Lunchtime Photo

Why was I so late getting to the GDP numbers this morning? Well, let me tell you.

Yesterday was dex day, so I went up to my favorite dark spot in the desert to shoot a picture of the Iris Nebula. Traffic was surprisingly heavy, but when I got there the sky was lovely and the stars were brilliant. I got great focus, great polar alignment, and I slewed right over to my target. Then I started up a calibration run, which takes about ten minutes. To kill time, I set up my regular camera to take a star trail picture.

After a few minutes I went back to check on my calibration and . . . my mount had stopped. The software said it could no longer connect to a port—or even find a port—and after a good deal of checking I finally decided it was an equipment problem, not a software/OS problem. That means it's either a bad cable or a bad USB port on the mount. I haven't figured out which yet, but I sure hope it's a bad cable. Sure, a replacement will almost certainly be outrageously priced, but that means forty or fifty bucks. A blown USB port on the mount, by contrast, might be covered under warranty but will still be an enormous pain in the butt.

So that was bad. But then, near Coachella on my way home I saw something on the highway, swerved to miss it, but didn't. Whatever it was, it blew out a tire and made me swerve even more. Luckily, it was 4 am and Interstate 10 at that point has a huge median between eastbound and westbound traffic. I ended up pointed the wrong way on the median, but no harm was done except for the tire. However, it took an hour or two for AAA to fix things, and by then the sun was coming up so I ended up pulling off the road a bunch to take pictures. Also, I spent the whole drive home dawdling along in the slow lane.

So here are today's pictures. The top one shows AAA fixing my tire. The bottom one shows how bad a star trail picture can be when the camera isn't focused very well. It was also exposed wrong and has a ton of noise. Other than that, it's great!