Milk and Cookies, originally uploaded by Cook Jones.

Some chocolate chip cookies I made today from a recipe in Cook’s Illustrated. These cookies turned out great; I think the key is using butter and not margarine. Remember, when a recipe calls for butter, use butter!

Just a quick photo I shot when I was making the Cook’s Illustrated recipe for coffeecake (subscription required). The recipe was easy and made for a delicious breakfast.

So instead of finishing my write up (ha, starting) on the lunar eclipse, I fell off the abstaining-from-lolcats wagon (once again) and decided to hold a contest that isn’t really a contest. Basically, lolcat up Bogey in the picture below. Post in the comments if you are comfortable with html, or get in touch with me through the comments (or by email if you have it) and I will help get the picture up. Bigger versions should be available on Flickr.

(This is all Rory’s fault. If he wouldn’t have forwarded me this, I would have been productive today.)

I haven’t got my lunar eclipse photos fully edited yet. I have hit a roadblock in successfully combining the darker images from totality with the partial eclipse photos from closer to dawn. I can get it all together just fine, but each moon shot gets washed out with the brighter dawn pictures.

By the way, I am using Photoshop’s screen blend option to combine the image. If anyone has any suggestions or different approaches I am all ears. I am attempting to emulate multiple exposures on a single frame of film. I should have a full write up tonight or tomorrow.

Tomorrow morning (Tuesday, August 28th, 2007, UTC -5 hours) marks the second lunar eclipse of 2007. I’ve been looking through sites today to get some good tips to capture this eclipse on film (literally and figuratively). It is a little late, but if you are wondering, these sites have been a big help:

1. NASA Eclipse Homepage is as good as place as any to start.
2. Find your viewing location’s coordinates using Google Earth or a GPS and plug them into NASA’s Lunar Eclipse Explorer. (Alternatively you can just select a nearby location, but where is the fun in that?) This cool little tool will spit out exact times for all lunar eclipses at a certain location for any century starting with -1999 (2000 BCE) all the way up to 3000. The times provided are an exact measure of returning what lunar eclipse events you will be able to see.

   If you don’t want to mess with the app, this graphic provides a quick reference to see how much of the eclipse you can see. The values attached to the contact curves (e.g. U1, P1) refer to the phases of the eclipse visible for a certain location. So in the Kansas, the eclipse will be visible through the U3 phase; sometime afterwards, the moon will set. The description of each phase is available on the main eclipse webpage.

3. The first result returned by Google when trying to figure out proper exposures is the excellent MrEclipse page. Mr. Espenak has great advice, and his photographs are amazing. His material is great, and with the tables and advice provided I was able to figure out a shooting plan that I hope will provide some great results.

I will post some digital shots tomorrow. If the film comes out, I’ll post it when it gets developed and scanned.