I was driving home this evening and noticed that Jupiter was particularly bright in the sky.  After a few moments of marveling, I thought, “Hey, it would be fun to see the Galilean moons!”

My 10×25 binoculars didn’t quite cut it.  I could see the planet, of course, but I couldn’t make out any of the moons.  Time for a bigger hammer.

I got out the 400/2.8, a 1.4x TC, a 40D, and a wholly inadequate tripod.  How inadequate?  The camera, lens, and extender together weigh something like 15 pounds.  I normally use that combination with a very sturdy monopod, but a monopod isn’t good for astrophotography.  That meant putting the 15-pound load on a tripod that’s rated for about 3 pounds.  Needless to say, I kept a firm grip on the lens at all times.

I went to one of the outdoor stairways in my apartment building, set everything up, and pointed the lens towards the heavens.  I wasn’t really sure what exposure to use, so I started with 1/200@f/4 and ISO 800.  Not even close.  More fiddling: 1/100@f/4 and ISO 1600.  Better, not there yet.   Finally, I hit on something that worked:

Jupiter and the Galilean moons: (l to r) Ganymede, Callisto, Io, Jupiter, Europa

For those of you playing along at home, the magic settings were 1/25@f/4, ISO800, and a 560mm focal length (ignoring FOV crop).

To get more detail, I’d need darker skies, a much better tripod, a motor-driven tracking system, and, of course, a longer lens.  For materials on hand, I think it turned out all right.

I just got done processing the images from the Stanford football game last night — my first time photographing a football game.  Out of 1,083 frames taken, 57 made the raw cut, and of those there are 8 that I’m particularly proud of.  That’s a rate of about 0.7%.

That might seem low, but it’s not unheard of in the industry.  Appartently, Sports Illustrated shot over 300,000 frames at the Olympics this year.  Of those, only 1,046 were “super selects,” a rate of about 0.3%.  Granted, many were from remotes, and there was a lot of duplicated effort, but can you imagine trying to edit that volume of photos?

In the future, I’ll try to lay off the motor drive a bit more, as that contributed greatly to my total count.  My camera’s shutter will thank me.

It seems that Madden 09 has made a new leap forward in realism:  the photographers in the game chimp!  Check out the sidelines in the trailer to see for yourself.  Much as in real life, it seems that the chimping game photographers are missing the best action.

Unfortunately, I have to dock the game a point because all of the photographers are shooting Canon (recognizable due to the big white lenses).  As can be seen at the Olympics, Nikon (with its big black lenses) has made a huge recovery in market share.  The market reversal is a relatively recent phenomenon, so maybe they’ll fix it when they release the patch to put Farve with the Jets.

(via)

With Rose’s homecoming two months away, the question on my mind is:  who’s going?

If I can find a reasonably priced plane ticket, I’ll be there.

I wish I had learned to appreciate farmers markets long ago.  It wasn’t until this spring that I started to frequent them for my fruit and vegetable needs, so it wasn’t until recently that I realized what I was missing.

Sure, I had been to farmers markets a handful of times in the past, but I never bought much of anything.  I’m not much of a cook, so I would always be baffled by piles of chard, and I could never understand why people would pay extra for misshapen, miscolored “heirloom” tomatoes.  My mistake was that I never took a chance to actually taste any of the goods.

With a market in Palo Alto four blocks from my summer apartment, I decided to give those super-fresh foods an honest try.

*nibble* *bite* *munch*

Oh, the flavors!  I never knew how much flavor a tomato could have.  The peaches — so juicy.  And the strawberries?  Delightful!  It’s amazing how much better food can be when it hasn’t been bred for shipment across the country (or world).  It’s the kind of taste that will make one into a food snob.  Suddenly, the fruits and vegetables at the supermarket seem incredibly inferior.

What’s more, the food is usually less expensive than it would be at the grocery store.  It gets really cheap when the market is closing and everybody is trying to get rid of inventory.  For example, today I got a delicious cantaloupe for $1.50 and Yukon Gold potatoes for $0.25/lb.

It’s a shame it took me until age 26 to appreciate food that came directly from the farm.