American Airlines will fly to Bonaire from Miami

Getting to Bonaire just got much easier.  American Airline will begin a direct flight to Bonaire each Saturday, beginning in June.  You can read all about it in this article on the Bonaire Insider.
We always make every effort to do a direct flight whenever we need to travel to or from Bonaire.  Now one can fly direct to Bonaire from Houston, Newark Atlanta, Miami, and Toronto.  Pretty cool.

Fire at TWR's USA Office

A fire broke out at the Cary office early this morning. Thankfully, nobody was in the building at the time, and there were no injuries.  You can read about it here.
And learn more about it here.

Solarcan Day

December 21 has been special for centuries, make that millennia, and has had a number of names.  Well now, Nerds around the world think of Dec. 21 as solar can day, the optimum day to set up your super long exposure pinhole camera.  Our son, Richard gave us a bunch of them and Kevin Baker helped me mount two at the TWR transmitter site this morning.  One is facing South like most Solarcan users do, and the second one is facing West.

The shutters are open and we'll leave them in place for a number of months, maybe all the way till the other Solarcan day, June 21.

Today, the Sun will set at the extreme left side of the top picture.  On June 21, it will set over the white building near the right side of the horizon in that picture.

You can read amore bout the clever Solarcan device here.














Below is a shot of the South facing can in place.

"Dog Tired"

In the picture of the thee tires. The small one on the right is the type of toy that all our other dogs have played with. We accidentally got the larger one in the middle a while back, and gave it to Coco. It turns out that he loved it. We've since gotten him a few more... they last about six months before he chews them up.

So as an early Christmas present, I gave him the really large tire on the left, that I just took off our trailer. He thinks it is great. He likes to shake it to death and also toss it in the air and try to catch it. He succeeds once in the attached video clip.

Gemini Meteors were Great

The Gemini meteors were great last night. There were clouds, but in between the clouds, the sky was super clear. Here is a picture of a meteor zooming past the Andromeda Galaxy and a picture of a meteor zooming past the Pleiades.

Small Magellanic Cloud

We have had really clear moonless skies at night this week, for the first time since we returned to Bonaire in August.  I zoomed out to Red Slave to see if I could capture the Small Magellanic Cloud dwarf galaxy.  It is at its highest point, five degrees above the horizon, around 8pm this week.
I shot a bunch of 5 second long exposures with an 85mm lens at f2, and combined them on the computer.  Stacking a bunch of frames averages out the random noise but keeps the stars.


The SMC is the elongated light-ish blob more or less in the middle of the picture.  The bright "star" to its right is actually a globular cluster, 47 Tucanae.  I couldn't see either of them with the naked eye that night, so you can imagine how dim the SMC is, and how effective the camera is a collecting pixels.

New Transmitter is on Bonaire

Trans World Radio's new transmitter has made it safely to Bonaire!

I'm not sure when it will actually make it to the TX site.

There is paperwork to process still.

Handel's Messiah Live Concert on Radio and Internet

On Saturday afternoon, we’ll be broadcasting a live presentation of Handel’s Messiah from Duke University in North Carolina, on our Bonaire FM station. Other TWR sites around the world will be broadcasting this concert, as well as a Friday evening performance that we aren't airing here on Bonaire.

One can also listen to the Friday and Saturday performances online. 

 

Here on Bonaire pre-concert stuff will probably start tomorrow around 2:30 in the afternoon on 89.5 FM, The Voice of Hope. The concert itself will start around 3pm Bonaire time.