New House Work

We came out to Aguanga last night, leaving LA around 8:10. We stopped at Home Depot for a few items and made it to the house at about 10:40. The clouds had come down so we arrived in a dense fog that lasted most of the night. Within an hour or so things were cooled off in the house for a nice quiet evening.

Today was a day of work, as a new house often is. I took a trip to the local waste transfer station to drop of a bunch of used boxes, then set about cleaning the floor of the workshop. It was (and still is, for that matter) very dirty. It had flooded during a severe storm and there was a layer of dried mud on the floor.

We wet down the floor, scrubbed it, then vacumed up the water. It made a huge difference. The process literally created mud which was then slurped up into the shop vac. We cleaned 2/3 of the space — exactly what we had planned. I then took a mop and plain water and cleaned a section we had already cleaned. I got up a bunch of mud and dirt. I can’t imagine what I would have gotten up if I had used a cleaner.

At any rate, it looks a lot better. It will be very nice once it has been thoroughly cleaned and painted.

Pictures Posted

I have added several photos to the archive today, including a series of M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. This object was one of the first things that I imaged. I posted my first processing and an updated one I did today. I also posted a decent version of some data that I took in April of 2005. This provides a good comparison both changes in processing and better data acquisition.

The older version of M51 clearly suffers from too little exposure time.
The image is noisy. I was suffering at the time from bad circular
gradients from poor positioning of my focal reducer. The 2005 data
is pretty good in luminance (65 minutes) but short in RGB (30 minutes each).
The RGB also suffers from being taken binned 2×2, a practice I do
not recommend in light polluted locations such as I have here.

Summer Starts with a Bang

It has been over a month since I last posted. And it sure has been a month.

In late June I travelled to Europe for work. Arrived in Paris on Sunday and did the 5-hour tour hitting the Tuilleries, The Louvre (saw the Mona Lisa), Isle St. Louis, Notre Dame, the Left Bank, dinner at Foucquet’s on the Champs-Elysées, a quick view of the Eiffel Tower before heading back to the hotel. Whew. It was good to do some sightseeing because the rest of the week was work. Monday night to Brussels (yes, if it’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium), Tuesday night to Munich, Wednesday night to London, Saturday home.

After two days back at work, we left on vacation to Alaska, taking a wonderful tour and cruise through Cruise West. Our good friend Ken Neibaur arranged the tour — he works for Cardoza Bungey travel. It was a great trip, absolutely way above our expectations. I’ll try and post some details on it later. We took the Glacier Bay Highlights tour with a stay over at the Kantishna Road House. If you go to Denali, I definitely recommend staying at the far end of the park in Kantishna. For cruises, the Cruise West small ships (ours was 70 passengers) is an outstanding way to really see Alaska up close.

We also got to spend a day with my brother-in-law Walt. That was very nice.

Back at work now and finally sneaking in the time to make a post.

Oh, and we closed the purchase of a second home in Aguanga. More on that later too. So we have been busy.