Lair of the Wolf

Sometimes, I think I get so caught up in the bs of life, that I forget the simple things in life, like looking up at the night sky, and just being amazed by it. A couple of weeks ago, I got a chance to play with a telescope in person for the first time in my life, which was fun. It was an Orion Spaceprobe 130mm, which a friend of mine just got that day. Though it was a full moon night, and too close to city lights to get a good look at much, though I hope to get a chance to use it again when its good and dark and just relax and explore what's up there.
Strangely enough, with a little luck, I managed to get a few good photos of the full Moon.

I'm surprised they turned out as good as they did, since it was my first time really using either the camera or the telescope, and they were done just holding the camera's lense to the telescope's viewer. The camera I used was a Nikon Coolpix 7900, which is also my friend's and fairly new. My digicam is a couple years old, so playing with a 7.1MP cam with optical zoom and many scene modes, that's like, tiny, compared to what I'm used to was interesting. The original images are 3072x2304, though for posting I've resized them down to 1600x1200.

The first image I like the best, as it sits off-center and I think it looks really cool as a desktop wallpaper. The second one has the full impact that the Moon gives off though, frozen in time. I can't quite put into words the feeling I get when looking at it. I've always just stared at the moon, even when I was a kid, riding in the back of the car on a long trip, just looking out the window at it. Its calm and peaceful presence looking down at me, till I fell asleep.

I got my hair cut short a few weeks ago, so, finally, I got around to getting the new pic of me up here. Its amazing to me how much different I look in this one compared to the one that's been on the Me page the last few months. I look so pale in that one. :-/ Maybe i'll get the motivation up to try to change more about me now.

Sometimes a 3 mile hike is rewarding...

My friend Curtis and I, went back to Crowders Mountain State Park last tuesday to finish what we started several weeks ago... to make it to the top of King's Pinnacle, up the 1.7 mile Pinnacle Trail. Its a rocky trail, half of which is fairly steep going uphill. Overall, I performed worse on the part of the trail we had been on before, and didn't particularly enjoy the climb up, i'm not in good enough shape yet for that trail to be easy. Though, I didn't give up on it.At the top of the trail, we were greeted with this...

I'm not big on heights or rock climbing myself, and it didn't look particularly easy to climb up after hiking the trail, but I decided to give it a try, after resting. We'd make it up this far, and I didn't particularly want to go back down without getting all the way up. Turns out, the rocks were fairly easy to climb up... and the reward? Seeing the view in that first photo.

In person, its breathtaking. I'd never been up that high like this before, to be able to see all of that. I can't begin to describe how it felt to see that view firsthand. The beauty of it, is just amazing. Its scary being up that high, since the only thing stopping you from becoming part of that landscape is, umm, rocks? ;-)

I took several photos while up there of course. :-) This one is my favorite.

I love how the rocks look in this photo too. I can't describe the feeling I get looking at it.

Curtis posted the rest of the photos in his gallery over on his site... Be sure to check them out.

I definitely want to go back up there, though I think the next time, i'm more interested in going towards Crowders Mountain itself. Not sure yet though.

OK. So, I've been thinking about doing this for weeks and weeks, (maybe months even...), I (finally) posted 5 new albums in the gallery.
2 of them are from 2005, Full Moon (which is the full set of images that I blogged about in Exploring the Night Sky, some time ago) and Lake Trail @ Crowders Mountain, which is from my first visit, before the Pinnacle hike.

The remaining 3 are from this year, i'll just list them here, since they've got a more detailed descriptiion on the album pages.
- Pond @ UNC Charlotte
- Storm Clouds
- UNCC Random / UNCC @ Night