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I did astronomy last weekend and I have proof. It isn’t very impressive proof, but it is proof.

Most of the cool amature astronomers in this area were at Table Mountain Star Party last weekend. I am not that cool. I have had access to several good telescopes over several years and I have only used them a few times. I just haven’t been very interested in astronomy.

Last week was the Perseid meteor shower. The weather was good and the moon was a thin crescent. Those are good conditions for sky watching. On top of that I wanted to go camping with my 10 year old granddaughter, so we went up to Paradise on Thursday, the 12th. Actually, we camped at Cougar Rock and hung out at the Paradise lodge as it was getting dark.

I set up a telescope in the parking lot and it drew a small crowd. The sky was clear and dark. Why did I stop doing astronomy? The meteors were cool, but there is nothing like the Milky Way on a clear dark night.  You don’t need a telescope. It’s just there. Our galaxy is right there to see. There’s not much of anything that is more beautiful than that. My granddaughter had never seen anything like it. We didn’t do much with the scope. We mostly just looked up. We were a bunch of strangers, hanging out together and looking at the sky.

The next night was Friday and went to bed early in my nice soft bed. I am a wimp in my old age.

On Saturday my new green laser pointer was delivered (10 bucks from amazon. Cool) so I had to give it a try. This time I went up by myself to a fire lookout station called Suntop. The station was manned so I asked for permission to be there after dark. I promised to be quiet and share the scope. It was another great night but it wasn’t quite as magical without my granddaughter there.

Photography is a one man sport. After my hosts went to bed I tried it with my digital SLR. I haven’t shot the stars in well over 10 years.

The camera is an Olympus E500 and I have to say that it’s a piece of crap when it comes to astrophotography. I shot at ISO 800, which was a mistake because of the noise. I healed the noise a little by shooting a dark frame and stacking it as a difference layer in Photoshop. I don’t know what the deal is with that thing in the upper left corner or the horizontal banding.

But, here it is, proof that I saw the sky a little over a week ago:

[View with PicLens]

It looks like we might be up for one of the first Coronal Mass Ejection triggered geomagnetic storms of the next solar cycle. What does that mean… the end of the world, maybe? The world didn’t end the last time that we had one of these, so I am pretty sure that we’ll make it through this one. What it means to me is an opportunity to see the Northern Lights.

The sun goes through a cycle that usually lasts around 11 years. I became interested in the Aurora during the last solar peak. For some reason, the low end of this cycle has been exceptionally long, but that could be over now.

If you are interested in this sort of thing then pay attention to these sites:

http://spaceweather.com/

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SWN/

Spaceweather.com is good for predictions. The NOAA site, Space Weather Now, tells what is currently happening way out there.

Northern Lights happen when the Earth’s magnetic field is being distorted during a geomagnetic storm. When the above dials move into the red there is a better chance that the Northern Lights will be visible. The dial on the left is the one to pay attention to. It possible for the Earth to be hit with a CME but still have that dial stay green. If it’s pointing down and it’s dark outside, go out and take a look.

In this picture, if you see a bunch of red over your area, grab your camera and a tripod and head out.

It’s been a while since I have been excited about anything in the sky, but could be an interesting next few years.

In the past I have had the thought that fractal art will someday be seen the same way that traditional art is, with fractal prints hanging in galleries and hundreds of people standing in front of them in awe. If that day came, I would know that fractal art had found its place within traditional art. 

After reading a couple of responses to my entry about the fractal art contest, it hit me that this thought would never be realized. The responses were in my Deviantart journal. They disagreed with my statement that more fractal art should be printed. One person, zweeZwyy, said that fractal art is the “art of light” and it should be displayed using the same media that it was created with. That thought doesn’t fit with the vision that I had about how fractal art should fit in with traditional art.

“The art of light” triggered the memory in me that photography is also called the art of light. Photography has a lot in common with digital art. In fact, nowadays photography is digital art.

I have talked before about the fine arts show at the Puyallap Fair. That fair is a big deal. The International Photo Solon is in the same room as the fine arts show. For years, the photography show included a theater for slides. This year that theater didn’t have a slide projector, it had a digital projector. The fair no longer uses slides in its photography competition, it uses digital images.

The fair still had a huge number of prints on display as well as the images displayed by the digital projector. I think that it is safe to say that all photography is digital at this point, but there is still plenty of room for prints. On the other hand, since I have gone digital, I have not printed a single photo.

banana-tree  said in my journal entry that the monetary value of digital art is minimized by its reproducibility. Unfortunately, that makes too much sense. There is only one Venus de Milo, but we could easily create thousands of copies of a digital image. In fact, this is exactly what we do when we put a digital image on the Internet. The law of supply and demand says that digital images are cheap, however limits can be placed on prints. If prints are limited, the value should go up.

If digital art is going to have any value, it must be printed, so I hold to my belief that there is not enough printed fractal art in the world. However, like photography, fractal art should be displayed in its natural digital medium. It’s just not worth anything in that medium, except for maybe the value of the emotional reaction that it triggers.

I took these pictures a couple of years ago…

http://keithmackay.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=110

I ran for cover on Saturday. It was the annual neighborhood garage sale and I had to get out. I hate garage sales. Well, garage sales in and of themselves aren’t so bad, but there is one particular member of my family that loves them so I end up with a lot of great junk to fill up my own garage. Anyway…

Reference this map.

Paradise Valley road. Note the cars parked on the road side.

I took my first trip to Paradise on Saturday afternoon. I wanted to go through the new visitor’s center and check out the flowers in the meadows. When I got there I couldn’t park. The parking lot was full and cars were snaking through the lot, so went down the Paradise Valley road to find a place to park. That was full too. I have never seen Paradise that full.

I ended up parking at the 4th Crossing Trail head and that turned out to be a good place to end up. This is the same area that I took these pictures of Mt Rainier in fall colors. I went up the 4th Crossing Trail and hung a left on the Skyline Trail. At about 200 yards down that trail I heard a familiar sound: hummingbirds fighting.

These weren’t the fat, lazy, city hummingbirds that live off of my feeders. These were wild and mean. Apparently the bushes that turn that nice red color in the fall have flowers that the birds like to feed on because that is what they were fighting over. I’ll bet that there were at least 10 birds fighting over a patch of bushes that I could see from the trail. It led me to believe that there must have been hundreds of them in the unseen areas of the mountain’s meadows.

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Still experimenting with the NextGEN Gallery plug-in in Another Gallery. I am starting to like it.

These shots are terrible. They are out of focus and without a tripod, but they are proof that less than an hour ago I saw more noctilucent clouds. In addition to me not being prepared to shoot at night, low clouds obscured the view.

Today’s bird

I thought that I would try my luck with that bird again this morning and sure enough it made an appearance - I think, maybe. It’s hard to tell but I think that this is a different bird from yesterday. Look for yourself. I have added today’s pictures to the album that I created yesterday.

Yesterday’s bird

I was lucky to get the shots that I got. Every time that a bird appeared, a big nasty sounding truck or something would drive by my house and scare off the bird.

The bird made up for it this evening. While I was watering a basket that was above the flowers that the birds like, one appeared at the flowers. The bird acted like I wasn’t even there and at one point it wasn’t more than 10 inches away from my belly. It was a treat.

There is a new album in my gallery with more pictures of this bird (my web server has been acting up today. Sorry about that)

This morning I got up early to do yard work before the heat kicked in and I noticed a lot of hummingbirds at the feeders and flowers. I was glad to see that they had recovered from the 4th of July. Every year they seem to disappear when the bombs start bursting in air.

I was happy to see this Rufous at these flowers. The Rufous’s start heading south in August and this one was determined to fatten up for the trip.

I noticed a pattern in this bird so I was able to figure out when to grab the camera. When he showed up he would pick a fight with one of the birds in the back yard. I could hear them yelling at each other and see the aerial dog fight. When the dog fight was over, this bird would appear at these flowers in the front yard.

I don’t know what those flowers are. They are not a that pretty but the birds sure do like them.

Speaking of dog fights, I saw one of those little birds chasing a crow this morning. The crow looked it was 20 times bigger than the hummingbird. It was cool.

Maybe you have already seen this. It’s cool:
http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=15374