Land of the Giants

So we just got back from our trip to the coast to see the giant coastal redwoods of northern California.  It was a long trip (maybe a couple of days too long - we were all pretty tired at the end), but it was fun and a great experience for all of us.

Day 1 - We drove from Boise to Portland.  This is mostly a pretty boring drive, but just outside of Portland we stopped at Multnomah Falls, which is very pretty.

Day 2 - We stayed overnight in Portland so that we would have a chance to visit the OMSI - the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.  If you ever get a chance to take your kids there, do it.  This is such a fun place!

After visiting the OMSI, we drove to Newport, which is a beautiful little city on the coast.  We stayed in the Elizabeth Street Inn, and our room had a great view right on to the beach.

Day 3 - In Newport is the Oregon Coast Aquarium, which is a really fantastic place to visit.  The girls love sea life, and there is a lot of it on display here!

After our visit to the aquarium, we spent the afternoon on the beach.  It was a beautiful day, and the girls had lots of fun.  It never gets really warm in Newport, but it was quite nice and comfortable.  The water was too cold for me, but the girls didn't seem to mind!

Day 4 - We drove down the coast to Crescent City, California.  This was our home base as we visited the redwood forests.

Day 5 - Our first visit was to a privately owned area of redwood forest called "Trees of Mystery".  This was pretty fun - the highlight was a ride in a gondola several hundred feet up a mountain to look down on the redwood canopy.

Standing next to Paul Bunyan at Trees of Mystery

After we came back from Trees of Mystery, we visited a little privately owned aquarium in Crescent City called Ocean World.  It's small, but it had a really fun show.  We really enjoyed it!

Holding a mutant four-legged sea star

We heard a lot of noise down by the docks, and went to check it out.  A whole pack of sea lions had taken over the end of one of the boat docks, and we were able to get quite close to them and take pictures.

Day 6 - We drove down to Humbolt State Park to see the redwood forest there.  There is a scenic byway called The Avenue of the Giants which we took for several miles.  It was really really pretty.  I kept being reminded of Endor from Return of the Jedi, which I understand was actually filmed in some of the forests around Crescent City!

These trees are really amazingly huge

The girls really liked to climb up on the huge stumps and downed trees

Standing by Founder's Tree

Did I mention how huge these trees are?

I wasn't the only one taking pictures, but I had to be sneaky to get pictures of Christine taking pictures.

Drive through tree!

Stopped on the way back to the motel to get this picture of the sunset on a rocky beach

Day 7 - We spent some time on Crescent City's beach - much colder and very foggy, but still nice.

Looking for sea life in the tide pools.  Lots of hermit crabs, sea stars, and anemones, and a few big purple crabs.

Day 8 - We headed home by way of Crater Lake.  It's really high up, and really beautiful.  Watch out for the edge, though!

Astro-nuts

So, I've never put any of my astro photos online before, since I don't really feel like any of them are particularly good yet.  I hope that I can take some better ones eventually, but I guess I should put up what I have so far, just to share them.

For starters, here is a collection of my best Solar System shots:

The Moon - through a blue filter, hence the color

Mercury - This one is pretty crummy; poor focus, no detail.  Mercury is incredibly hard to photograph, both because of its size, and because it is so close to the Sun that you always have to shoot close to the horizon.  Still, you can see the crescent shape of the current phase.

Venus - This one turned out pretty nice.  This was actually through a blue filter to cut down on some of the prism-like effects of shooting something this small and bright.  I then digitally adjusted the color back to natural tones.  I'd like to try this again some time with my infrared filter.  Infrared light is not affected by the Earth's atmosphere as much as visible light is.  When we get to the Saturn picture, you can see what I mean.

Mars - I like this one pretty well - some nice suggestions of surface detail come out in this one.  I've seen much better online, but this is my best so far.  This was taken before I got my infrared filter, which I mentioned on the Venus picture, so one of these days I'd like to try this one again with that filter.

Jupiter - The detail is fuzzy on this one, but there are some very cool things going on in this picture.  The most familiar one is the Great Red Spot, in the lower left of the disc, looking bright orange in this picture.  What you might not catch at first, however, is Jupiter's moon Io.  A little up from the center of the image is a dark spot - that's Io's shadow on the surface of Jupiter's clouds.  If you go a little to the right, following the same reddish band that the shadow falls in, you can see a lighter spot - that's Io itself, moving across the face of Jupiter.  This was neat to see live, as I could actually sit and watch it move across Jupiter over the course of about a half an hour or so.

Saturn - This is my best Saturn shot, and possibly my best planet shot period.  This was done using my infrared filter for the luminance channel, and then imposing that on the color shot.  You can see Cassini's division in the rings, and the difference in shades of various bands in the atmosphere.  I think the only problem with this shot is that the color channels and the luminance channel were not exactly aligned, so that the left edge of the planet becomes completely gray.  Still, it looks pretty nice.

Uranus - This doesn't look like much, and I really only include it for completeness.  Like a big game hunter, I was looking for trophies when I shot Uranus.  It's incredibly hard to get a good image of something so far away, and this is the best I have of this one.  It's not much to look at, but it's nice to be able to include it, just to be able to say I got it.  Now, all I need is Neptune, and I'll have a full set!

Comet Holmes - Not a planet, but definitely a Solar System object.  This comet was a bit unusual in that it didn't develop a distinct long tail, but rather grew this massive coma.  At one point, that dust cloud coma grew bigger than the planet Jupiter!  While its lack of a real tail made it less attractive than other comets, its sheer size made it easier to photograph.

And, to round things out, some of my deep space shots:

M8 - The Lagoon Nebula - One of the first images I did with my digital SLR.  The focus isn't very good on this one, and I suspect that some of the redness isn't actually nebula, but rather digital noise.  Still, it's not bad looking.

M13 - The Hercules Cluster - Again, the biggest problem with this picture is probably the focus.  That's something I really need to work on.  Also, I would like to get more exposure on this object - I probably didn't shoot for long enough to really get a good representation of the variance in star brightness in this cluster.  That's my other thing that I really need to work on.  Patience.

M31 - The Andromeda Galaxy - Focus and more exposure time, again.  Still, this one looks really quite nice.  I particularly like the coloring I got here.  This one probably looks better if you shrink it down a little, or step back from the screen a little, so the focus problem isn't so obvious.  One of my favorite objects to look at - I definitely plan to shoot this one again sometime.

M42 - The Orion Nebula - Hands down, my favorite deep sky object to observe or shoot.  This suffers from the same problems as my others, though perhaps not quite so much.  Focus and exposure time.  The focus isn't as bad on this one as on some of my others, but I really could use a ton more exposure time.

M45 - The Pleiades Cluster - Another favorite.  The focus on this one is much better than most of the previous images, but my impatience is a problem here as well - I could really use more exposure time to bring out the blue nebulosity that floats around these stars,  The distinct cross "star" patterns were added later, digitally, because I like the way they look.  My telescope is a Cassegrain, so it doesn't produce these star spikes naturally.  Those are caused by the wires that hold the secondary mirror in a standard reflector.  Still, on this cluster, I like that look, so I added them after the fact.

All right, so there you have it.  A selection of my best astro shots so far.  I hope to get some better ones in the future.  I just need to go out and do it again.

California Girls

So, we went to San Diego this past week for Spring Break.  It was fun, but we were so tired by the end, we were really ready to be home.  Here are some highlight pictures from our trip.

Day 1 - We flew into San Diego early Sunday evening.  Unfortunately, the car rental process took so long that it was late evening by the time we got some dinner and settled into our hotel room.  This was doubly frustrating because I reserved the car rental online over a month earlier - we were in the rental place for over an hour.  Bad show, Avis.  Actually, based on my experience the last time I rented a car in San Diego (a couple of years ago for a business trip), this is typical for rental places in San Diego.  Pickup is poorly run, long, and inefficient, though drop off is smooth and easy.  Interestingly, this is something the Germans did much better.  I didn't spend more than ten minutes in the rental place during either of my Germany trips.

Anyway, we stayed in a cool hotel called The Catamaran.  On the back side of the hotel it opens right onto the beach on Mission Bay, and on the front side, it's just 500 ft to Pacific Beach.

The Catamaran Hotel from the Mission Bay side

The girls in the lobby of the hotel

Day 2 - On Monday, we spent most of the day in the San Diego Zoo.  Wow, it is quite a huge place!  After spending all day at the zoo, we spent a little time on the Mission Bay beach at our hotel.

The girls get up close and personal with a peacock

Day 3 - Tuesday was our day at Sea World.  We spent the whole day there, but didn't quite get to see everything.  That's not so much because there is too much to see in one day, but more because you have to line up early to get a good seat at the shows.  Also, the highlight of the day was the girls' participation in the "Dolphin Interaction Program", where they got to get into wetsuits and spend time in the water with dolphins.  It was expensive, but they will never forget that experience.  We also saw the very funny Sea Lions Live show, and of course, the Shamu show.

Holding starfish in the tide pool

Laughing at Biff, the stagehand at Sea Lions Live

Seymour, of Sea Lions Live

Getting splashed up close by a dolphin

Petting a wet tummy

Dolphin kisses

Going to get splashed!

All wet now!

Feeding time

Shamu and friends

Day 4 - On Wednesday we decided to go back to Sea World to catch the last remaining things we had missed the day before.  Our passes were good for five days, though we had to pay for parking again.  The main thing we missed on Tuesday was the dolphin show, called "Blue Horizon".  I say dolphin show, but it had choreography, parrots, pilot whales, cranes, and vultures too.  It was actually more impressive than the Shamu show, which was a little tame in comparison.  I think that must be because of the accident they had a couple of years ago with one of their whales.  Anyway, we also saw the polar exhibits, including polar bears, penguins, and beluga whales.  Also, Ashlee got to ride the Journey to Atlantis roller coaster, which made her day.  She's a brave kid!  That afternoon was spent visiting the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier permanently docked in San Diego harbor.  The girls enjoyed that more than I hoped, especially Ashlee.  We rounded out the evening with a little time on Pacific Beach, across from our hotel.

The dolphins of "Blue Horizon"

A pilot whale in "Blue Horizon"

A beluga whale

Those doorways in the USS Midway are small!

Tower, this is Ghost Rider requesting a flyby.

On the flight deck of the Midway

Playing in the surf on Pacific Beach

...and in the sand

Day 5 - Thursday we drove out to Point Loma and visited the lighthouse and Cabrillo National Monument.  Then we visited Children's Beach in La Jolla, where the harbor seals congregate, and the tide pools at Shell Beach.  Finally, we spent the rest of the afternoon playing at La Jolla Shores beach, which is really nice, and has flecks of fool's gold in the sand.

The view from Point Loma

Checking out hermit crabs in the tide pools

All the girls in the ocean at La Jolla Shores

Christine's sand castle at La Jolla Shores

Day 6 - Friday, we packed up and headed out, driving to see Old Town San Diego before returning our car and heading to the airport.  We kind of wished we'd had more time to spend at the Old Town, as it ended up being much cooler than we expected.  The girls (all three of them!) liked the country candy store the best, though the mining shop with all the crystals, fossils, and semi-precious stones was a close runner up.

Well, like I said, we had a lot of fun, but we were glad to be home.