Sky

Every once in a while, it’s good to “touch grass” and try a new form of photography. I did this when I participated in a Great Basin School of Photography workshop in June 2024. We photographed night at Mono Lake in California and the ghost town in Bodie State Park about 15 miles north of the lake.

In short, I am very pleased with the results, and I cannot say enough good things about Jeff Sullivan and Lori Hibbert, the two master photographers who led the workshop. To say that they are experts and helpful would be a massive understatement, and the fellow photographers who were part of the sessions were inspirations all on their own. It was one of the most fun and exciting things I have done in years, and hey, I see rockets launching every third day. If you are a photographer, take a look at them for a workshop vacation. It will no doubt please you as much as it did me.

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Beneath a full moon this evening, SpaceX launched another twenty-three Starlink Mini V2 satellites to orbit after successfully launching the Starlink 6-62 mission from Space Launch Complex 40 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station this evening.

Liftoff was at 10:35 PM EDT. Around 8.3 minutes after liftoff, the first-stage booster used for the mission, tail number B1080, touched down safely on ASDS ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas’, stationed downrange in the Atlantic Ocean. After landing, B1080 has now flown eight times.

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A Rare And Spectacular Launch Phenomenon

There is a period of time when the sun has just set where conditions are perfect to illuminate a rocket high in Earth’s atmosphere as it ascends while it is nearly dark down on the ground where people are watching.

Conditions have to be perfect for this to happen: skies need to be relatively clear between you and the rocket, the Sun can’t be blocked by clouds between it and the rocket and it has to happen at just the right time of day. All that came together tonight here on the Space Coast, giving spectators a spectacular “jellyfish” that was the best in about two years. Rare indeed.

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The Great Eclipse of 2024 came perilously close to being a bust after careful planning and a lot of spending: we traveled to Texas with plans to enjoy totality in the Texas Hill Country, but forecasted clouds ruled that out. Looking at satellite forecasts, we decided to head north and slightly west of a storm front and ended up in Idabel, Oklahoma — a place I had never been to and quite frankly, wasn’t even sure I’d ever heard of. It was a good call, barely. Despite some cumulus clouds from time to time, we were able to enjoy most of the eclipse and all of totality. After this, the next total solar eclipse that can be seen from the contiguous United States will be on Aug. 23, 2044.

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