My B-Day

Today is my B-day, and I wanted to drop a hello to everyone out there who are reading this.  My wife was a sweet and made me cookie and cupcakes.  She also got me a new attachment for my telescope.  The funny thing with that is that the part is not in stock at the moment, because Starizona is making a new version of the part.  It won’t be ready for about three more weeks.  I was hoping to have it this weekend for family camp since I am in charge of a star viewing time Saturday night.  Dean (the owner of Starizona) is such a great guy that he is loaning me his personal product so I have one for the weekend.  My brother got me a poster that is a periodic table with Star Trek stuff on all the elements.  For example: Mn, which is manganese, is Mind Meld and shows a picture of Spock and Bones in a mind meld.  It is really cool.

I went out this morning and took some more pictures of the sun.  The flares were a lot larger, and there were more of them this morning.  It was really cool.  I am going to continue working on them, and try taking more.

My wife is giving me a hard time (all in fun mind you) about what I have started to watch on TV.  I really enjoy watching BBC America; well three shows, Cash in the Attic (think atiquies road show), Changing Rooms, and What Not to Wear.  For some reason the second two I find really interesting and fun.

A New Toy

Yesterday I picked up a new toy, a Coronado PST (personal solar telescope). It is a small telescope designed specifically to view the solar flares.

So, today I got it out, set it up in my backyard, and started viewing. The sun looked awsome. So, cool that I wanted to try and take a few pictures of it with my digital camera. The picture you see is the best one I got today. All I did was hold the camera up to the eyepiece and push the button. This is a first trial, and I am going to try and take more pictures. As I get better pictures I will post them. As you can see there are some flares coming off the bottom, and there are some at about 4 o'clock.

If you go to my webpage I listed yesterday, and then click on the other link that goes to my personal school wepage you can see other pictures I have taken through my regular telescope.

Let me know what you think.

I Think I Want to Try This Out

I got an email from Aaron Griffy and he mentioned that he was going to try out the Blog thing. I really liked what he had done, and I thought I might be able to do it too. So I am going to try and do a better job at keeping this up to date.
The picture is from my vacation to Yosemite, Sequoia, and Las Vegas that Beverly and I recently returned from. This picture is from Yosemite.
If you are interested in more pictures from that vacation, and others we have taken in the past here is a webpage with that info:
http://employeeweb.cgc.maricopa.edu/c/an/canham_m/link.html