pnArt

Yesterday I took advantage of some recent tick-killing freezes to descend into the woods behind our house to cut firewood. A large red oak died last year, but had the courtesy to remain standing while its wood seasoned, before it fell recently so I could reach it with my bow saw. A chain saw would make much faster work of this but a bow saw cuts both pushing and pulling so it’s great upper-body exercise for all the opposing muscle groups in my arms, back, and chest. I also like its quietude - I can hear the birds and the deer and chipmunks all around me as I saw and I can start early in the morning without disturbing neighbors.

Later in the day I harvested my remaining apples. My wife and I have a tool used to change lighbulbs in our high ceilings - an extendable pole with a sort of spring-loaded basket for the bulb. This was perfect for picking high-in-the-tree apples and filling a utility bucket with them. After dinner I used some of the apples to make apple-cranberry crisp from a Jane Brody recipe I like.

Then I went to Westford, to the Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston (ATMoB) site, to take more photos of Comet 17P/Holmes.

I’m not actually a member of ATMoB. I used to be, back in 1997, when I was shooting comet Hale-Bopp. So I felt a little guilty setting up in their field in pitch blackness at 10PM, surrounded by the disembodied voices of the real members, discussing variable stars and galaxies that they were looking at through fancy, expensive telescopes. No one said a word to me, nor I to them, as I set up my little old Nikon D100 and el-cheapo FJR equatorial mount.

The light pollution was only marginally less than at my house in Chelmsford but I did get a slightly better comet photo than a few nights ago . . .

I then tried to photograph M31 - the Andromeda Galaxy - but the automatic noise reduction feature in my geriatric Nikon D100 camera picked that moment to fail so I got a shot resembling what you might see in good binoculars or a small telescope - you can just make out the dust lanes, but that’s it . . .

. . . still, the thought that I’m seeing light from two and a half million years ago is thrilling. This was the Andromeda galaxy before there were humans. This was the Andromeda galaxy back when there were mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers, and when the ancestors of camels trod the plains of North America. And I just took this picture of it last night.