Texas Star Party (TSP) 2011...my first time...

So I arrived on Sunday morning at TSP for my first time and so far it has been a very cool experience and I am looking forward to coming again next year. This is a panorama of the upper observing field; there are two other observing fields I will try and photograph them later this week. I am set up on this field at the opposite end of where I took this photo from. There are so many scopes of all shapes and sizes and some fairly large ones. I am impressed and maybe a little frightened by how much effort some observers go to create the perfect observing setup for themselves.

The first night was very clear but the seeing was not really good but I got quite a bit of observing in. Last night (Monday) we had quite a few high thin clouds and spent much of the earlier evening dodging the thin clouds but after about 1:00am things got much better and I was able to do some nice viewing.

These are two of the first sketches I did from my observing log for this trip, I did them on Sunday evening my first night observing. The first sketch is a lower power showing both M81 and M82 in the field, the M82 sketch was done with twice as much magnification and it is one of the object from one of the TSP Observing lists.

I will post more later in the week.

And now I take up Gardening...

So, I found out about 2 months ago that there is a community garden in our neighborhood and there are some plots available if I am interested. So just before Easter I pay the $15 fee for the year and get a key to the garden and go to the store to get some plants and seeds, and the fun begins.

I planted 3 tomato's, green chilies, jalapenos, radishes, carrots, cucumbers, squash, lettuce, melons, onions, garlic and basil, but it did not grow (or I can not find it in all the rest of the stuff that is growing). I am having a lot of fun and my garden is the envy of everyone, I was one of the first to plant my plants in the garden so it is the fullest bed out there. I planted the tomato's, jalapenos, green chilies and squash from growing plants and all the rest from seed.

Today I was at the garden watering and was visiting with some friends, Josh and Jess, who have a garden there now, next to mine and I got a second garden that we are sharing with just corn in it for now, we planted it last weekend from seed so we have a few more days before we see any growth. We were looking at my bed and decided that I need to thin out the carrots so I am going to have to transplant some of them to the other bed. I decided to check the radishes to see if they need to be thinned out and I find some radishes ready to pick...

We took out 6 of them and washed three of them and tried them out, I brought the others home and used them in the salad I made for lunch tomorrow, and guess what the lettuce is from my garden also, I have been picking it and using it for about a week now it is pretty good...

I am excited for the rest of the garden to ripen and be harvested, I am going to have so many tomatoes and lots of squash and if the melons keep doing as well as they are I will have lots of melons also. I will keep you all posted as I get more food from the garden.