In the news:
Large areas of southern California are on fire. It doesn't help that the Santa Ana winds, that I visited last January, are whipping up the flames. They have just begun to subside.
Only the Camp Pendelton fire has a known cause so far.
I spent most of Sunday cleaning my kitchen:
At least one more:
Cassiopea 13 sec, f/2.5, 35mm lens, D100
Previously my digital sky pictures had a lot of hot pixel noise, which could mimic the appearance of stars at web-viewing resolution. The 'kon provides a noise-reduction mode that eliminates hot pixels from the background noise by automatically subtracting an equally timed exposure made with the shutter closed.
I can see doing a lot of this. It should be possible, given an unlimited supply of time, money and smarts, to devise a sky scanner using a computer driven telescope mount and computer controlled camera (the Nikon Capture program will allow the camera to be run over the usb connection) that would map the sky entirely unattended.
