Moon Pics That Didn’t Quite Turn Out

Moon Pics That Didn’t Quite Turn Out

The title pretty much tells you what the video is about, for every good moon picture I take I get 15 to 20 that end up blurry, black, or just F’d up… Sometimes they are oddly worth looking at however. The Soundtrack is the Bangles, a remake of Paul Simon’s “Hazy Shade of Winter” and you can’t go bad buying their greatest hits linked below.

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October Moon Nearing Full

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October Moon Nearing Full

Here’s a picture of tonight’s beautiful moon, it’s nearing full. The sky was crystal clear, but the wind from across the Western plains was quite stiff so this is not as clear as it could be even though I was shooting from a tripod.

Late September Moon

Late September Moon

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A took a few photos of the moon tonight, one was taken at the full 300mm focus of the lens at 200 ISO setting and 1/25 shutter speed. The other was taken at 70 mm with a plain auto setting to allow a long exposure. In the photo on the left you can see the hazy clouds that I had to focus through causing the light to diffuse and bloom.

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7-20-1969

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On that day I was 12 year old boy, visiting my Great-Grandfather for what was the last time in Bull’s Gap Tennessee. We had stopped to see him on our trip fromĀ  Ft. Bragg in North Carolina to Ft. Wainwright in Alaska where my father was due to be stationed.

My Great Grandfather was 98 and a long retired railroad engineer; frail and recovering from a broken hip and emphysema. He used a walker and like Hugh Hefner wore PJ’s all day, I guess he had earned that.

He was one of those who drove steam locomotives most of his life, with those lonesome whistles that would Doppler through the quiet mountain valleys and open plains sometimes in the night. I haven’t heard that sound in years, it’s a thing of the past — a sound that carried across the nation and helped build our country but one that was plaintive – whenever you heard it at a distance you thought of some bereaved banshee wailing for a ghostly lover. By time he retired most of the main lines had replaced their steam engines with Diesel electric so he had driven them as well, and in the late sixties and early seventies even the back-country railroads had replaced their steam engines.

The world was still black and white then, most periodicals and Televisions were anyway, even though color magazines and televisions had been around a while they were still considered luxuries by the average person. Even magazines that had color photographs were still mostly black and white, the exceptions were Look and Life, as well as National Geographic.

Six years earlier President Kennedy had been assassinated, and a year earlier the Viet Nam war peaked with the Tet Offensive. In Woodstock NY, some were preparing for a concert.

I watched the landing as Walter Conkrite narrated and didn’t realize that I was watching one of the greatest achievements of mankind that would occur in my lifetime. I assumed that Mars would quickly follow the moon landing. My great grandfather didn’t believe it… he thought that they must be faking it somehow.. At bedtime I slept in the smoking porch, smelling the stale patina of years of cigars, and looked out at the moon that was crescent and waxing towards half and… for the first time really had men on it. As I nodded off somewhere in a far off valley a steam whistle wailed.