Growing up I always marked August 12th on my calendar as the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower ever since I read about it in a magazine (I believe it was National Geographic, but I don’t remember with great certainty).  Only once though did I really manage to immerse myself in it, pulling an all-nighter with my brother and a couple of our friends in their backyard (I think I was about 10; this was also the night when I stepped in dog poop in my socks, so it was memorable all around).

I remember speculating (repeatedly and I’m sure very annoying to the others who were all older than myself) about how fast the meteor fragments must have been going, and what it would mean if you saw one that just grew into a larger point instead of streaking, and OH WOW DID YOU SEE THAT ONE IT MUST HAVE BEEN THE SIZE OF A HOUSE because something was exceptionally bright, etc.  We had a single pair of binoculars amongst us and enjoyed some stargazing along with the spectacular show.

As years passed I made fleeting attempts but usually had something else going on or not a good opportunity to observe (bad lighting conditions, full moon, poor location, etc.).  This year being a moonless night I decided to give it a go again, and combine it with some fun star gazing using my recently inherited 8″ Newtonion telescope.

My location was still terrible, with streetlights within 150′ of where I was standing.  I positioned myself in an empty field behind the house simply for a better vantage of the sky despite all the light pollution surrounding me (and drifting up in the northern sky from the nearby semi-urban metropolises).  That telescope just drinks in light though, especially with a good eyepiece that takes advantage of the field of view.  Whereas I could only dimly perceive the band of the Milky Way unaided, I pointed the scope at any random patch of sky and was astonished and delighted with the awesome proliferation of stellar pinprick.

I refamiliarized myself with the constellations for navigation (handy iPod app for that) and generally played around for a few hours outside (and also learned that with a 10mm objective lens I can read billboards from over 4 miles away, wavering heat currents notwithstanding).  I managed to see four or five really good shooting stars, picked out some Messier objects, and bided my time until Jupiter made it above the eastern mountains (which took an awful long time, on account of I live part way up the slope of those mountains).  I’ve been able to do some meager planetary spotting with the new scope so far, with Venus, Mars, and Saturn making wonderful early-evening appearances throughout the summer, but I really wanted to see what kind of detail I could get out of Jupiter.

Turns out, an awful lot.  I should have waited for it to get higher in the sky so as to minimize the atmospheric distortion, but as it was I could still make out a prominent equatorial band on the gas giant and 4 of its moons: Callisto, Ganymede, Io, and Europa.  The sheer brightness of Jupiter made it difficult to see enough contrast to really appreciate the detail (that, and the aforementioned distortion) but it was an awesome experience all the same.

I’m hoping to take the 10″ scope out one of these days soon and put it through its paces – I’m getting some weird refraction artifacts with it right now, but that’s shooting through a window (a double pane window with decorative metal band squares throughout) in the master bedroom where I’ve been servicing it; hopefully it’s just the window, but I want to make sure (and yes, it’s been properly columnated insofar as I can determine).

My goal is also to eventually get a more complete set of eyepieces, ranging from 25mm to 4mm, and a good Canon lens adapter so I can borrow Rachelle’s EOS 5D Mark II and get into some serious (well, as serious as an amateur can expect to be) astrophotography under way.

Geeking out, rockin’ the blog at 1:30 in the morning.

Christopher Nolan is probably the greatest living filmmaker.

Was it perfect? No.  But it was a masterpiece.

That is all.

I’ve always been able to sculpt – I’ve just never done it.  It’s been a strange sensation, having that realization sitting around untested, occasionally surfacing and teasing me with possibility.  The very few times I’ve done anything along these lines it’s blossomed easily under my hands – but it’s never really been tested, because I didn’t have the time or resources (mostly time though) to invest in refining it.

I came close while I was in Seattle working for Amazon – while I was still naive enough to think that I’d have more time on my hands (this is a fallacy for Amazon employees – it’s a great company, but when you work for Amazon that’s pretty much ALL you do), I contemplated getting some materials together and trying it out.  I did some research, started sketching out some sculpture ideas, and made some plans – but then changed to a much smaller studio apartment with hardwood floors; working with polymer clay in that environment with 3 cats seemed a losing proposition to start with, so I bought an EWI instead.

While making those plans though, I was more sure than ever that the talent was there – with one sculpture concept I couldn’t get the sketches of the beastie to turn out right, so I grabbed a sheet of aluminum foil and made the face out of that: and then proceeded to sketch it off of that reference. For my most recent birthday, Rachelle bought me all the stuff I would need to really try it out, putting money where my mouth was much the same way we did in setting up her photo studio eight-plus years ago.

Organic shapes came as easy as I’d expected:

A rough draft of organic elements in unlikely juxtaposition of species

I would need armature wire to start building anything with substance though (such as I’d sketched previously), so I had to work on smaller scale projects.  I figured I’d book some flight time in a simulator first – doing simple projects, tearing them down, and then set my mind on committing to a small project I could do without the wire (which I subsequently acquired, but I’m still finishing this one out first) that would use a minimal amount of the clay and familiarize me with its characteristics and my tools for working with it.  The project in question is a 17th-ish century tower-top observatory, with absolutely no concern for period accuracy (or even scale, really) – off the cuff, just for fun.

Tower floor beginnings

Head-mounted stereoscopic magnification is a must for long sessions

Amanda wanted me to make her a lamb, which hung around and supervised construction.

Post stone, pre wood

Mandy's Lamb

Completed floor

A grain of rice makes its first appearance to provide scale reference:

Stone and wood texture detail

Rough desk form

Lock detail

Desk ornamentation and surface objects

Candle detail

That dark bar in the middle of the quill is the wire out of a twisty tie in order to hold it up – this sheet of clay is thin enough it shows through as white, and won’t possibly stand up under its own weight.  The large hole in the inkwell underneath it is where I stabbed it through with a straightpin to help it adhere to the desktop and haven’t filled in yet.

Quill detail

If you look closely you can see the bookmark ribbon is forked at the end, and that the loose-leaf paper on the right contains stellar observations (Ursa Major’s indication of Polaris).

Book and paper detail

The chair is still very much in progress, with only the chairback and cushion completed in this photo.

Chair detail

Still has a way to go, including the storage chest next to the desk and the telescope, and lots of polishing and refinement after that: I’ll need to go through and smooth out tooling marks, and then set the whole thing in the oven.  I don’t plan on painting it since my skills definitely do NOT as present tend that way – maybe I can get some of the gaming mini painters in the area to swap me work, where I customize minis for them in exchange for getting a nice paintjob (hint hint, all ye readers).