On the Road Again - Eclipse 2024

OK, I apologize! I finally got around to processing some images to post.This was my best shot of totality, but the Diamond Ring and Bailey's Beads shots didn't turn out well. In New Mexico we stopped along the highway to take a couple shots of the Very Large Array Radio Telescope dishes in the distance when I suddenly realized that the nearest dish was getting closer. It turns out each dish can be mounted on special carriages built to travel on 4 parallel railroad tracks and they are repositioned 4 times a year! This is not what you expect to see crossing the highway in front of you! I will post some more images when I get them processed.

Thanks AZ!Yeah, processing is amazing with some of the new digital techniques. When I worked in my darkroom back in my film days I really dreamed of being able to adjust the color and tonality in ways that just were not possible dodging and burning while exposing a print.I started using Photoshop before there were commercially available DSLR cameras, using a high resolution scanner to digitize my Kodachromes and I was hooked.My cameras are pretty old, the Nikon D700 was released in 2008 when I bought my first one. I got a second body in 2012 before it went out of production and I just bought my third last year, it only had 4000 shutter clicks and cost $430, almost brand new! Anyway, it had Nikon's first full frame sensor and was 12 megapixels. All the newer cameras introduce problems the produce lower quality images than I get with the D700s. I do have a D810 and a D850, but I use them for video or high magnification focus stacking.I'll post some more shots from the trip tomorrow.

No, there are 28 dishes, 27 operational and 1 is always being cycled through maintenance. Very Large Array

quote:

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The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) is a centimeter-wavelength radio astronomy observatory in the southwestern United States. It lies in central New Mexico on the Plains of San Agustin, between the towns of Magdalena and Datil, approximately 50 miles (80 km) west of Socorro. The VLA comprises twenty-eight 25-meter radio telescopes (twenty-seven of which are operational while one is always rotating through maintenance) deployed in a Y-shaped array and all the equipment, instrumentation, and computing power to function as an interferometer. Each of the massive telescopes is mounted on double parallel railroad tracks, so the radius and density of the array can be transformed to adjust the balance between its angular resolution and its surface brightness sensitivity.[2] Astronomers using the VLA have made key observations of black holes and protoplanetary disks around young stars, discovered magnetic filaments and traced complex gas motions at the Milky Way's center, probed the Universe's cosmological parameters, and provided new knowledge about the physical mechanisms that produce radio emission.

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The eclipse made me do strange things with my camera. A shot from Petrified Forest and Painted Desert National Park. The volcanic ash layers are really colorful. A creepy place.