New Lens for Digital Rebel

Mom and Dad gave me a new lens for my birthday (thanks!), and it came yesterday, so today I went out on the Piermont pier to take some pictures. It was about a year ago the last time I went out to Piermont with the Lumix FZ1 camera and the lens that Mom and Dad gave me for my last birthday.

Here's the lens - the Sigma 75-300 APO:

Here are the pictures:

Nice bokeh, right?

What's more, I can screw the Raynox teleconverter onto the end of the new lens and increase my magnification by 2.2x. The resulting focal length is equivalent to 1056mm (300mm x 1.6 crop factor x 2.2 teleconverter). The Raynox introduces some chromatic aberration, but that can be fixed easily enough in PhotoImpact using a plugin. Here's a sample:

Wow!

Rebel XT + ETX90

Here are a couple shots with the Canon Rebel XT coupled to the Meade ETX90RA telescope. Since the telescope acts as an f/14 lens, I had to shoot with 1600 ISO. The pictures come out fuzzy and muddy, but something can be rescued with enough PhotoImpact work.

Rabbit @ 100 feet:

Dragonfly @ 30 feet:

Orienteering and First Light

HVO's weekly orienteering training was on Thursday, so after work I went up to Black Rock Mountain (a bit west of Little Long Pond in Harriman Park). We did sprint training, which means that the controls were about 150 to 400 feet apart. Thanks to my new watch, I'm able to time each leg individually. Here's how I did:

To Control	Leg Time	Total Time
1	1:35	1:35
2	1:40	3:15
3	1:06	4:21
4	1:18	5:39
5	1:14	6:53
6	0:38	7:31
7	3:16	10:47
8	2:03	12:50
9	1:07	13:57
10	1:26	15:22
11	2:56	18:15
12	1:26	19:41
Finish	0:53	20:34

Next, we tried running the course the other direction. I did pretty poorly, and gave up after 35 minutes or so, since the end-of-exersize time had been reached.

Afterwards, I took some pictures with the new camera on the way home. Here (or here) are some pictures I took. Not exactly breathtaking, but not bad, I guess. The sun had already gone down, so there wasn't a lot to work with.