colored dots. The noise is also pretty significant.
The second is a series of six five-second exposures at ISO3200. Each of these individual frames had the same quality of the shot I posted this morning. For these I did have a dark frame, so the noise is significantly reduced. I played with the exposure settings of the resulting image a bit, but that’s the part I don’t have quite figured out. This software was considerably easier to use than the software I previously used (Registack or something like that) and had much better documentation (hmmm… related properties perhaps??).
One thing I noticed is that both stacking processes seemed to wash out the color significantly. I’m not sure if this was the stacking or my exposure adjustments afterward. Looking forward to some nice deep sky pics later this summer… but for now… I need sleep… badly.
Date: 07/12/2008
