Perseid fever...

This is supposed to be the best night to be watching the Perseid meteor shower, so I set the alarm for 3 am and got up and out to see what I could see.

It was a pleasantly cool night to be out, but the half-moon pretty much put a damper on things, as all the light in the sky made it impossible to see any but the brightest meteors.

In my eternal quest for a nice photo, I managed to RTFM and set my camera to shoot at ISO 1600, with an f/2.8 lens opening and a 15 second exposure.

I actually caught two meteors (and a few more didn't show up in images because their photons didn't adequately excite my camera's CCD sensors).

In the shot below, the meteor's streak is almost coincident with a line drawn between θLyr and a star named Sulafat, both part of the constellation Lyra. Those two stars, together with the brightest star in the constellation, Vega (the bright star along the right edge, about a quarter of the way down from the top), form an almost equilateral triangle. (If you go visit my Flickr account, the so-called "blind astronomy solver" has labeled a number of stars in the image (though not θLyr, for some reason).



The meteor caught in the next image is passing through the constellation Hercules, appearing to just graze the star Massym (also known as Misam). (More star information can be seen here).



Wow. It's almost time to get up, but I think I'll sleep in for a few hours.

Cheers...

Kitchen experiment update...

The formation of a scoby layer in non-refrigerated, clear kombucha seems to not have been a fluke, as I set out two 32-oz. canning jars with clear liquid from the last batch, and both have developed scobys. This would suggest that the commercial kombucha I've been buying has been treated somehow (pasteurized?), because it will not form a scoby on its own if left to rest.

Back at the beginning of the month, I put a "baby" scoby into a jar with some ready-made Lipton Green Tea. Since then, it has developed into a "textbook" scoby, looking something like a jellyfish with a more solid portion floating near the surface and a diaphanous "skirt" hanging down into the liquid.

One thing that puzzles me is the stated requirement for sugar to be available to the scoby, because the Lipton product I added was artificially sweetened, and thus contained no sugar! Then again, there may have been enough sugar in the liquid that I added to the Lipton tea along with the scoby to keep things going to this point.

I tasted the result a little while ago and it seems quite good, even warm. I poured about half, though, along with the scoby into about 3/4 of a gallon of the Lipton "ordinary" (orange pekoe?) ready-made tea product, which is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup. I am curious to see what develops, though the answer to that question will probably come at about the time Galina returns from her trip.

In other news, the kefir grains are - as expected - growing in size with each round of new milk. I estimate the grains have doubled in size since I acquired them, and they manufacture kefir in quantities greater than I am reasonably capable of consuming in the same time period. I'm going to have to research methods of storing these kefir grains in an inactive state (that, or go the other way and examine the idea of trying to manufacture and sell the stuff, which I do not currently believe to be a viable option).

Cheers...