  Last nights meteor shower was great! We saw lots of shooting stars and I tried my hand at some astrophotography... I won't know how the latter went until later today as Jodi volunteered to take my film to the developer. I was using Kodachrome Professional Slide Film 200 ISO. I mainly shot images of Casseopia, Perseus, the Summer Cross, and then some images of nothing in particular...just hoping to capture a meteor streaking across the image.
I also did a 5 minute "star trail" exposure centered on the North Star, Polaris. I would love to get into Astrophotography as I've seen some really amazing photo's done by amateurs online. The prohibiting factor there is cost. First of all, a telescope worthy of imaging (must have superior optics and solid/stable mount) is VERY expensive... but since I won the buzz aldrin scope from Meade... I'm good there! The next step would logically be a CCD camera... these are coming down in price but are still up in the $2k+ range for a decent one. I suppose I'll just keep working on my 'film' technique since that is cheaper and allows more room for error. I'd love to be able to do long exposure photography, over 40 seconds... but that requires a precisely driven telescope.
It'll take time before I can do that. Most of the people online doing Astrophotography live in dark-sky area's, so they set up their telescope and camera equipment while it is still daylight outside... and can then image the sky from the comfort of their home. I know a couple guys that actually sit inside their house... and operate their scope from a computer. Lucky. There is definitely a down side to the shower last night... I am dead tired! I haven't felt this tired/sleepy in a long time.
I tried to counteract it by drinking a bit more coffee this morning... the only thing I succeeded at was upseting my stomache with it. Oh, and get this... we helped out registration yesterday because they were getting buried in work... too many files coming in now... and guess who calls in sick today? Todd. Todd is in registration... so that means that they have too much work and are one man down.
More work for us today I guess, stupid "load leveling". He better have a good reason to not be here today... because I feel like crap but I'm still here working away... okay okay... so I'm not working this very minute but I will be in a second or two. If any of the prints come out decent... I'll be posting links here for all to view. I'm hoping to be able to identify a few nebulae and star clusters in my images, if there are any... I'll post two versions, one unedited and the other with a wire frame overlay and text explaining what you're looking at. We'll see. Feeling so tired that I feel sick... 
