Photography, Technology, Science, Adventure

Had an awesome experience today. Got to drive 600 head of cattle with everyone at Red Top Ranch. One of the best experiences I have ever had in my life. The ranch is 97,000 acres and has a total of 1,700 cows. We moved about 140 of them to a new section of land so they would have better access to water since one of the wells was having a few problems. The cows are Angus and are primarily used for beef.  The ranch is incredibly beautiful and since there was a lot of rain this year and the prairie is carpeted with has miles and miles of wild sunflowers.  All together there were 5 of us spread out over about a 1/2 mile. After we got all the cows moving and we gradually became closer and brought the herd tother so we could get them through the gate in the fence. We drove them up onto a mesa then watched them go down the other side to the section where there was better water. In addition to us there were about 5-6 cattle dogs with us. The cattle dogs would walk near the hors...

TTechnology has advanced a ton in the past 15 years. The picture on the bottom is of the Orion Nebula. I took it when I first started to get into astrophotography around 2002. The picture on top is the most recent picture of the Orion nebula that I took last night. I bought a super old 400mm Olympus lens from Ebay and mounted it on top of my telescope with an Olympus OM-1 *FILM* camera. I also used one of the first autoguiders on the market to guide the telescope while the picture was being taken.  Something interesting (I think its interesting) that not a lot of people know about is something called "reciprocity failure in film." What that means is that film looses its sensitivity to light after 1 second. There is a very sharp drop off in the films ability to expose after 1 second. This means that if you want to take an astrophoto you need to have a very long exposure time due to the problems that film has. This reciprocity failure isn't present in digital sen...