This summer, Pete and I have been staying up all hours of the night when we go camping playing around with Astrophotography.  Apparently there aren’t enough things on the ground to keep us interested, so we had to start taking pictures of the stars.  He has a pretty sweet telescope, and he can connect a camera, but for the photography, we can get more light and exposure using the camera lenses.  These are certainly not pictures of the quality you would see from some huge telescopes, but we had fun searching the skies for things to photograph, and trying to get some kind of picture of them.

One of our main subjects is the andromeda galaxy.  It is the galaxy that is nearest to our Milky Way galaxy (and actually traveling toward us very fast).  We got a couple nice pictures of it (click to see a bigger image):

In this one, we even caught a shooting star:

Here we got a picture of Bode’s Galaxy with the Cigar Galaxy above it.  If you look close, you can even see 2 other small galaxies in this shot:

In fact, in the whole image, I found 13 different galaxies:

We had to wait up until almost 3:30 AM to get this shot of the orion nebula:

Google these items and you will find some incredible pictures of far greater detail than these, but we still had a good time.

On Sept. 9th my little Jayci turned 4! I can’t believe how old she is getting. It is so sad, but so fun to see her grow!  Somewhere she picked up this horrible little sassy attitude though. So far 4 is making 2 look like a piece of cake! Little stinker. I hope she grows out of it soon!

She was pretty excited that she got to go to her first day of preschool on her birthday. That was probably the best present she could have gotten. She has wanted to go to school forever and she is loving it. We started out the morning with eggs for breakfast – Jayci’s favorite. Then she got to open one present before school which was a new outfit for her to wear and then off to school she went. After school Rob took a long lunch and we took her out to Hungry Bear Pizza.

Later that day we had a swimming party planned at her Grandma and Grandpa’s house. We had pizza for dinner. Yes, pizza again! Another of Jayci’s favorites! We spent the night swimming with our family and then opened presents and had cake and ice cream! It was a long day but I think she had a lot of fun! She got a lot of awesome presents. Thanks everyone!

These pictures are from her preschool orientation on Sept. 2nd.

First day of preschool.

Birthday Party

We got a new car! It’s been a long time since I’ve driven a car. I’ve had a Tahoe for a couple years and if I wasn’t driving that I was driving Rob’s truck. It is weird to be in something so little. I love it, but I do miss my Tahoe too! The only problem is it is way fast…that is not going to be good! Oh well. Pretty cute isn’t it?!

We just got home from camping tonight and we saw an amazing storm going through the Morgan valley as we drove through.  I really wanted to stop and get pictures, but we needed to get home.  Another great storm came through soon after we got home and I managed to snap a few cool shots of the lightning.