On Vacation
Soon we’ll be off on vacation. We thought hard about where to go and what we wanted to do this year. And the end of all that thought was summed up in the word “veg” we are just going to go out and sit all day if we want and do nothing. With all the changing rules about where you can hunt and where you will get in trouble if you try to hunt, we decided to just plop ourselves down in a spot that would be ok for meteorite hunting if we wanted to do some and would be good for astronomy during the nights.
So we will be sitting at Franconia. We have hunted here before with limited success. We have found both the irons and the stones and had a lot of fun but it can be frustrating now after all the hunting that has gone on here. We know they are still out there but it is a big area.
We have set up telescopes at Franconia before and it is dark enough to see a large number of objects. The Moon is not going to be in a very favorable state for deep sky work this week but since lunar photography is what I want to do the first couple evenings should be great. The planet Jupiter will also be bright and high so we can watch the moons cross and do some fine work observing the planet.
The new season of Meteorite Men will be starting this November and I am really looking forward to that. I am excited for Geoff and Steve this is a wonderful time for them. I am sure that years from now these will be some of the most treasured memories related to meteorites that they will have. Personally, I am looking forward to seeing where they go on this season.
After a lot of procrastination I am getting my garage cleaned up. I have my work tables set up and my wife can get back to doing her stain glass work and I can sneak in and do mine too. I have my lapidary equipment on another long table. Spread out now it is nice to have room to work and to keep everything together. I was handicapped by having piles of material here and there all disorganized. It is great to have a little control of the inventory.
As you can see we have got the new look for the magazine completed. Paul is the wizard there. I check things out as a tester and help with the color scheme decisions and layout but the coding is all his. He always does a great job of getting things working really well.
The new format also lets us make the entire history of issues searchable and once all the back issues are reformatted it will be the resource that we had originally envisioned. But, the capacity just was not around to make it happen till recently. Searching through the back issues has admittedly always been a pain, but soon it will be a delight we hope.
I’ve had a new laptop for a few months and never really given it a good workout. I think that will change this week. I loaded some astronomy software onto it and I expect to do some image processing while we are relaxing during the days. We will not be doing any deep sky photography this trip but I am sure I will still take a lot of pictures. We will have a great vacation summary to till next month so stay tuned. Hopefully we will have found a few meteorites and had a great adventure again.
