Category: Reflection

Back from perhaps the best-ever OkieTex Star Party, I felt inspired to get organized with this blog and my image repository. And here it is. For the first time in a few years, all the images I care to share are back up on line. For anyone who cares to look at them, they are categorized into galleries in the right hand column. Makes me feel more organized and ready to process some of the data which I gathered over the last two star parties (hopefully at least three images are on the way). Also, I think the style and color scheme is much more readable that the old format.

Now, all of my images are stored within in the WordPress Media Manager instead of in a separate gallery. I have lost data (in the sense that I had to re-create it) twice in the separate-gallery model, while I have never had issues with WordPress. So, I am more confident in this as a solution. Even better, it is easy to create and modify individual galleries and best of all, they can each be formatted differently. This is great because with each astrophoto that I publish, I would like to publish text describing it’s acquisition. But for general star party pictures or for some tidbit about using the trailer at the a star party, it would be nice to have a slide show with only captions. Either way, it is nice to have options!

Of course, I can also upload images to AstroBin, too, but I just haven’t jumped into that arena, yet.

Patience is a necessity for astrophotography.  So many things can go wrong, expecially when you are a nomad without a permanent observatory.  I try to be a patient astronomer and astroimager, but in reviewing last year’s progress in my journal and in my hard disk archives, the queston keeps popping into my head, “Where are all the images?”  Then, however, I hit on an entry that made me smile:

May 7, 2010 – First time guiding and imaging together.  Was able to take 6 minute exposures for the first time.

So less than a year ago was the first actual guided image of anything over a minute.    Here is the image from that night:

First guided image, first picture of a galaxy.  Hooked.

So this year, with the new telescope from Audrey, exposures will have to be even longer, guiding will have to be even better, polar alignments will have to be impecable, and certainly, the images wil be more spectacular.  And surely a warm clear night will be coming soon.

Patience.