Photographing the Moon

Managed more writing yesterday (Thursday) afternoon (about 600 words)  and again this (Friday) morning (about 300 words).  I actually did get up at about 4:55AM -- but I realized that I was in that funny pre-verbal pre-awake state.  So... I photographed the waning moon though the telescope (all of the photos came out fuzzy), opened the house to cool it down, and then crashed on the sofa.

I thought about the human ship and the alien ship in my current story, and a couple of scenes suggested themselves.  I was in a kind of day-dream lucid-dream state.  I'm not sure if the cats' antics were a bad thing that interrupted my dream-train-of-thought or a good thing that woke me up enough so I'd remember stuff.  It's possible that Spencer the neighbor cat (and Cicero's brother) was in the house, because Smokey (who has never done this before) was reaching out and batting me on the face.

 On the astronomy front, I cut out a cardboard tube that fits on the end of the telescope and over the lens of my camera:  this lets me butt the camera lens up against the eyepiece, with the result that I can snap photos of the moon.

 I was hoping to be able to use the telescope as a zoom-lens for photographing the eclipse... but after watching how easy it is for my camera to be confused about what to focus on during day-time shots of the moon, I'm almost certain that that is going to not work.  The process works well for photographing the moon, but so far I haven't gotten it to work for stars or planets.

The best photos happen when the sky is still fairly dark, when I put the camera in its almost-but-not-quite-full telephoto focus, and if I let the camera choose the F-stop.  When I've tried to open up the F-stop, the camera can't seem to focus on the moon (although this would let in more light).  Going full telephoto confuses the auto-focus, and I haven't had much luck getting the camera to auto-focus on the moon during the day.

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Gym - went Friday night.  25 minutes for about 300 calories on the cable row machine.  Downstairs, 3x12x60lbs pec fly.  3x13x80lbs on the lat pull-down.  3x12 Roman chair curls, plus some 2x6 side curls.