Monthly Archives: October 2018

Holiday Bazaars

 in Blog  tagged bazaar / holiday bazaar

  Is it ironic that the way we spell “bazaar” is bizarre?  If it were 50% more strange would it become tri-zarre? What’s really strange is that we haven’t even reached Halloween yet, but the holiday bazaar season starts just 1 week from today.  I am doing a different event every Saturday in November, and the first 2 weeks of December – six events all together.  The above flyer is for the biggest event, not the first (the smaller organizations usually don’t publish flyers like this).  The first event, on November 3rd, is Baker Prairie Middle School in Canby, OR.  […]

Look, No Wires!

 in Blog  tagged backlit frame / battery / power tank / usb

My backlit film prints have been very popular since I first started selling them about 10 years ago, and from the beginning people have asked whether it would be possible to make them battery powered.  Until now, the answer has been, “Theoretically, yes, but…”  In the early days I had only large sizes, and it was not very practical to run them off batteries because getting a reasonable run time would require some very expensive batteries.  Although battery technology is always improving, it’s still fairly expensive today.  But for the smaller sizes (8×10 and 11×14), ordinary AA batteries can power […]

Gravity Rules

 in Blog  tagged gravitational wave / Hanford / LIGO

Along with a group of people from Rose City Astronomers, I visited the LIGO (Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory) facility in Hanford, WA last weekend.  The impressive looking structure in the above photo is actually just a water tank (mainly in case of a fire), but has the best LIGO signage on the site – the LIGO logo, if you like. I’ve written about LIGO and gravitational waves here before, but in case you missed it, here’s a quick summary:  Gravitational waves are distortions of time-space caused by the movement of mass through space.  Their existence was predicted by Albert Einstein […]

Flying South for the Winter

 in Blog  tagged M17 / Omega Nebula / Swan Nebula

There was a plan to capture more data on this target, the Swan Nebula (Messier 17), from the observatory in Australia, but the Swan has now flown too far away and is no longer a viable target.  The good news is that I was able to make this pretty decent image with the data I do have. By the way, don’t spend too much time trying to see a swan in this shape.  As is often the case, the photographic appearance of this nebula is very different from the visual appearance from which the name derives.  But if you really […]