Wolf Creek Powder

Wolf Creek I - Powder from Patrick Cullis on Vimeo.

  Video from the first day of a 26" storm at Wolf Creek Ski Area.  It was pretty amazing there with 16" on the 5AM snow report and an additional 10" during the day!  

Snow on the Flatirons

Snow on the Flatirons from Patrick Cullis on Vimeo.

  Video from my photo shoots of the Flatirons in Boulder on February 27th.  I took photos early in the morning before sunrise and then later in the evening after sunset and before the nearly full moon rose on the eastern horizon.  Once the moon rose, it put a spotlight on the iconic peaks while the stars were still visible.  Music is by Excavacation and my good friend Chad Parsons.  Thank you to him for providing good music to set my photos to.

Moon Burn Pt2

The Flatirons Pre-Moonrise

  Since I've been waiting over a year for the proper snow and lighting conditions to align, I decided to sack up and head back out in the chilly evening to set up cameras under crystal clear skies.  At first the bright stellar jewels of the western sky stole the show above the muted peaks of Green Mountain.  Then the moon rose and set a spot light upon the landscape, making the recent snow glow bright in the night.

The Moon rises in the East

Orion and Sirius above the Flatirons

Moonlit Flatiron Long Exposure

Moon Burn

Moon over the snow covered Flatirons

  Snow fell on the Flatirons yesterday and I decided it was about time for me to muster the motivation and take a few pictures before the warm Boulder Sun bakes it off.  In the first two you can just make out the halo that surrounded the Moon before the clouds continued to clear.  It was a seriously beautiful night.

Frosty Flatirons

The photographer and Boulder, CO

The Flatirons and Moon

The Geminid Meteor Shower

Geminid Fireball above the Flatirons.

  The Geminid Meteor Shower peaked the night of December 13-14 and the weather held off just enough for me to get some really nice shots of some really bright meteors.  This one at top is my favorite and the largest fireball I captured above the Flatirons along with Orion, Jupiter, and the Pleiades.  The National Weather Service forecast was predicting 50-73% cloud cover throughout the night.  Thankfully, predicting the weather still proves nearly impossible and the world is full of pleasant surprises.

Geminid2012 from Patrick Cullis on Vimeo.

Geminid Meteor

Geminid Meteor over the First Flatiron

Improving drastically

Collimated fairly well, but fighting a foggy aperture

  I randomly woke up in the middle of the night to a bright moon shining in through crystal clear skies during a predicted overcast night.  I gave myself a pep talk and dragged my telescope out in to the brisk, humid night at three in the morning.  I worked once again to fine tune the collimation of the scope and was amazed by the difference in my focus star.  The sky was still waving and shimmering, but I could actually see a broken airy disk around the focused star.  Turning my attention to Jupiter high in the sky above Orion, I saw the break in the northern band for the first time ever.  I could also make out a fourth band to the south and soon I had hooked up my camera and was taking high definition video.  I got three one minute shots before realizing that the whole time my front glass was completely fogged over.  I was amazed by how good the view still was for shining through tiny beads of water.  Right then I promised myself to always fine tune my scope when going out for a session.

  In the picture above you can just make out three of Jupiter's moons, one below at seven o'clock, and two further above and to the right.

  My stacking skills still leave something to be desired, but I need a PC in order to properly run the latest software.  My boot camped MacBook Pro is fickle with the Windows XP installation and only runs an oft crashing version of Registax 5.

  Hopefully this weekend continues to defy the weathermen and I can have another go at it without the damp humidity fogging up the view.

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I moved a previous post from 9/16/2012 in so the optical improvements could be viewed easily in a film strip.  I am also extremely happy that I once again found a blogger template that allows images to be viewed full screen and then left and right on the keyboard cycles through them in a slideshow.  I really like the possibilities of the new dynamic templates, but they have some unacceptable shortcomings.

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And Back to the Big Guy

Jupiter on the 8" Celestron SCT

  The seeing wasn't very good, and there are definitely some alignment issues that still need worked on, but hands down the best view of Jupiter I've ever had!  I'm excited for this fall and winter to get some extended time on the gas giant and a new crack at the Orion Nebula which is just getting high in the sky before dawn.  See below for a comparison of my previous telescope...

Jupiter on the 4" Meade SCT

Milky Buffalo Pass

The Milky Way

  I went on a hike around Buffalo Mountain just west of Silverthorne, Colorado.  The first night we pitched camp on the trail to Red Buffalo Pass and I set my camera at 11,424 feet photographing the Milky Way throughout the night.  Smoke from forest fires burning in California and Montana created a thick red haze throughout the day and a green shimmer at night.  With clearing skies throughout sunset and in to the next day, stars blazed throughout the night above the New Moon's pitch black Rocky Mountains.

  I time-lapsed the subsequent images in to a video below.  Help preserve our dark skies...

Camp at 11,400".  Buffalo Mountain to the left.

My trusty Hubba Hubba with Red Peak in the background.  

JetBoil Coffee...  Yes

Red Buffalo Pass, the major trail from Silverthorne to Vail. 

Red Peak and Alpine Lake

High Alpine Wildflowers still hanging on at the end of this parched and hot summer.

Milky Way over Colorado

First Run of the New Telescope!!!

   After a month of sitting on the tripod in the corner of my living room, I was finally able to take my new 8" Celestron out for its inaugural run with partially clear skies and a nearly full moon.  Holy moly!!!  I can't believe how good it is compared to what I've been using, and it hasn't even been collimated.  I spent about a half hour aligning the two mounted scopes and a laser spotting scope and then needed to grab the camera for a half dozen shots before heading to bed.  It completely blew me away.  These are single images taken at 1/250 of a second, not stacks...  I CAN, NOT, WAIT to really get in to using this.

Science Friday Venus Transit Contest

My Transit of Venus photo on Science Friday Photo Contest

Science Friday Homepage

  I've been struggling through the intricacies of getting my videos to show up on Google search.  For how easy people keep saying this is, it really isn't.  I guess that's why web optimization is such a big business these days.  But, the root of my problem is that I just found out all my embedded Vimeo videos use the new header page that (finally) allows them to work on mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad, but which amazingly make them invisible to the horde of Google spiders crawling the web for search mapping.  Google isn't too concerned with the plight of Vimeo users since they own YouTube, but I would think that Vimeo would be working harder at rectifying this.  But, the good news is that while following my video stats this morning to see where people are actually able to find my stuff, I saw a new blip on the radar coming from the Science Friday website!  Booyah!

TRANSIT of VENUS

 The Transit of Venus. I Finally finished putting together my video of the transit on June 5, 2012. It was a lot of work aligning a lot of images that were especially troublesome because of the 25mph winds during the transit. I got some good footage though, including video of an airplane flying across the Sun during the event. I hope you enjoy it. I had a lot of fun planning and executing this shoot.

  It's going to take me a while to get all the footage sorted, but I thought this short little video was worth posting right away.  Pretty cool.