The Think Tank

Rose Festival Fireworks 2012

Mom, Joel, Shannon and myself went down to see the Rose Festival Fireworks again this year, and I think we got some good shots.  Click through for the pictures!

Annular Solar Eclipse May 2012

Mom and I drove down to Medford on Sunday so we could get the best view of a very rare celestial event: an annular solar eclipse.  As with all solar eclipses, when the Moon passes between the Earth and Sun a shadow is cast which, depending on your location on the planet, can block all or most of the of Suns rays.

Unlike a full solar eclipse, which blocks the entire visible part of the Sun (the photosphere) an annular solar eclipse leaves a thin “Ring of Fire” around the Moons shadow.  (The name is derived from the Greek word annulus, meaning ring.)

There was a fairly narrow band stretching around the globe where you could witness the “totality” in full.  In our neck of the woods, the band ranged from around Eureka, California to Medford, Oregon.  When viewed within that band, the Moon blocked about 94% of the Sun.

Mom and I cruised down there just for the event, and everything worked about as well as could be hoped for.  The car did develop a bit of an overheating issue – as this car has been known to do, this time due to a sticking thermostat – but it got us just far enough for us to get a great spot to take some photos.  It got us back home again too!

We’d done some reading and knew that we needed to have some kind of special filters to photograph the eclipse, but we were unable to find one in town or online that could be shipped in time.  However, we did discover that you can use welding glass, so we bought some of that and decided to give it a try.  For viewing the eclipse with the naked eye, the welding glass worked great (although the green color was sort of strange), but it wasn’t of high enough quality to get good pictures through.

Fortunately I was able to get some good, unfiltered shots during totality.  I had to stop the camera all the way down to F45 and use 1/8000 of a second shutter speed, but that did the trick.  They may not be the best shots, but I think it still pretty cool.

Big Foot at Redding Trail Shoot (2012)

Update 5/24/2012:

I kept myself pretty busy while I was in Redding and didn’t get around to updating this post at the time.

I shot pretty well on the weekend, although I was a couple of points under where I would have liked to have been each day.  But, given that it was my first time, I felt I did OK overall… with the exception of one target.  I suffered what I have coined a Compound Brainfart, because it came from two different angles.

I was shooting at a 19 yard skunk target, and the first mistake I made was mis-setting my sight.  I set to 37.5 instead of 32.5, which means I shot really high.  Fortunately I still managed to catch the top of his tail, which on that target was only down one point.  I really got lucky there because a mis-set sight usually results in a zero.

The trouble was, I was ticked off that I had done that because I was trying to be very careful not to mis set my sight.  (That is something I did in almost every field shoot last year.)  I also should point out that there were eight targets to choose from on the bail, and only two of them had arrows in them at this point.  So, being distracted and upset, I pulled up, settled in on the spot, and drilled a dead center bullseye… in a different target than the one I had tagged in the tail.  There aren’t a lot of rules in Redding, but one of them is that both arrows have to be in the same target.  So I got a zero on that one.

That was a major bummer, but I guess shit happens.  Aside from that I did OK.  If had been able to get a muligan on that damn skunk, I would have come in with a 1515, which would have been good enough for 8th place.  (Out of about 200.)  As it was, I shot a 1503 and came in 18th.

Original Post:

Mom and I are down in Redding so I can shoot in the NFAA National Marked 3D Championships.

We have some photos from the shoot and from Lasson National Volcanic Park, but I haven’t gotten around to posting them yet.  Hopefully I will get to that over the weekend.

I shot pretty well today, although I dropped a few at the end of the day which took me from really good to just acceptable.  I wound up dropping 8 points on the day.  I feel like I could have been down only 4-5, but I struggled with the wind and the hills on the last few targets.  Oh well.

I don’t know placement so far, but I’ve only spoken to one person in my division so far who shot better than I did.  I figure I’m probably in the top ten, and maybe even somewhere around 5th, but that is nothing more than a total guess.

Check back for more details over the weekend.

Since I started shooting again last year, I have wanted to build myself a target that I could use to shoot at home when I don’t have time to get to the range.  I have several different places where I can shoot: Inside the garage I can get about 6 yards, enough to practice form and do paper tuning, etc; Across the back yard (North-South) I can get 13 yards, shooting toward the concrete wall between our yard and our neighbors; And along the side of the house I can get about 30 yards depending on where I stand.  This last option will require me to get some kind of a back drop which could stop an arrow should I suffer an equipment malfunction, which I haven’t come up with yet.  So until I do, I can still use the other two options.

A long time ago I had a foam target which I used, but it got shot out pretty fast and eventually started letting arrows pass through it, which of course is unsafe and made my neighbors unhappy.  I needed something that would last a long time, be fairly cheap to build, and could be portable enough to move around wherever I wanted it in the yard or garage.

The first thing I needed to do was to decide on the material for the bale itself.  Eventually I settled on phone books under pressure.  When I was a youngster, The Nock Point up in Seattle used phone book bales and I remembered them working really well.  Plus, phone books have the added benefit of being free!

I found some good instructions for building the compression shelf here, and then I more or less made up the stand as I went along.  Total cost for the project was about $60, not counting a few bits which I had left over from other projects.

I started shooting at it on Friday and put the finishing touches on it today.  I have to say, it works great! It stops the arrows dead in five inches (at six yards, less from farther away), yet the arrows pull out easily, and   since I’m shooting into the books from the end (toward the spine), the pages more or less separate and do not get damaged.  This means the they should last for a long time.  The arrow holes almost completely close up after about thirty minutes, and even when I put the arrows in the same holes over and over again (which happens a lot at six yards) it still stops the arrows dead.

Click through for full instructions and building materials if you are interested.

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Maure is in the hospital with a fairly serious intestinal problem.  She is probably going to need a surgery today or tomorrow.  Please send her your best thoughts and prayers.

She is at Kaiser Sunnyside, room 456 if you want to call and give her your best.