greenvillesky

I was able to get away to Goose Creek State Park with the scope last night. I set up in a parking lot at the end of the park road and had a fairly decent view well into the night. This photo was taken with my camera piggybacked on the scope. It is looking into the Milky Way with the constellation Cassiopeia just above the tree line. More at Observer's Blog.

Up until now there has only been suspicion that the planet Mars holds water. But after the Phoenix Mars Lander heated a soil sample it retrieved from a 2-inch trench on the surface of the planet Wednesday, July 30, that suspicion has now turned to proof. NASA announced today that the sample has been identified to contain water vapor and that we now have "touched and tasted" water on another planet.

A couple of years ago the photography staff at the newspaper I work for, The Daily Reflector, took it upon ourselves to document the condition of an old and historical tobacco factory in our city; The Imperial Tobacco Factory. We set about shooting fine art type images and exhibited them for a month in a local coffee house in Greenville. In April the building burned and all that is left is a shell that will soon be demolished.

In the near future at the paper we are also preparing to write a series of stories on the homeless in our city.

These two stories are somewhat connected because at one time there were several of the homeless that took up shelter inside and around the closed tobacco factory.

The image above is one that I photographed as I made my way around the backside of the factory one day. It's an image of a religious figure that someone has hung like a framed piece of art in a makeshift living space against the wall of the factory.

I thought it might be appropriate to pull out my photos again from the project and post them here.

The Observer's Blog has been updated with a complete listing of the Messier Objects. Each object is represented with it's own icon and links to much more information online. Click on the portrait of Charles Messier at right or on any of the icons above to find out everything you need to know about each object.
To view star maps of each object, click here

A view into Vulpecula

Here's a view looking into the constellation Vulpecula (click on photo for a bigger version) shot from Goose Creek State Park on July 13. It was taken from a primitive campsite at the park at about 2 a.m. There's not much of a clearing in the campsite so it was difficultt getting my telescope aligned properly but I managed and then I attached my camera to the scope and shot this image. The ISO is 1600 and the exposure is 31 seconds at f/4.0. More on the Observer's Blog