Tonight, I used my zoom lens to try to get some photos of the moon. I learned very quickly that the best time for these shots was like shooting in daylight. Makes sense. The moon is quite bright against the black background of a night sky. I tried to take them without a tripod but even at very fast shutter speeds, at a zoom of 300, I was still getting camera shake. However, the tripod did great.

Enjoy the pictures at the following address:

Flickr Moon Shots

On a recent gem/fossil excursion with Mike Mangrum (Rock Hound extraordinaire), I came home with numerous and lovely examples of Tennessee gems and fossils. One of the neat items that Mike helped me find was a limestone geode. He had found numerous sizes throughout a very large cliff of limestone, but using my now keenly, trained eye, there before me was an object of gargantuan size (okay, it was only baseball sized!). As Mike expertly removed it from the limestone, I contemplated the incredible riches and beauty that lay inside this geode. We had tried to open some smaller specimens we had found, but weren’t impressed. I knew this one, however, was special. We decided not to break it open and take it to the Rock Hound Club meeting that Mike was now attending monthly and get their expert opinion. After many weeks of tortuous waiting, I shared my geode with the wise and wonderful experts at the table we were sitting at, and it turned out I did have something special — the rare, elusive “Leaverite”. Yes, that’s right — Leaverite. If you find one like it, “leave her right” where you found it. It was worth under $100 — way under!! Yes, my geode provided numerous seconds of entertainment. Anyway, my son Timothy and I decided to open the geode up and see what we had. He took a hammer and literally pounded away on the front porch trying to get a clean break. Finally, in all it’s glory, our geode was open and sharing her beauty for all to see. Here’s the flickr page with all the pictures of the geode:

Tennessee Limestone Geode

Enjoy!

My new tripod (AT-828) came in today. I gave it a workout at a friend’s house by trying it out on the night sky. I did a little research on shooting the night sky but obviously not enough. The few good (well, average) pictures I took are here on flickr.com. They are a little dark, but welcome to a dark, night sky. The first picture is of Ursa Major (Big Dipper), and the rest are of the Scropio Constellation with the brightest start on the picture being Jupiter. One of the pictures I took to includes a commercial jet crossing the field of view. They are definitely not going to get me to quit my day job. I hope to do a lot more research and trial-and-error this weekend.