My building just got struck by lightning. Apparently pretty badly. Being four stories underground, I had no idea until my boss came down to see if anyone had been electrocuted and to make sure that our computers hadn't exploded or anything. Being somewhat brontophobic, I'm really loving my underground lair right about now.

So I ordered a PS3 game from Amazon. When I pre-ordered it two weeks ago, they indicated that it would ship on the release date (yesterday). As of yesterday at dinner, it hadn't shipped. Today, my order was marked as "needs my approval." Upon investigation, I discovered that they had slipped the delivery date by a month and that it would be arriving on September 28th. That's pretty dirty pool.

I clicked on the product to see what their current delivery estimate was if I were to order it today, and it says.... September 6th. So by canceling my two-week-old preorder and re-ordering it today, I save three weeks on delivery. What?!

This article over at Wired offers a really good look at the people and mentality behind Penny Arcade, a company I have a tremendous amount of respect for.

Plus, it uses the word "grognards."

No clouds, no wind. So.... here we go:

Last bit of sunlight on the moon before it went into the full umbra. 1200mm Mak f/9 4s

Ozone in the upper stratosphere gives the edge of the shadow a turquoise color. 300mm f/4 0.5s

This is at the point of maximum eclipsification. 300mm f/4 2s

This was the first time I tried using my Maksutov spotting scope as a lens for eclipse photography. A few lessons learned: With a focal length of 1200mm (1920mm effective with my small-sensor DSLR), the whole moon doesn't quite fit in frame. A slightly smaller lens would be better (or a full-frame sensor camera). Also, with a fixed aperture of f/9, the lens is too slow for a full lunar eclipse. It was pretty good when there was still a bit of sun on the moon, but once we were into the umbra, I had to pump the shutter speed down so low that the motion of the moon in the frame made all shots blurry. It was, however, a great scope for visually observing the eclipse. I think next time I'll bring this, but not hook a camera up to it.

As usual, I had a hell of a time finding good infinity focus manually with my f/300 lens. I had to pan over to the lights across the valley and do my best to focus those, then pan back to the moon and hope nothing slipped. I took about 200 photos and I'd say that at least half of them are poorly focused. I sure could go for some 20Da live focus action right about now.

Also, I borrowed a second camera body from Christina because A) hers has more megamapixels and B) I wanted to be able to have the Mak and my 300 configured simultaneously. This plan failed for 2 reasons: I only have one tripod (and it sucks), and Christina doesn't keep her batteries charged. In the end, Christina's camera ran out of batteries right at the outset. However, it was attached to the Mak which wasn't of much use once the shadow set in anyway. So no biggie there.

Just a heads-up, there's a lunar eclipse tonight. It's sort of late. It centers around about 4:30am here. Check spaceweather for more information. The timing isn't a huge problem; I'm willing to get up in the middle of the night to bring you fine photographs of night sky phenomena... unfortunately, a big storm has descended onto New Mexico and the NOAA expects heavy rains and total cloud cover all night. Ugh.

So someone please go out and enjoy it in my stead.

PS: don't worry, I'm still getting up at 3am to see if there is a break in the clouds. Who knows; maybe I'll get a lunar eclipse/lightning combo photo. That would rock.

And while we're on the subject, check out this great time-lapse video of a lunar eclipse from earlier this year (900k).

So I got made a principal investigator for a small project at work, but it has turned into a real political cluster... mostly on account of sporadic and self-contradictory guidance coming down from the sponsor. It's looking like I'll be working some weekends to cover my bases on this because if I fail to accomplish what the sponsor wants at the time of the demo next month, then I look bad... even if I have accomplished the goals laid out for me at the outset.

To offset this aggravation, it looks like Kiril might be saving a bit of funding to send me to IEEE to talk about our fast analysis package for HEU enrichment monitors. This may not sounds like it's awesome, but that's because I left out the detail that IEEE this year is taking place in Honolulu. :-)

In other good news, I want to direct your attention to the most recent copy of Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physical Research (Section A), which you keep on your bedside table. You do, right? Anyway, you'll find an article in there entitled, "Development of a liquid scintillator neutron multiplicity counter (LSMC)." I'm a coauthor. SCIENCE!

Nina is 28 today. I took her on a rafting trip on the Chama River, which we just returned from. I was originally intending to get us a more aggressive rafting trip; the Chama is seldom class 2 rapids punctuating what is otherwise a flatwater float trip. The Taos Box trips for this weekend were all sold out when I made my reservations. Nonetheless, I did manage to get ejected from the boat right at the beginning of the longest bit of rapids and did the whole stretch on my butt.

Our guide, it turns out, was very interested in caving and had been to a Pajarito Grotto meeting a few years back. He asked me, "Is that guy 'Mouser' still around up there?" So I guess we had already met, though I didn't recognize him.

Hurricane (Typhoon?) Flossie is presently whipping the big island of Hawai'i with its outer bits. The webcam at the summit of Mauna Kea suggests that there ain't much going on astronomy-wise right about now.

Not a good time for phooning, either.

My parents were in town for a week and, after that, Nina was up for the weekend. I owe her some serious attention after taking the last 3 months worth of weekends to train for Rainier, so I haven't been spending much time on the computer. In the meantime, I've had a hardware development project dumped in my lap at work which I have to get done in six weeks. So I'm going to be pretty busy at work for the foreseeable future. Wheee!

I remember having this idea that, once I finished graduate school, the insane workload and unreasonable schedules would come to an abrupt end. I was somewhat younger and considerably more naive at the time.

So I'm searching Google video for news videos of the Minneapolis bridge collapse... and the first video I click on is this one. It's a slide show of still imagery set to an Enya song that starts with the lyrics:

    "Who can say where the road goes?..."

Nice choice, dorkus.

I was late on the uptake on this one due to an failure with the internets at my home, but apparently the I35W bridge in Minneapolis just fell into the river.

Here is some satellite imagery of the bridge before the collapse (it's the big one on the left). For those that aren't familiar with MSP, that's a pretty tall bridge, and it's one of the main arteries to downtown Minneapolis. And it fell down at about 18:05; there was probably a lot of traffic on it at the time. Not good. Anyway, now it looks like this:

Goooo...

Those of you into urban exploration will recognize the massive entrance to the I35 drainage tunnel in the first image... Those of you into not falling into rivers will recognize that the second image represents a pretty bad day for a lot of people.