Astronomer

I met Motorhead back in '87 or so when they were opening for Alice Cooper. I was a student and working as a doorman/bellhop at the hotel they were staying at. I got to briefly chat with Lemmy and Phil Taylor. Both were gracious and generally nice, pleased to chat with a fan. R.I.P to both of them.

A leaden sky over Lake Erie. I used a high ISO to create a grainy effect like old film, and converted it to black and white.

Patterns in sand created by water, Lake Erie shore.

Thank you @@Leadfinger! I'm in the process of going through some shots to print and frame. Man, I wish I discovered this passion years ago. Lots of ground to cover, so much to learn.

Sunrise

You must have a full-frame sensor in your camera. The APS-c sensor in my 70 D gives me 25-30 Mb RAW files.

That's nuts!

I think the 27th is the hard cutoff date to buy it at 50% off. Thanks again for the reminder of this awesome program @@djMot! I just bought it and skinned it with a dark theme. Man, this is an awesome tool. I love the folder tabs, and so much more. I also ditched iTunes on my PC and replaced it with Media Monkey Gold (also dark themed. I hate bright white apps/screens). Cheers, and Merry Christmas!

FYI, the manual is 972 pages.

I've used it in the past @djMotr and loved it. Another advantage it has is full multithreading, so it can do many operations at once. I may take another look at it. thanks for the head's-up!

Welcome to Idiot™ Central, @@suicidebetty! Good to see you here!

Good luck sir, and enjoy whatever you do. Hope to see you sometime if you get the urge to play.

...I still hope and pray that you'll forgive me and take me back! LOL! Congrats!!

You're no longer a special snowflake once you enter the real world. It does kids no favours to teach them otherwise. When I went through school, it was a meritocracy. If you failed, you re-did the year. If you got good grades, you bloody-well earned them. No ribbons for just showing up.

...ahhh...memories of my university days, the Emergency dept at the local hospital...

I went through my parent's health issues recently Gam3rGurL. You're in my thoughts. I hope things settle down soon.

From my drive into work this morning. The rising Sun turned the dew to mist as the day warmed to early summer temperatures, November be damned:

Beautiful colour and detail @@Gam3rGurL! What phone?

I'm trying to recall how to attach a file vs embedding it. Once I figure it out (or you tell me), I can attach.

A couple of shots from the Sept 27 Lunar eclipse taken with my 55-250mm lens at 250mm:

I recently bought a telephoto Lens from a friend, a full-frame Tamron 28-200mm. On my camera's APS-C sensor, it becomes a roughly 45-320mm lens. It's not image-stabilized, so I set it up on my sturdy tripod and tried my first attempt at photographing the moon with it. After a bit of experimentation, I settled on 320mm, ISO-100, f8, 1-250th of a second exposure, and manual focusing. Just a fraction of a hair off from the Infinity mark gave the best focus. Here's the shot, cropped to enlarge the moon. No sharpening was done to it in post-processing:

One of the methods astronomers use to detect planets around distant stars is to record their brightness over time, looking for dimming events. This is done along with other methods to eliminate sunspots rotating across the face of the star or interstellar dust between us and the star as reasons for the dimming. The measurable dimming that we look for is relatively small, maybe 1% of the light output from the star. Because of distance and sensitivity of current instruments using this method, the planets we can detect tend to be very large - the size of Jupiter or bigger - and are very close in to the star, and therefore they tend to orbit really fast. This means the dimming event is very quick, and most importantly, the dimming is periodic and predictable. This dimming event, or series of events, had none of the expected characteristics of a large orbiting planet. The dimming was very slow, and it has not repeated.