(Or… a story of the bitey-ist, most nervous unadoptable senior dog ever) (change of topic for this blog for now) We said goodbye to Peanut yesterday. We gave him the best life we could for just over 8 of the 16-17 years he had on this earth.  putting on his best good boy smile He was our “free” April Fools’ Day adoption from the local pound. We had gone looking for an adoptable dog to be a companion for Gizmo. My father-in-law would soon be moving out of our house and we felt Gizmo would need company during the day while my wife and I were still working full-time.  happy to have found a new pack All the dogs we saw were older pit bulls, shepherds, hounds and other large breeds with questionable backgrounds. We didn’t feel we would be comfortable trusting any of the large dogs with Gizmo (he's a 22 lb alpha dog and would likely have tried alpha dogging any large dog we brought into the house).  As we were walking out, we saw a photo of “Muggsly” on the wall. He had been pi...

 Hey, I'm back. I obviously haven't been doing a good job of keeping the old blog active, but I'm hoping to change that in the days and weeks ahead. As my last post indicated, Milky Way season is back on us. I made one short trip to Brown County State Park about an hour south of where I live a couple of weeks ago. Bortle 4 night sky conditions, so it still has a significant amount of light pollution, but much better than the suburbs. Normally this should have been a relatively good area for Milky Way photography, but high level haze from wild fires up in Canada really decreased transparency in the atmosphere. Despite that challenge, I managed to get a couple of decent shots, including my first successful tracked image using a new (to me) Benro Polaris Astro tracking head. The first night trying to use it was a complete failure, so I spent much of the following day testing camera and Benro settings till I got things right. User error (ha!). Lots to learn with this new toy. T...