Today Diane and I drove my parents car to the Good News Garage and donated it. My folks have had this car since 2002 (I think).. and still only 92,000 miles. My mom very generously gave us the car whnen she moved to Minniapolis a few weeks ago. At the time, her mechanic felt it had several good years left in it. We were thinkign that Gabe could have used it. Unfortunatley when we took it to get checked out, our mechanic quickly spotted several expensive problems.. They would have cost more than the car is worth to fix them… 

So we decided to doante the car instead.. 

 

I have to admit it was a little emotional for me droppign the car off.. It’s the last car my dad ever drove.. I spent the tiem driving in to town thinkign of my folks driving aroudn in that cr.. it’s a good little car.. it drove well..and it even smelled like  my parents.. !

 

the process to donate the car was pretty easy.. I encourage anyone that has an older car to consider charities like the good news garage here in Burlington. This is the 3rd car we’ve donated.. and we still see one of them driving around from time to time. It’s a great way to make a difference for a family somewhere.. 

 

 

 

Later after work, DIane , Gabe, the dogs and I went up Libby’s Lookout. It was a beautiful night !  You could see the last rays of sun on Camels hump 

 

I love the layerign of maintains.. the bigger ones in the distance are the Adorondaks in NY.. 

So grateful  to live in a place like this..

 

Nite all, nite sam

-me

 

 

Tonight we had gentle yoga at the house.. Like always, Tuesday is soup night and we invite all the yoganaughts in for soup..  Tonight was fresh Gazpacho from the garden  .. my favorite !!!.. Diane doesn’t even like it.. but she makes it for me.. Now thats a wonderful mate !!

todays yoga was eclipse themed.. Diane had made an awesome playlist of eclipse music.. My favorite is Ring Around the Moon by Elephant Revival.. my favorite band at present

TOday I had put a 1,5 hour meeting on my cal to watch the eclipse. I’d set my 8″ telelscope up to track the sun with a solar filter.. it made it so fun  to watch. We were able to watch it from end to  end… s

 

here are a few still shots.. 

 

 

and here’s a simple moview I made of still pictures I took through the telescope..

we also experimented with other ways to view.. including using binoculars. 

and soem simple pinhole prrojectors we made 

 

 

we watched it streaming from nasa on our phones too.. .. Here’s totality from soemwhere in Nebraska 

 

ome friends dropped by .. so we were able to  share the view with them 

the eclipse made me think about sam…my eclipsed son..  

 

 

Max was down in Nashville and called from there.. I hope he got to see well !

 

Man.. what an amazing sight.. Really humbling.. It was great to see the country  come together to watch ..

maybe it will help reset things…   hope so !

 

nite all, nite sam

-me

Did soem cleanup prep for burnign man today, got our gerar out, finsihed up the swamp cooler and cleaned up the mess I’d made in the shop and garage in building it. 

 

I also got my telescope (8″ schmidt-cassegrainian)  to get ready for the eclipse tomorrow. I have a solar filter made just for this kind of thing. .. We’re only going to get soemthign like 56% occlusion tomorrow, but it should be cool anyway

 

I had to expereiment with my telelscope to sue it in the day liek this.. Normally I align it to two stars that I know and it does the rest .. it can find objects in the sky, and tracks things ot keep them still despite earths’ rotation.. well.. thats fine at night when I can see the stars..

 

It was wierdly hard ot get the telescope aimed on the sun.. simply because you can see the sun in the sky, doesn’t make it easy to line up.. especially since you cant use the finder scope.. because that means looking into the sun..

 

WHat I did was is aim the scope north and level , set the date, time and lat/long where I was standing.. then pretended to go through an auto align even though I coud see the guide stars… they’d be close enough. THen I asked the scope to go to the sun.. after several warnings, it did… still.. I wasn’t exactly on the sun.. i had to do soem fine adjustments with the manual settings.  I found soem advice on the web that had  the great idea of adjusting for the smallest shado wf the telescope.. which means it’s aligned.. BINGO.. from then on , the scope tracked wonderfully .. 

here are some simple images just taken by holding gabe’s camera to the lens.. notice the sunspots. 

here they are up close..

 

if you’re in the neighbrhood tomorrow, drop by and take a peek during the eclipse !

 

 

later int eh afternoon we headed to tim and jen’s for an almost end of summer feast.. lots of kids heading out of town soon, so it was a chance to all be together.. 

 

it was another view of the sun for the day ..

 

and the newlyweds

 

ok.. gotta sleep now.. more tomorrow froma partial sun !

nite all. nite sam

-me