Day 123, Thursday, February 20, 2020 - Imperial Dam LTVA, CA, Day 3

Stars & Starlink Satellites

It was a warm night so I sat outside and did a couple of star photos. While in the middle of nowhere, Imperial Dam is a bit too bright for good images. Too bad, because the moon is very late rising so all the extra light is from the ground. You need to look at the large versions to see much of anything. The circle was a one hour exposure. In the above image I may have caught a few of Elon Musk's Starlink satellites. There are a bunch of short streaks in the 31 second exposure. I can't think of any other space objects that would have that group signature.  If the detail is not visible in the above photo, you can see them in the large version of the last image on today's LakeshoreImages page.

Tonight won't be a good time for photos of the stars, light clouds are moving in. Still enough sun to fill the batteries, but cloudy. Lots of wind with 18 MPH peaks and 11 MPH average. It is very drying - the humidity is 15%. I usually don't ever get chapped lips, but I dug out a Big Tent freebie - a chapstick from Pahrump, NV this afternoon.

I had a short visit with an Escape 17 owner that follows my journal on his way to Organ Pipe National Monument. A great place, and good for night photos where there usually isn't much spill light. He was here at Imperial Dam for the last couple of months.

More sitting outside ducking the wind. Current book is Contract Null & Void, by Joe Gores. He has an unusual writing style that I thought I recognized - looked in my "read books" database, and discovered that I read his Gone, No Forwarding in 1999.

Dinner was a grilled chicken thigh & spinach cakes.

Until Tomorrow -