It has been a while since I posted here.  Among the many things that have been keeping me busy is an attempt to clean up the mess that I call my office, and while doing that I ran across this old photo:

That is the first astro-photo I ever took.  It was shot on film (!), so I don’t have the exact date, but it would have been around 2000 – five years before I got serious about astro-photography.  I had no idea what I would capture, but just pointed the camera up and did a long exposure (probably about 15 minutes).  The red area just below the top of the frame is the North American Nebula.  Below that and to the right is the star Sadr and some more red nebulosity.  If you look very carefully you can even see a bit of the Veil Nebula on the left side.

This was done using a device called a “barn door tracker”, a simple, manually operated device for tracking the stars (compensating for Earth’s rotation).  To operate it, I had to carefully turn a knob every 15 seconds for 15 minutes.

The other thing that has been consuming most of my time is filling orders, which is a good thing, but gets in the way of maintaining a blog.  The first major star party of the year happened early this month, but I couldn’t go because my motorhome, Starship Gamma Pictoris, was being repaired.  It’s still not quite ready, but will be in time for the next New Moon.

At the last meeting of the Rose City Astronomers our guest speaker was Dr. Ethan Siegel, who spoke on one of my favorite topics, gravitational waves.  It was very informative and entertaining – he’s a great speaker.  I had been feeling a little let down that there haven’t been any further announcements of G wave detections since February and that it would be a long time before improvements were made in our ability to detect them.  But Dr. Siegel raised my hopes about improvements in LIGO and other detectors around the world (they are planning on a 3X increase in sensitivity at LIGO).  He also hinted that another announcement would be made soon!