Starry Nights

It has been quite cloudy and rainy, here on Bonaire, for a couple weeks now. But back on December 11, I got out in the back yard and took a few pictures of the Milky Way running from Cassiopeia over to Taurus. This composite picture runs from Cass. to the Pleiades. The top picture has some labels to help you know what you are looking at. At the top left of the picture is the Andromeda galaxy, which I've incorrectly labeled M33. It is really M31. I could also see M33, the Triangulum galaxy, in the original picture, but I don't know that you can spot it in this downsized version, although it is barely there at the middle of the top edge of the frame.

At the left side of the picture is the constellation Cassiopeia, it is below the Cass. label and is pretty much lost in the clutter of stars. The double cluster between Cassiopeia and Perseus is above the "D" in the label. Comet Holmes is to the lower left of the "C" in its label, and is above the central part of Perseus. Then way over on the right side of the picture is the Pleiades, located to the upper left of the "P" in the label.
The lower picture is a little larger and doesn't have any pesky labels in it. There is another comet in the sky right now, not too far from the site of this picture. It is much dimmer than comet Holmes, but we'll look for it later this week when the moon isn't up.

Big Sailboat

This sail powered cruise ship glided by while we were eating out under the stars the other night. So when it was time to head home, Sandra and I stopped off downtown to check it out.

Bonaire is usually too windy to allow for calm reflective water like this, but this time of the year is the exception, and I hope to take full advantage of it any chance I get.

Christmas Party Time

Our son, Richard, recently drove from NJ to Virginia, for the annual company Christmas party. Here on Bonaire, we had a staff Christmas food fest at Richards Restaurant.

Although we don't eat out much, Sandra and I have visited Richards Restaurant a good number of times during the 17 years he's been in in operation here on Bonaire, and we've been very pleased with both the service and the food each and every time.

Here's a picture of Sandra and friends enjoying the seaside atmosphere and camaraderie. Wish you were here, heh-heh.

Cara Cara - Wara Wara

The names for this bird remind me of the po tay toe - po tah toe song. By any name, these are impressive birds.
During the hot and windy spring/summer months, I often see them soaring on thermals and on wind pressure waves associated with some of the ridges and valleys in Washington Park. One bird, soaring near Yuwa Pass, shot up vertically like he was on an invisible elevator. I definitely was suffering from wing envy that day.
During the cloudy and windless fall months, I usually see these birds hanging out on the ground.

I saw four last week as I cycled through the park. Three of them scampered into the undergrowth when they saw me, but this one flew up onto a nearby cactus. He really has two legs, but spent a lot of time perched on only one.

I saw five Cara Cara yesterday. One was flying and four were hanging out on the ground.
Here is a 100% crop from the first picture.
This is a 100% crop of another image.
Some flamingos performed for me too. A couple were so nice as to fly right past me while traveling from one pond to another. I'll post flying flamingo pix sometime soon. I like the contrasting colors in this picture.

I also saw a bull and a few cows in the park last week, in the same area that I saw them once before. But no bovine pictures in the blog. I didn't stop to dig out the camera from my backpack, 'cause I wasn't sure if I could pedal as fast as the bull could run, if he turned out to be camera shy.

Big Birthday

Sunday was Amado Felix's 60th birthday and a full day of festivities were planned, starting with a small reception following the morning service at the IBCB. If I ever fail to have my camera, I can count on Lucy to get some great shots. Here she zooms in on Amado while Keith and Barb Johnston sing him a special song.
Here we see the birthday boy with his wife Sue.
It looks like a photographer feeding frenzy. Notice the kids waiting in the wings before their own feeding frenzy!

Just Plane Fun

The sky was quite clear last Saturday morning. I really enjoyed the vistas in Washington Park as I rode my bike in there for the first time in about a month. Another Saturday morning regular is Ernie Franke, who often takes out the Bonaire Flying Club plane for a lap around the island. I frequently see Ernie fly by offshore as I ride along the "long route" in the park.

Regular readers of my blog will probably remember the aerial photos of Bonaire that I've posted from time to time. They are the result of Ernie kindly inviting me to join him for his aerial adventures from time to time.

Here is a shot, with my "new" 400mm lens, of Ernie and Janto as they flew by the north coast of the island on Saturday morning.

Visitors from the Cold North

It was great to see Tim Jones and family in church a week ago. Back when I was operating our TWR transmitters out by the salt flats five nights a week, Tim Jones, the son of TWR missionaries Warren and Bev Jones, used to hang out with me from time to time. We probably swatted a million mosquitoes and ate about that many Pringles, urp!

Tim, his wife Dawn, their two kids, and a Nephew all visited Bonaire a week ago. They had already plowed ten inches of snow back home in Pennsylvania before coming here, and it was 20 degrees F. when they returned. It sounds like they took full advantage of the snorkeling while they were here for an all too brief visit. Here is the obligatory "please stand in front of the big map at the IBCB" photo of the happy family.

On a side note, we still tease our son, Richard, about when cow poo splashed on him during a youthful visit to Dawn's family's dairy farm in PA. I can't figure out how we let Mike Rowe and the Discovery Channel series, "Dirty Jobs" run away with that scenerio and have all the fun.

ISS Flybys

The International Space Station (ISS) passed almost directly overhead on Wednesday and Friday evenings. I noticed that the ISS was going to almost "hit" the bright star, Deneb, in the Norther Cross, as seen from our back yard.

I did some playing around and found a spot just North of 1000 Steps where the ISS should pass directly in front of Deneb. Sandra and I zoomed out there. We marveled at how dark sky was compared to Hato, and enjoyed the first cloudless evening in a long long time.

With our naked eye, the ISS appeared to graze Deneb. In this picture, taken with a 400mm lens, it was a miss, but a near miss to be sure. I've labeled the stars with their Tycho catalog numbers. I'm still going to do some checking to try to figure out the scale of the picture.

The ISS went from left to right in the picture. You can see a wiggle at the left end of the ISS trail, probably from when the mirror went up and the shutter opened. My tripod was especially wiggly that night, but I didn' t have time to tighten it up. I generally lock the mirror up and take the picture two seconds later, but in this case I needed to have better control of the timing, in order to capture the ISS passing the star.

Comet Holmes (again)

Now that the moon isn't around in the evening, comet Holmes is again a naked eye object. But it isn't amazingly obvious like is was a month ago.



I took this picture Friday night. It is the first chance I've had to take a "real" astro-phot0 of the comet. Previous images were stacks of 2 second exposures. This one is a stack of one minute exposures, and better shows how rich the central Persius area of the sky is.

Comet Update

Comet Holmes is still putting on a show for us, but it is much more difficult to see, compared to a month ago. The above picture is from Friday night. The moon was very bright and there was a slight haze in the sky, even in between the many clouds. We couldn't see the comet at all with our naked eye, and could just barely see it with the binoculars.
Now that the moon isn't rising until later in the evening, we can see the comet with the unaided eye again. It has faded to mag 4.3 or so, so it doesn't jump out at you like it did at the start of November.

The skies were quite clear on Wed. and Thur., at least in the early evening. We could see lots of faint stars and could scan the sky across whole constallations, for the first time in a few weeks.

Wonderful Weather

The rainy season is still with us, here on Bonaire, but we're more in the occasional downpour mode, than the steady rain all day type thing. Our earliest sunset time was about a week ago, and the dirt roads in the hills north of Hato are dry enough to mtn. bike on, so my after work bike rides will be a little easier to squeeze in soon.

The temperatures are noticeably cooler too, although there is often still a high degree of mugginess. Of course, noticeably cooler on Bonaire means a drop of a few degrees. When the weather hardly changes, we become amazingly sensitive to the slightest changes. It's not at all like New York last week, where it was sixty degrees F. for the Thanksgiving Day Macy's parade and about 30 degrees F the next morning when people were lined up outside all the stores waiting for those Black Friday bargains.

Here is a graph from Weather Underground showing the high and low temperatures, here on Bonaire, this month. If you look really closely, you'll see that it is indeed getting cooler, heh-heh.

In fact, the nights are so cold and clammy, the dogs make every effort to avoid sleeping on the concrete floor, as can be seen in the other photo I've included.

Multitasking / ATM

Our TWR facilities,here on Bonaire, are really into multitasking these days. Besides our offices and studios, they also provide a home for a grammar school, a high school, an Intelsat monitoring station, and the nerve center of the Bonaire Youth Outreach Foundation.

The BYOF is in the news these days with a multimedia campaign called "Seks no ta un Wega." This effort, which has a broad base of community support, will culminate on December 1, the International day of AIDS/HIV awareness, with a big rally/concert at Jong Bonaire.

Last week, the BYOF held events in the barrios of Nikiboko and North Salina. They will be invading Anriol and Rincon this week. Their goal is to encourage kids and young people to consider abstinence as a way to protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy, and other consequences of "recreational sex".

Check out their creative web site that is loaded with all sorts of great content, and the tag line: "sex is not a game - don't gamble with your life."

Friday Comet Update

Comet Holmes was surprisingly difficult to see Friday evening (and Saturday too). It has dimmed slightly from mag 2.9 to mag 3.1, but that brightness is also being spread out over a larger area, so the "surface brightness" is a lot less.

The moon is getting bright too, which is probably making it harder to spot the comet. It was even pretty dim in binoculars on Saturday evening.

The bottom line is that the comet doesn't jump out and smack you in the eyeballs like it did just a few days ago, but it is still well worth checking out.

It still photographs well, as you can see in this shot from Friday night. This is a stack of four 4second exposures at F2.8 and ISO1600. It looks like I got the focus better on this one than the one from November 10.

Here is a link to the post from Nov. 1 as well, if you want to see a wide angle view and get a feel for how the comet has been moving with respect to the stars.

Bad Feather Day

Well, we've all probably had a bad hair day at some time, so we can empathise with these birds who are having a bad feather day. We are at that time of the year, here on Bonaire, where early morning showers are pretty common, even on otherwise clear and sunny days. The above birds appear to be Bare-eyed Pigeons. They look a lot like the White-tipped or White-faced Dove, but have a light colored beak instead of a dark one.
This Troupial actually seemed to enjoy fluffing his feathers and grooming them with his beak, so the early morning showers may actually be a good thing, even if the birds look a little scruffy for a while.

Fish Fun

We visited Washington Park a couple times while my family was here with us. It felt strange to me to glide up hills in our diesel powered pickup truck that I normally grind up with much huffing and puffing and perspiring on my bike. One of the highlights of our time in the park was snorkeling at Wayaka 2. There is a sandy beach entry to the fairly calm water, and fish that aren't afraid to get right up in your face.
Can you find the Flounder in the above photo? They are masters of camouflage. I can see it, even in the small thumbnail version of the photo. You might need to click on it to see the bigger version.
Two large angel fish were particularly nosey and hung around us the whole time we were in the water. Laurie also saw a giant turtle and a couple normal size ones.

Family Foto

As I mentioned recently, we've been enjoying some fun family times with my parents and my brother and his wife.

After the church service at the International Bible Church of Bonaire, we all posed by the big world map and asked some friends to help with snapping a couple family photos. Lucy shot some with her camera and later presented us with beautiful print copies.

Bob Lassiter used my dying Minolta camera to take the one you see here. Thank you Bob and Lucy.

Comet Holmes Update

We've been watching comet Holmes each night. It seems easier to see now, even though it has dimmed slightly from magnitude 2.9 to magnitude 3. Even with the naked eye, it seems to have grown in diameter and now looks distinctly fuzzy.

It's really fuzzy in binoculars. I shot this picture with a 85 mm lens, so it shows a "zoomed in" view compared to the picture I posted earlier, which was shot with a 24mm wide angle lens. I stacked a number of 4 second exposures at F2.8 and ISO 1600 for this image. There was some coma in the corners of the image, which I have cropped out, so I'll probably be trying this lens at F4 next time out.

The original size images showed that the stars moved during the four second exposure, but after I scaled the picture down for the Web, the stars look ok. I was able to shoot eight second exposures with the 24m lens, but four seconds is a little too long at 85mm. The more of a telephoto lens one uses, the more the earths rotation streaks the star images, and the more one needs to get out the good old motorized telescope mount to track the stars during the exposure.

7th Annual Eco-Swim

I counted about 80 swimmers churning up the clear blue waters of Hato this morning. They were participating in the seventh annual Eco-Swim open water swimming races.

There were 10k, 5k, 3k, and 1k distance categories, as well as sub categories for those who were using fins. (seems like we used to call them flippers back in my youth)

I shot a a few pictures that I'll try stitching into a panorama, but don't know if it will pan our or not. It is tricky because those pesky swimmers keep moving while I am taking the images that will make up the panorama. Here is a regular picture that I cropped to resemble a panoramic image.

Family Fun

We're enjoying a visit from my parents these days. My brother, Bruce, and his wife, Laurie, have just wrapped up a fun filled week with us too.

We got in a bike ride to Playa Frans, lots of snorkeling, two trips to Washington Park, and managed to squeeze in some good old R and R as well.

While Bruce and Laurie were here, their daughter, who is a freshman at the University of the Pacific, was tapped to start for the Tigers in the first pre-season game. It looks like she is going to get a good bit of playing time at beginning of the season, which is an exciting, but somewhat daunting prospect.

We listened to her first game, live, on the Internet. UOP won and she did well, which resulted in lots of cheering from her proud parents. In this photo you can see the aforementioned proud parents, as well as a proud grandpa checking out the game stats.

Sandra, who grew up in countries where basketball wasn't that big a thing found it all rather puzzling, ha-ha.

Comet Holmes Picture

We could easily see comet Holmes the last three nights. Here is a picture that shows a rough outline of the constellation Perseus and where the comet is. It doesn't seem to move much from night to night.

You might be able to see in this picture that the comet is fuzzy looking compared to the stars. You can just barely detect this fuzziness with the naked eye, but it is really obvious in our 10x50 binoculars.

Sky and Telescope has more information and a finder chart that shows where Perseus and the comet are relative to some of the other stars and constellations.