I guess Donna wasn’t busy enough with her activities which include Tennis Club, Pickleball Club, golf, Viewpoint Concert Band and her work providing dog walking and companion care for some elderly residents here at Viewpoint Golf Resort. So, she took up another hobby.

She built a raised garden bed from a kit made by a company called Vego. She did most of the work herself with only a little assistance from me. She used quarter-inch mesh screen to line the bottom of the bed – this will prevent critters like gophers or moles from entering the bed. The she filled the bottom with garden waste – broken branches, leaves and other plant matter. This was mainly just filler to take up space without spending money on soil.

From there, she needed a higher quality garden mix to provide the proper consistency and mix of nutrients for her plants. For that, she bought some garden mix from Home Depot and then wanted to improve upon that. I found a place in south Phoenix called Arizona Worm Farm that was just the ticket.

Arizona Worm Farm is an interesting place and a great story of entrepreneurship. About five years ago a guy named Zack Brooks bought ten acres of land that was formerly a cotton field. He had a vision of running a farm that would be a zero-waste, self-sustaining enterprise that would provide sustenance for up to 10 families. That grew into a successful worm production facility that creates compost and soil enriched with worm castings as well as fruits and vegetables.

He developed relationships with various businesses that had a need to dispose of organic waste material. He gets wood chips from landscapers that would otherwise get sent to landfills. He gets vegetables that are past their sell-by date that would normally be thrown out as garbage. He also gets things like melon rinds, carrot tops and other vegetable matter from companies that process vegetables into pre-cut vegetable packages. Finally, he has sources for horse manure from reputable stables that only feed pesticide- and herbicide-free material to their horses. He raises chickens and uses chicken manure as well.

The materials are combined and used as feed for worms, which in turn, provide the worm castings – a polite term for worm poop. This is a very nutrient-rich plant food. He sells about 60,000 worms locally to gardeners per week as well. We went to the worm farm on a Saturday morning to take a class called Gardening 101 which was led by the garden manager and head grower, Leslie. It was 90 minutes well-spent. Donna took copious notes. The cost of the class was $25 and included me as Donna’s guest. It also included a half gallon box of worm castings and four vegetable starts.

The transformation of an abandoned cotton field into a garden and desert oasis in just five years is amazing. The ten acres have about two acres taken up by various buildings and the rest is either dedicated to compost rows or gardens with fruits and vegetables.

Donna bought compost along with about 300 red wiggler (sometimes called red wriggler) worms. She finished filling her raised bed on Sunday and it has an in-ground compost tub which is a worm feeding station. We keep vegetable scraps in a container in the kitchen which we will transfer weekly or so into the compost tub and mix it with paper, cardboard and leaves. The worms will digest this stuff and transform it into plant nutrients. I find the whole concept amazing. I’ve watched several You Tube videos describing the process.

The worms can move freely in and out of the in-ground compost tub through holes in the sides. They will travel about in the raised bed, aerating the soil and depositing nutrients. They return to the compost tub to feed.

I cut a water dripper hose to the right length to fit the bed and we set it up on a timer. When the timer detects sunrise, it runs the dripper for 15 minutes to deeply and gently water the raised bed. In about six to eight weeks, we should have fresh tomatoes. Donna already has basil ready to harvest and she has sugar snap peas started along with a few other vegetables. She has marigolds in the corners of the bed to keep pests away. This should keep Donna busy.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing to work at learning astrophotography. Tuesday I made another attempt at Jupiter, but atmospheric conditions had layers of wind and temperature gradients that made it very difficult to get a sharp image. I tried a different approach. I used the William Optics Z73 refractor. It has a focal length of 430mm and much lower magnification than my Celestron 8SE which has a focal length of 2032mm. I used a 2X barlow on the Z73 to double the focal length and thus the magnifaction to try to capture Saturn and Jupiter. The results were still unsatisfactory. The only thing I can do is keep trying and hope for better conditions as the weather cools.

I turned my attention to the moon. I removed the 2X barlow and used the Z73 at its native focal length. By using the maximum sensor area of the ZWO ASI678 astrophotography camera, I could just fit the entire surface of the moon in the image. I photographed the moon on successive nights – I’m amazed at the changes in the moon view that occur in 24 hours.

The moon is waning – there is less surface area illuminated each day. I had a better exposure balance on the second night – I’m learning.

In the detail view above, the upper left has the craters Hercules and Atlas. Hercules is about 44 miles in diameter and Atlas is about 54 miles. Below them is the upper portion of Mare Serenitatis. Ancient astronomers named the dark, smooth surfaces of the moon mare (plural is marie), Latin for sea. They mistook the dark, smooth appearance as water. Actually they are large basaltic plains, the result of volcanic activity on the moon long ago. On the right side of the picture is the terminator – the name for the line where the illumination stops and the remainder of the surface is hidden in shadow. That is the Taurus mountain range right at the terminator.

I should mention the feature near the bottom right of the full moon picture. It’s the crater called Tycho with what appears to be rays radiating from it. These rays are formed by the ejecta created when an object collided with the moon forming the crater. We only see the rays on relatively young craters. As they age, the space environment with space dust and heavy doses of radiation darken the rays until we no longer see them. Meteors or asteroids collide violently with the moons surface – there isn’t an atmosphere there to create friction to slow them down or burn them up. The crater Tycho is relatively young – it was created around 100 million years ago!

Donna prepared a new recipe for chicken thighs called One-pan chicken thighs with coconut creamed corn. This recipe is a keeper for sure.

Sticking with the chicken thigh theme, she made another new recipe with boneless chicken thighs called skillet chicken with turmeric and orange. Served with steamed rice and sauteed spinach, it was delicious.

The weather has cooled in the last week – daily highs are upper 80s to low 90s. This is making outdoor pickleball a little later in the morning possible. Unfortunately, most of the pickleballers here in the park stiil want to start at the crack of sunrise. My astronomy sessions and early morning pickleball are at odds with each other – one has me up late, the other demands early rising. I enjoy outdoor pickleball more than the indoor game. I can see the ball better, it doesn’t skid on the floor and the level of play here at Viewpoint is generally higher than the recreation center.

We’re looking at a rainy weekend with thunderstorms possible. Donna turned off her automatic drip irrigation last night. It’s starting to rain as I type this.

We’ve completely transitioned from the RV lifestyle to full-time residents of Viewpoint Golf Resort. Viewpoint is a gated community for people 55 years old and older. It’s a very active community with two golf courses, a tennis club, pickleball club, four swimming pools and various hobby clubs such as woodworking with a fully equipped wood shop.

Viewpoint occupies over three hundred acres of land in east Mesa, Arizona and I’ve been told there are more than 3,000 park model homes. There’s always something to do here, although activity slows down during the hot summer months.

Donna keeps busy with tennis, golf and pickleball. She also works in the community as a companion caregiver to elderly residents. We were playing indoor pickleball at the air conditioned Red Mountain Recreation Center, but they closed for remodeling for the last three weeks and will re-open next Monday. So, I haven’t been very active lately.

We took an Allegiant Air flight out of Mesa Gateway airport to San Diego on July 22 and spent five days in La Jolla while Donna dog-sat for her sister, Sheila. Flying out of the small Gateway airport was a treat. I don’t think there were more than 400 people in the whole place! San Diego was a nice break from the heat and it’s always nice to be by the ocean. We met up with Gary Stemple at Offshore Grill and Tavern and Rick Miller was with him. I think the last time I saw Rick was 1974. We had fun catching up over a few beers, then I dropped Rick off at the airport for his return flight to Florida.

Donna and I hit the beaches and took a drive up the coast for lunch in Oceanside. We also played pickleball in Pacific Beach and Ocean Beach and saw some of our pickleball friends that we last played with three years ago. Time flies. The flight back to Mesa had us in the air for under an hour and the drive from Gateway airport to Viewpoint was about 15 minutes. Nice!

Last week, Donna and I drove up to Canyon Lake and met up with some of her tennis club friends. Tom had his pontoon boat on the lake and we cruised across the lake and up the Salt River to a point just below the Apache Lake dam.

We saw a group of four Desert Big Horn sheep across the river from where we stopped by the dam. I couldn’t get a good picture of them though.

With too much time on my hands, I’ve taken up a new hobby. Someone once told me that hobbies were my hobby. I always like to learn new stuff and can really get lost in new ventures. I went through a couple of photography phases when I was younger and sold event photos. Later, when my kids were in high school, I took sports photos of the high school sports team – many were published in a local newspaper called the Arlington Times.

I also have an affinity for science – I really enjoy electronics and ham radio. So I kind of combined the two interests and took up astronomy. My longer term goal is to pursue astrophotography. It’s a steep learning curve though and I can see myself chasing this subject for years to come.

After reading up on the subject, I bought a Celestron NexStar 8SE telescope. This is a reflector ‘scope – a catadioptric Schmidt-Cassegrain to be precise. Reflector type ‘scopes were invented by Isaac Newton and utilize one or more mirrors to reflect the light path. This allows a longer focal length in a more compact package than a traditional refractor type ‘scope.

The NexStar 8SE came with a computerized electronic mount, known as an Alt-Az mount. This mount slews the ‘scope in two directions – altitude (vertically up and down) and azimuth (horizontally right and left). You can program the amount by pointing it to guide stars and it triangulates the position and then you can select from a list of targets and it will automatically slew to the target. Some fine adjustment is required to center the target, but it really simplifies things.

The 8SE has an aperture of 8 inches – about 203 millimeters. The focal length is 2032 millimeters. It reaches that length by “folding” the light path back and forth before sending it to the diagonal and eyepiece.

I had a budget in mind as I embarked on this hobby, but I soon found out that it’s hard to stay within the confines of a budget when you don’t have enough experience. I soon went down the rabbit hole and upgraded a lot of the equipment. I bought upgraded eyepieces, a higher quality diagonal, a 9×50 finder scope and an electronic focuser.

Then the mount started acting up. I found excessive play in the altitude axis. I opened up the housing and found a defective bearing.

I sent the photo above to Woodland Hills Camera and Telescope where I bought the unit. They, in turn, contacted Celestron and they sent me a return authorization and shipping label. I sent it to them for repairs.

Meanwhile, I did more research on this mount and found some disappointing information. Generally speaking, you should limit the weight of the telescope and accessories to about 80% of the mount maximum for visual use and only 50% of maximum for astrophotography. The mount Celestron supplies with 8SE has a maximum weight rating of just 12 pounds. The ‘scope itself weighs that much before you add eyepieces, finder scope, electronic focuser or any other accessories. It was overloaded with my set-up. Lesson learned.

I bought a new mount. This time I went with a Sky-Watcher HEQ5 German Equitorial mount. It’s rated for 30 pounds. This design points the ‘scope along two axes – they’re called right ascension and declination. It’s more complicated and hard to describe. Suffice to say it allows the mount to compensate for the rotation of the earth and keep the target centered and prevent background stars from turning into streaks across the image. This is important for astrophotography.

When I started down this rabbit hole, I was mainly interested in visual astronomy. With my assortment of eyepieces, I can vary the magnification level from around 80X up to about 400X. I used 400X to view Saturn under excellent viewing conditions and could clearly see the rings of Saturn with a sharply defined Cassini Gap.

Atmospheric conditions – astronomers call it seeing conditions – are often the limiting factor to what you can see or photograph in the sky. When bands of turbulent air move across your vision, it creates distortions like the heat waves you can see rising from hot pavement. This is what makes the stars appear to “twinkle” in the night sky and can wreak havoc for astrophotographers. High levels of magnification increase this effect.

I used my Samsung Galaxy S22 to snap a photo of the moon through the eyepiece and it wasn’t too bad. This piqued my interest in astrophotography. I bought a dedicated astrophotography camera. There are many to choose from and it’s another learning experience.

With the long focal length of my ‘scope and the sensor size of my camera, I have too much magnification. Even with a focal reducer, which drops the focal length to 1280 millimeters, I get 400X magnification. This makes seeing conditions limit how sharp my photos are. Seeing conditions haven’t been too good lately. Soon though, when the temperatures drop a bit, it’ll improve. Here are a couple of moon shots somewhat spoiled by poor seeing conditions.

I’ll discuss the processing of astrophotography images another time, as it will be long-winded and this is long enough.

Here are a few dinner plates to close this post.

I bought a whole USDA Prime beef tenderloin and cut it into a dozen filet mignons and about a pound of beef tips. Spendy, but it’s delicious.

Donna is heading off to Vermont to visit her parents on Tuesday. Once again it’ll be just me and Ozark the cat for a week.