Our Baylor alligator

A year or two ago, some juvenile alligators moved into our area or were moved in (we are right on the edge of the alligator zone in Waco). I've been hoping to see one of them. Finally, today, I did, right by Baylor's marina, as you can see from the reflection of the Baylor logo.

Eclipse

The day started off all cloudy, but the clouds got less dense, and then when the eclipse in our front yard reached totality, we had a big break in the clouds.

The first picture has a sunspot in the middle. In the totality picture, slightly to the right of the bottom of the sun in the totality picture there is a hint of a reddish prominence which in my 8" telescope had lovely structure. A quick measurement from the photo shows that the prominence is about seven times the size of the earth.

Today's sunspots

Today I was testing the solar filter I got for the eclipse. (300mm f/5.6, cropped).

Partial eclipse

Handheld, through welder's glass

Hanheld, through eclipse glasses, with a whiff of sunspots (I'll have to get proper solar film for total eclipse photography this spring)

Full professor position at Baylor Philosophy Department

We have an open area full professor position in our Department. If you qualify, I encourage you to apply. If you know someone who qualifies, I encourage you to encourage you to apply. Email me if you need more information or encouragement.

Waco is a lovely place. Here is a bittern at sunset last week. The spot is an easy one mile bike trail-ride along the river from campus.

Sony A7RII with Retina Xenon Schneider-Kreuznach F/1.9 50mm lens (wide-open, cropped).

Playing with photo developing

My ten year old and I developed a roll of 35mm film that I shot over the past year in my grandfather's Voigtlander Vito I camera. I've never developed film before. 

2022 Heart of Texas Fair. Fomapan 200.

Alligator statue

Waco riverwalk, Yashica 12, HPS5+

More film photography

I acquired a Yashica 12 medium-format TLR camera from the 1960s. (The lens hood is 3D printed, though.)

I'm still learning how to use it, but here are some pictures on the Waco river walk. The bridge was taken with Arista 400 and the other pictures with HPS5. I need to learn to focus better. 

Analog photography

For over a decade, all my photography has been digital, but this spring I finally pulled out the 1939 Voigtlaender Vito 35mm camera I inherited from my grandfather, checked with an oscilloscope (photo-detector on one side, flashlight on the other) that the shutter timer was still correct, loaded it up with 100 ISO black and white film, and took a bunch of pictures around Waco over several months. 

I had the pictures developed and scanned by OneStopDeveloping on Etsy.

Last years, Waco installed a bunch of animal-themed sculptures near the zoo. Though one of the pictures is of real animals.

 

Manual Star Tracker

My Instructable for a simple manual star tracker for astrophotography is now up. The idea is that you manually rotate a knob together in sync with a stopwatch to compensate for the earth's rotation. There is little that is innovative, except for the fact that I accidentally found that a carriage bolt head compensates for tangent error very nicely.

The camera as a temporal microscope

For a long time I wanted to take one of those high speed water splash pictures that I've seen other people take. I played around with controlling my Lumix GH3 camera (thanks, Dad!) via WiFi, and considered setting up a microcontroller and a light sensor to time a photo for when an object hits water, like I've seen in some instructions online.

But then I had a much, much simpler idea. Just take pictures in continuous mode. Then if I just drop an object in the water enough times, one of these times I'll capture a nice splash.

I set up a bowl in sunlight, put the camera on a tripod, set exposure time to 1/1300 s, focused manually, and started taking pictures while dropping a rubber ball (to avoid contortions, I used a wired remote). To my surprise, almost every run captured something nice-looking, even though I was only using 6 picture per second mode. And I didn't expect 1/1300 s to be good enough, but it was.

Eternalists like me can think of a still camera as a temporal microscope, stretching an image temporally.

Snapping photos of the sky

I took my Panasonic DMC-G1 camera, set it on the widest setting, focused on something lit up in the distance, set it on manual, maximal aperture, 14mm F/3.5 setting on the 14-45mm lens, 30 second exposure, and put it upside down a table on our balcony.  I was surprised how much more you see than with the naked eye.  Here's the result (with the slightest bit of editing to crop and to darken the sky).

That's Lyra at the bottom and Hercules in the middle. If you look really closely, you should be able to see M13:

At 30 seconds, even at this low, low magnification, star trails start.

And here's the Baylor Science Building with Venus setting over it:

Feeling cold? Apply to our graduate program!

Are you thinking of grad school and feeling cold? As your December days get colder and darker, you may want to reflect on the warm weather in Waco. It was over 80F today.

Of course, the really great thing is the warmth of the graduate student community.

We've extended our deadline for the Baylor Philosophy PhD program this year until January 2.


The anole photo is from today, from the path by the river on campus (or just off campus?).  The butterflies are from Thanksgiving, though I saw a number today, too.