Tag Archives: astronomy

Two star parties back to back

The PolyBlog
October 24 2017

This past weekend, skies were looking promising and so I planned to do two star parties back to back. Friday night was the first one in Carp, the last RASC star party of the year. I’m not only a member, but I’m also actually serving as the acting star party coordinator. We have marshals though to cover if I’m not actually there, so mainly my job is to send out the notification emails in advance as reminders, and then make the call for the day before or day of the event.

I was a bit later arriving there than I had hoped, not getting there until about 6:30 p.m., so had to set up in the dusk. Long past the sun dropping below the horizon and taking the moon and three or four planets with it. I was wondering if I would be able to see Mars, Jupiter or Venus if I was using my solar filter as they are really close to the sun, but I wasn’t overly hopeful. I never got to try though.

Saturn was still up, so that was good. Turnout was about average, maybe 20+ scopes with the big 25″ from one of the members down at the end. I wandered down around 9:00 p.m. and the line-up was about 25 people long, and apparently was even longer at times.

I had this great idea to use a special list I organized on my tablet as my viewing targets, and it went out the window pretty fast as I didn’t have it set up early enough to avoid blinding people with white light while I got it going. So I did my basic alignment and some star tour stuff, before heading for seeing Saturn. Shortly after I got going, someone wandered over to say they had a new 8SE, same scope as mine, and would I mind coming over and helping him get going as he was having trouble with the red dot finder. Don’t we all?

I felt like it was time to repay some of the help I’ve received from others. Lots of people are reading my blog entries about my alignment problems, often looking for tips and tricks to see what might help them. But within RASC, I’m more often the one asking for help than giving it. It was nice to be able to explain some of the setup steps, how to make it work well the first time, etc. And more importantly, to get the dang red dot finder to align on a red light above the Diefenbunker. One alignment on Mizar and one alignment on Altair later, and he was aligned. First target was Saturn, and it was awesome to hear his excitement in seeing it in HIS scope and to then immediately call over his son who had passed the initial patience point several minutes before (I’ve been there, I recognize it!). They looked at a bunch of stuff for the rest of the night and it sounds like it went well.

Then I lost my scope. Not really. It was just that I wandered back, and of course, it’s VERY dark, and I couldn’t even FIND where I had set up. I had to wander back the opposite way twice to just to figure out where I was. Mostly as there were people looking through it at Saturn still. 🙂

I looked at a few things, and then I heard someone say in passing that the only planet available was Saturn. And I thought, “Wait a minute. I know I looked at Uranus and Neptune a week or two ago, they should still be up now.” So I went looking. Until I found Uranus. So then some visitors wandered over, and we all agreed yes it was disc-like and yes we thought it was Uranus. Hard to see it in a simple 25mm eyepiece or even my 17.3mm. But one of the other RASC members came over and confirmed it was indeed Uranus. So we tried for Neptune. That one we were far less certain of, but we did find something disc-like, just without the tell-tale blue. But again, the member confirmed it was indeed Neptune, which made one of our guests quite happy — he had now seen all 7 visible planets in a scope. Beats me — I haven’t seen Mercury yet.

Two more guys wandered by and we started looking at nebulae. The nearby member also lent me an Oxygen III filter to pull out some details from the Veil Nebula which was cool, albeit quite dark with the filter on. We looked at a bunch of objects for about 90 minutes. Mostly as the one guy is thinking of buying a scope like mine, and wanted to experience it. Around 11:00, I think, I happened to notice that Orion was up, and someone mentioned the Orion Nebula. I hadn’t seen it in almost two years, so I was in. But the guy loaned me an UltraBlock filter. Which made the nebula just “pop”. Eloquent as always, I think my official comment was “Holy crap!”.

After the two guys left, a couple came along where it was obvious the guy was super interested and his girlfriend was playing a supportive partner. She was interested, but she clearly had passed her interest point. Nevertheless, she was game to keep going, so we split some stars, looked at Uranus, etc. Just before the end of the night, I wandered down to the 25″ scope to see M15 and then looked at it afterwards on my own much more pitiful 8″ scope. It was almost laughable the difference. On the other hand, mine fits in the back of my car; the 25″ travels in a horse trailer. I love to see through it, but man, it’s HUGE.

And that was it for the night. And for the season. Sad to see it go, particularly as I have everything working now!

On Saturday, I ran by the telescope store to talk about filters and a specific EP that I have, checked a few things out for their “used” items, and then I headed out to Luskville for the AstroPontiac evening. I’m on the Board, although that mainly means I try to go to their star parties, I do the website, and I sign some docs from time to time. My friend is the main driving force, and he has some good results to show for it.

My son had asked to go on Friday night to the Star Party in Carp, but with my marshal duties, I wasn’t planning on leaving until after midnight, too late for him. So I planned around him coming to Luskville, along with my wife, and we got there just between 5:00 and 5:30 p.m. Not that there was any rush. The skies were REALLY overcast.

Fortunately, it’s right next to the Luskville Falls hiking trail, so we went and looked at the waterfalls and then had a little picnic dinner while watching leaves fall in the dusk light and listened to the falls themselves crashing in the distance.

Just after 7:00, I said, “Why not?” and I tried setting up out of pure force of will. The skies weren’t cooperating, but perhaps if I set up, they’d open up. They were supposed to clear at 8:00 p.m., but it wasn’t certain. We crossed our fingers.

I did manage to catch Saturn not long after 7:00 through a small opening in the clouds. I wasn’t aligned, but I could manually spot it. The clarity/seeing was pretty low quality, but we saw it. Then the hole closed and we waited. Just after 8:00, it did look like it was going to clear…some of the clouds started to drift away, I managed to do an alignment, and then they clouded back in again.

My friend managed to keep a bunch of people engaged for about 45 minutes explaining the sky, even if he couldn’t show it to them. And I passed the time giving an interview to the local press about the Initiative. That was a first for me.

Not too long after 9:00, we called it a night and started packing up. Most of the night, Jacob was in the car playing on his tablet, which is the reason I brought it. Sitting around in the dark talking about skies we’ve seen in the past isn’t that exciting for him. I managed to show off some of my old photos of what is possible to see even with a basic scope, but that’s a pale imitation of the real thing.

However, although it wasn’t the BEST NIGHT EVER or anything, it was still fun. We can’t always have great nights, but we can make whatever night we have as great as possible. And any night I can see Saturn, I call a win.

#50by50 #05 – Re-start my astronomy hobby

The PolyBlog
July 6 2017

When I set my goals for the year (Goals for 2017 – Nudging the needle), I had some astronomy goals in mind. Specifically, under my blue goals, I wanted:

Astronomy: Fixed battery supplies + 1 viewing…I want to attend the RASC annual meeting, do at least 1 viewing at Star Party+Luskville+cottage, but I’ll start with 1 viewing. And work on reading the new RASC guidebook for the year.

and under my yellow goals I had:

Astrophotography: One decent shot…Sure, I would like to do more. Level 2 would likely be a complete set of moon phases (1/4, 1/2, 3/4, full). Level 3 and beyond could be constellations, planets, figuring out the laptop thingy, filters, etc. But I’ll start with the moon. And somewhere in there I have to sort my existing astro photos.

Since my new 50by50 goals kind of overtake the regular 2017 ones, I wanted to keep something in my new goals related to astronomy and I wanted to be realistic. So, in the end, I chose:

#4. Re-start my astronomy hobby

  1. Attend RASC annual meeting and/or monthly meetings;
  2. Attend a viewing Star Party at Carp;
  3. Solve my battery supply for the telescope;
  4. One decent moon shot; and,
  5. Upload my previous astronomy photos to my photo gallery;

I didn’t expect to meet all five of those in one week!

Friday, Saturday and Sunday of this last weekend was the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Annual General Meeting, and because it was Canada Day, the Ottawa Chapter (of which I am a member) had offered to host the meeting. About 150-200 attendees across the three days, I think. Including…dun dun dun…me!

Yes, I registered, and yes, I went. I confess readily that I suck at attending RASC meetings. The local chapter meets the first Friday of the month, and there is a mix of technical and non-technical presentations. But the meeting is way across town, you have to pay for parking, the items I usually care about are only part of the meeting, and the reason I joined RASC is not really what they do. I originally hoped for more “informal training”, as I generally don’t know what I’m doing. I had hoped, I guess, that there would be more offerings on set themes, kind of like groups going out one night at the start of the year where everyone gets to figure out how to work the scope better; then perhaps a night aimed at studying the moon; another aimed at planets, or constellations, or clusters. Not really how it works. And I thought the star parties would lead to more obvious bonding, but honestly, you’re in the dark and you can’t even really see the other person you’re talking to most of the time! Don’t get me wrong, some people find it great; I’m an analytical introvert, and mingling is not one of my big skills. All things being equal, I feel I might as well stay home and watch the YouTube feed. 🙂

But I join every year, I pay my dues, and this year, I decided I would go to the annual meeting. I know! Surprised me too!

I won’t cover everything, but I picked up my registration on day 1, including my extra swag, a nice t-shirt for the conference. I was already wearing my “You have a place in space” shirt from the US Planetary Society; if nothing else, I have the group swag. I checked ou the displays, spoke to a couple of people, and said hi to Tristan working the Focus Scientific desk (more on that later). And then I decided to attend a sesson on “50 years of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) at the Algonquin Radio Observatory”. I know, right, how could I pass up such a stimulating topic? Dr. Brendan Quine was presenting, and I had heard good things about him, but seriously, why would I care about the topic? Cuz it was a title that did not do the presentation justice. He was fun, engaging, and talked about not only the basics of VLBI and it’s foundational work to create GPS, but also the transfer of the ARO from the government to the private sector and what his company (Thoth) was doing these days. Including workable ideas for space elevators. Not a dry technical presentation at all, although some in the room could have likely handled that detail too, and highly entertaining. Plus I found out that the ARO rents rooms out to guests who want to come and hang out i.e. a place where I could do a weekend’s worth of observing in Algonquin Park where the observing + sleeping is the same location, not a hotel somewhere nearby. With reasonable rates. Colour me intrigued, and I might book something for this fall (when the bugs are gone!).

I even attended the BBQ the first night. I normally eschew the social aspects by nature, but if I want to meet people, I kind of have to do it, right? So I did. And ended up sitting at the same table as our local rock star, Gary Boyle. Okay, so there is nothing remotely “rock star” like about Gary, but he is regularly interviewed by CBC, his name is recognizable to anyone in the Canadian astronomy community plus lots of people internationally, and not for nothing, he just had an asteroid named after him. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/astroid-named-after-gary-boyle-1.4075015 Plus I actually managed to talk to someone I had never met before, Heather from Calgary, who helps out with the Executive and is on several sub-committee/task teams. Practically being a social butterfly by my normal standards. And checking off part (a) above…meeting attended!

I left the BBQ and headed to pick up my son Jacob and wife Andrea, then a friend Mike, and we headed out to the star party in Carp. The weather wasn’t looking awesome but it was still a “go”. We arrived just around 8:30 as the sun was still setting, and Ingrid (wife of Attila, owners of the giant scopes) showed us sun spots on her small 4″ scope. We had a lovely sunset, and then we got to see the Moon, and then Jupiter along with four moons eventually as the night got a bit darker. This was the only the second star party I have been at without my own scope, and the first Ottawa one for Mike, Andrea and Jacob. We all walked up and down the row looking through all the different types, seeing the different setups and viewing options. Later, someone had Saturn in their scopes, so we had to look at them all again for that. Easy to see the rings, all good. Then the fireflies arrived. The field next to the viewing area was dancing. And all of that was in about 1 hour, 15 minutes. By which time the clouds were threatening and the bug stuff we were using was NOT working well enough to stay. Great evening, and tick off part (b) of my goal…star party attended!

On Canada Day, I quite enjoyed the presentation on the solar system and current geological controversies from a retired NRCan scientist, highly enjoyable, and again, a topic I normally wouldn’t have chosen to attend if it was part of the monthly series. I even chatted with some more people at lunch — Eriq La Salle, and his friend Taras, plus Mike M of course — and got some really good advice from Taras on viewing areas and my battery problem. I avoided the opportunity to go visit the Hill that night for Canada Day, and hung out at home with my family. Sunday was okay too, nothing big sticks out, although I skipped the actual AGM in the morning and the banquet at night (which apparently was quite good).

I mentioned above that I talked to Tristan, as well as Taras, and most of that conversation was about two things. First, I have a battery problem. I have two PowerTanks to power my telescope, but they are both standard batteries, which means if you over charge them or leave them on charge or let them go too low on charge, they die. Never to work again.

I killed a large PowerTank, I killed a small PowerTank. And the pain of figuring out what to do with them has been a bit paralysing. I sought other people’s opinions and options online, and found out I could try putting the PowerTanks on trickle or DC charge to see if it would help revive them, but reliability would always be an issue even if I get them to work. Or take them apart and replace the core batteries in them. Which has a bunch of labour involved, not very clear instructions, potentially a need for soldering (!), and no guarantees of success, plus the cost of the batteries, maybe $175+ to attempt to fix both? Or I could say screw it and buy one of the almost idiot-proof lithium ion phosphate ones that don’t die if you mess up the charging schedule. But they cost almost $200 and well, I already have these other ones, they just need fixing. Grrr…

I compared options, talked to some people, bit the bullet, and bought a new one at Focus Scientific. https://focusscientific.com/product_info.php/products_id/1104

Problem solved. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the old ones, maybe offer them to anyone who wants to try to repair them or for parts. In the meantime, I had power for my scope. You know, that scope I haven’t really used in over a year. Tick box (c) above…power issue solved!

The fourth item on my list was to have one decent shot of the moon. I have a range of options to do this, none of which I’ve figured out how to do reliably or consistently:

  1. Smartphone by itself, not very exciting;
  2. Point and shoot by itself, ditto;
  3. DSLR by itself, with a tripod, at least now I’m in the ballpark;
  4. Scope + smartphone over eyepiece — hard to get the phone centred above the eyepiece;
  5. Scope + point and shoot over eyepiece — similar to smartphone problem, but I have this little adapter thing, just never got it to work very well;
  6. Scope + NEXIMAGE 5 + laptop + software — I’ve done this before, even got some shots, but stability was definitely an issue, plus replicating the outcome from shot to shot.
  7. Scope + DSLR with adapter — sure, this is supposed to be easy, but I’ve struggled on anything other than the moon;
  8. Scope + DSLR with adapter + laptop + software — supposed to take a lot of the guesswork out of the previous option but I haven’t figured that one out yet;

Now, I have been treating these like a series of more and more complicated options and / or more reliable and sophisticated photos. Bear in mind that I am using a SCT-style scope on a basic alt-az base…this is NOT designed for sophisticated astrophotography, and honestly I don’t want it to do that…I just want some quick snaps of what I’m seeing, preferably all less than a second or two of elapsed time. I won’t get the beautiful colour shots of other people, but I’m okay with that. More souvenirs of what I saw, records of my viewing, than art.

And I can pretty much eliminate (a) and (b) above. I haven’t tried (c) yet for the DSLR just on a tripod, not consistently, although I do have a photo or two of the Milky Way and constellations. D-H are all increasingly complicated, as I said, and I wasn’t really into it.

Until I went to the conference and saw what Tristan was selling. A Meade smartphone adapter, one with a very simple setup, with good reviews online. For $30. Hell yeah.

It is a simple adapter that attaches itself to your smartphone and puts a little ring adapter over your camera so that you can “mount” it over an eyepiece i.e. the ring holds the top of the 1.25″ eyepiece (without the rubber cup around the EP) and thus allows you to almost centre it perfectly before you even put the EP into the scope. You can see the layout of it here at the FS store: https://focusscientific.com/product_info.php/products_id/1354

And I managed to get a few decent shots…they are not DSLR quality, nor will I be publishing them in an astro magazine, but as a fun addition to my hobby, I was pretty happy. Then I tried to get a “little” fancy, and do some zooms.

I have moon maps, so I can go through some time and label some of the features. But for now, I’m happy with just getting the shots. Part (d) complete…a good shot of the moon.

Which has left me with one simple piece outstanding — to organize my astronomy photos over the last 4 years and upload them to my site. I had them semi-organized at one point when I had a Piwigo sub-site, but never got around to fixing the mess of how they are stored now that I’m with SmugMug. I hadn’t even uploaded them. So that’s fixed too. I have shots of the sun (1), moon (54), Venus (2), Mars (6), Jupiter (5), Saturn (19), Milky Way (8), Constellations (6) and my gear setup (1). Not all photos in those batches are created equal, but it’s the best I have so far. And with that, I’ve completed part (e)…upload astronomy photos to the gallery.

Which means one of the items that I didn’t think I would come close to completing before the fall is done. I’ve re-started my astronomy hobby. Feels good.

Gratitude for planetary conjunctions

The PolyBlog
January 15 2015

Gratitude entry #11…Today I am grateful for planetary conjunctions. At the moment, in the sky, Venus and Mercury appear about two inches apart if you hold your hand straight towards them and measure. I’ve never seen Mercury before, or rather never realized it if I did. And for the last couple of weeks, I’ve looked at dusk and saw nothing. Mind you, I’m only doing naked eye visuals, nothing with a telescope or anything. But tonight, as I drove home, Venus was very obvious straight ahead of me, and faintly to the right, I could see Mercury. Nice of Venus to provide a simple easy arrow to find it.

I’m hoping on Sunday maybe, or possibly even Friday night, I might get a chance to try for it with the telescope. I’d love to see Comet Lovejoy too, and Orion is pointing the way, but just haven’t nailed it yet.

That’s it for today…Onward in the journey…

Gratitude for laughter, skills, selection and orbits

The PolyBlog
January 2 2015

Today I am feeling grateful for four things. First, Jacob’s laughter. Andrea and I regularly comment that we have to get an updated version of his laughter on video because when he gets going when he is giddy, it is incredibly infectious. Tonight was no exception! Thanks, dude…

Second, Jacob’s new-found computer skills. I think I’m grateful. Double-edged sword. I have joked about Jacob being eventually able to hack my computer, etc, or that he has shown Nana things on her iPad. Well, Jacob has learned how to move the icons around on my phone, so he decided that all “his” apps should be on “his” screen (I have one screen where most of his games were). But “his” list has grown to include some of my games, like backgammon. So he just went into the folders where they were and moved them all over to the other screen. He’s seen me do it, and it’s not rocket science, but I was a bit surprised last night to find some of my favourites suddenly missing!

Third, it’s a bit weird, but I am grateful for living in Canada where there are selections of goods like at Ikea. Way too much time there this afternoon, to get only a handful of things, but the selection was nice.

Fourth, I am grateful for the moon. My blog earlier today for my goals was about the wish to get back into astronomy, and tonight’s moon was awesome. I ended up just doing a bit of naked-eye observing, but it was a clear moonrise today, hanging out there for all to see and enjoy.

That’s it for today! Onward in the journey…

2015 – To the moon…

The PolyBlog
January 2 2015

When I was doing my vaguebooking countdown, my third one on the list was “03. Three people who have inspired part of the announcement (Aliza, Vivian, and Stephan)”. Aliza was already tagged in the first one, since she was a part of helping me figure myself out during my Tadpole years (age 28/29 to 33/34). And thus was a key inspiration for goal #1 — PolyWogg 4.0.

I tagged Vivian too but didn’t explain why in the last post. She was the one who invited me to present on HR competitions to the young officers at CIDA in the early 2000s and to appease HR, we had to name it a “completely unofficial guide”. It was my first formal presentation of my tips and tricks, which also meant I had to write something down. Eventually, it became my deck, and I’ve used it almost countless times (actually I’ve presented to about 250 people so far on my way to presenting to 1000, and it’s zipped around the government email system an unknown number of times at different departments). Now I’m in the process of writing it as a book. So while lots of people have contributed to the development of my ideas over the years, Vivian was definitely a catalyst both for writing something down and the eventual name. And the related goals of 500,000 words this year plus finishing my HR guide.

Stephan, by contrast, is a more recent inspiration for a giant goal this year, and one I haven’t previously announced. When I was about 12 or 13, I think, I got a telescope. It was a hand-held thing, more a mono binocular than anything, and like most people who get the same style/design, my interest waned pretty fast. You think, “Wow, I’m going to see amazing things” but then you look through the cheap scopes and think, “Meh.” It’s not much different from naked-eye observing. And since I didn’t have a star party or anyone else around who was interested in the sky, I didn’t jump on board. Fast-forward about 25 years, and a couple of the planets were low on the eastern horizon, with enough conjunction (which basically just means they’re close together in the same part of the sky) that they made the news. Stephan had a telescope and offered to show it to me. So off we went, over by Dow’s Lake and the Agricultural Museum. It wasn’t the best of observing sites, but it was darkish. I remember that I didn’t like the setup for his scope, too fiddly for my taste, which sounds like I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth. I’m not, and Stephan knows this too, but the choice of the type of mount and setup is about your own style of observing. I’m a grab and go type of observer, not a “let’s spend a lot of time setting up and getting it perfect” observer. Stephan has an equatorial mount, which is more finicky than other types of mounts. But regardless, I saw a planet. Plus some other constellations. I didn’t swoon, but it did whet my appetite for more astronomy. We even went to an RASC presentation at the S&T museum to see photos from the Saturn probe. Cool stuff.

Fast-forward another five or six years, Stephan is pushing his astronomy park idea, I’m on the board and doing the website, and I bought my first telescope with money from my inheritance from my Mom. It is a much simpler mount than Stephan’s, different style scope, etc. If I’m just doing the scope and setting up in the backyard, it’s 10 minutes tops from start to finish to get set up, and that includes alignment. It doesn’t include schlepping all the stuff from the garage to the backyard, setting up the table, etc., but those are all accessories.

Unfortunately, my interest in astronomy waned a bit last year. In early August, something futzed on my mount (there are three parts to a scope — the mount (i.e. tripod it sits on), the optical tube (i.e. the part that people think of as the real scope), and the eyepieces). The mount is what rotates the scope to look at the various parts of the sky, and mine comes with computerized controls and motorized movements. A fantastic beginner scope and suits my observing style perfectly (I borrowed five or six scopes from the RASC library last year, and still prefer mine the best). But the mount’s electronics and gears stopped working together, forcing me to send it back to the manufacturer for repair. It was gone two months, early August to mid-October, prime viewing time for astronomers in our time zone and latitude. I was so disheartened with the repair time, that I started to lose interest. I even stopped photographing the sky. It doesn’t help that the last three months have been exceedingly bad for night skies — only a double handful of good nights between mid-October and now to even do naked-eye observing. I haven’t even tried the scope since I got it back.

Which means that I need to re-kickstart and commit to astronomy. It’s all Stephan’s fault, of course, but in the meantime, I need to set my goals. And here they are.

First, I’m going to commit to moon fever. It is the easiest thing for astronomers to start with, and there are a lot of choices of targets on the moon’s surface. It is amazing to see the ridge detail in even a small scope, and mine is way overkill for such a close object, so it should be good. In practical terms, it means I’m going to blog about my experience, of course, as I complete the “Moon observer” certificate with the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC). As part of that, I’m also going to learn at least twenty-five major landmarks on the moon. And, last but certainly not least, I’m going to image the heck out of the moon, including completing a full cycle of images (likely spread over several months, but day 1, day 2, day 3, etc. and publish/print it as a collage with the full moon in the centre). I’ll even try for the lunar eclipse on September 27th.

Second, it’s time to check out a planet or two again and to use my collection of filters to see different types of detail. I have to order a couple to complete my set, but OPTTelescopes seems like a good choice, reasonably priced. For my schedule, I’ll concentrate on ones I haven’t seen much before or combinations/conjunctions such as:

  • Mercury in the first week of May (or early morning on October 23rd);
  • Venus in the first week of June (or early morning on December 7th, including a daytime occultation);
  • Jupiter with Venus on June 30th;
  • Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Mercury in the dawn light of October 8th or Moon+Mars+Venus+Jupiter in the dawn light of November 7th.

Heck, even this month I have a shot at Venus and Mercury (Jan 9th at dusk), Mercury alone (14th at dusk), Mars and Neptune (Jan 19th at dusk), Venus and Mars (Feb 20-21), and Jupiter’s moons occulting with a triple transit (Jan 23/24). I’ll also check out the Perseid shower on August 12-13 and Geminids on Dec 13-14. For my first Astro imaging of stars, I’m going for Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Andromeda, Orion, and the Perseus Double Cluster. 

Third, I’m giving serious thought to attending StarFest this year in August, but at the very least I’m going to make it out to Nirvana near Denbigh or head to some areas in Quebec that I’ve heard about. At the outside edge of possibilities, I’ll think about a trip to one of the big dark sky sites for Ontario.

Finally, I need to tie myself to the community. That mainly means RASC and the continued involvement in AstroPontiac, but I will also do more engagement with the online community, including blogging about newbie experiences.

Stay tuned for photos. And remember, it’s all Stephan’s fault. Or moon fever. One of the two.