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Mojo
Posts about photography, contract bridge, astrophotography, astronomy, Java development, internet systems.

Observing report, dark desert June skies

Mojo, Caroline, Jane, Catherine, Gary, and Todd

Update: Jane wound up using most of my astrophotos below in her July NASA What’s Up podcast. Check it out!

The forecast was for a very temperate desert evening, so six of the Old Town Sidewalk Astronomers headed off to the Colorado Desert to play outside all night. Seeing was […]

Pinwheels, Horseheads, and Flaming Stars

Photo from Feb. 2009 of the Astro-Physics Traveler getting ready for a night of imaging at Chuckwalla Bench

Jane and I were by ourselves for the dark sky weekend of November 14, 2009. We set up at our usual spot at Chuckwalla Bench. Unlike the past two months, this night featured a cold air mass that […]

Finally autoguiding

Full photo album of setting up and astrophotos here at the Whiteoaks Photo Album.

Update: Here’s Jane’s version of the same evening.

It was another perfect new moon Saturday for a trip to our favorite spot in the Colorado Desert out I-10.

Yes this is a very full Grand Caravan!

Jane and I happily took out all the […]

Perfect wallpaper from digital photos using Linux and Netpbm

The world is full of wallpaper managers for every operating system out there. I enjoy wallpapers taken from some of my digital photography, such as this trip to Yosemite last year.

On nice modern monitors, you can really enjoy the full resolution of your pictures. Jane and I just replaced our old Viewsonic CRT monitors with some […]

Making panoramas

Moonstone Beach in Cambria, CA

I love to make panoramas almost anywhere I take the camera. There are some examples on last week’s Mojave National Preserve trip, a weekend at Moonstone Beach, and the Fremont Peak Star-B-Q.

Making them smoothly takes a little practice, so I thought I’d pass on my pointers. I use a Canon 20D […]

Snakes, Tortoises, and Stars

Photos and video found here

What do herpetologists and astronomers have in common?

They both like going out on new moon weekends: astronomers to find faint fuzzies, and herpetologists to find nocturnal reptiles.

Last year in October, Jane met herpetologist Hanna Strauss at an event in Mojave National Preserve, and the two of them resolved to get together again […]

Making Flash video from AVI files for JAlbum

My wife’s little point-and-shoot Canon SD870 makes some splendid video. The full-res versions are motion-JPEG files stored as an AVI. It doesn’t take very long to eat up a lot of megabytes.

It’s not very practical to share our video on a web site in its raw form. By converting the AVI video to Flash, you can […]