Across the country, rest areas like this one have been losing a long-fought battle to commercial alternatives, super-sized stops with eight blends of caffeine, free wifi, burgers, and gas. Traditional rest areas cost money to staff and maintain, and aside from the odd vending machine, don’t generate any direct revenue; Virginia expects to save $9 million (much of which has gone to minority- and female-owned maintenance contractors) by not maintaining these buildings. It’s a public expense, originally conceived when the highway system was new and the opportunities to stop far between. That’s harder to justify now that there’s a McDonalds and a gas station at every interchange. The flailing economy today has only made matters worse.

Last year, Louisiana closed 24 of its 34 stops, and Vermont has already shuttered four this year. In April, Wisconsin stopped staffing its welcome centers. South Carolina, meanwhile, is closing its stops two days a week (“budget cuts” say the signs on locked doors) and North Carolina one day a week (“budget shortfalls”).

Day by day, travel keeps getting just a little bit meaner. Via MetaFilter.

My retinas: let me show you them. I had an eye exam on June 16, my first since 1994; my optometrist just sent me the images from the retinal screening. Apparently my retinas are healthy. My vision, on the other hand, has gotten a little worse over the past 15 years: it’s now +2.50/-0.75 — worse than the +1.50/-0.50 it was 15 years ago. Yes, you read right: I’m nearsighted in one eye, farsighted in the other; I believe I already told you that.

So now it’s time to replace my hideously beat-up, uncomfortable, unfashionable and now wrong eyeglasses with something new and up-to-date and suitable. Damned if I can figure out what looks good on me; everyone’s wearing these glasses with small, rectangular lenses and ginormous frames, which I’m just not used to. Kids these days, et cetera.

It’s Netscape 4 all over again: that old browser did a horrible job of rendering CSS, but its installed base meant that it took years to go away. The question is: has IE 6 gone away yet? Are there few enough people still using it that it’s safe enough to ignore compatibility problems?

Using Google Analytics, I had a quick look at my visitors’ browser usage. The answer is: a definite maybe.

It’s interesting that two thirds of the visitors to Gartersnake.info use some variant of IE, whereas the IE-to-Firefox ratio on the other two sites is much closer and the Safari and Chrome usage is much higher.

Now let’s take a look at IE usage. Which versions are being used? The following table shows the percentage of IE users that use IE 6, 7 or 8:

Regardless of the site, a majority of IE users — between 57 and 64.2 percent — use IE 7; IE 8 usage ranges between 16 to 20 percent, while fewer than one in four IE users are still on IE 6 (and many of them are probably doing so from a work machine).

Looking at IE 6 users as a percentage of the whole, only 9.6 percent of all visitors to The Map Room or my personal site use IE 6; that number rises to 13 percent for Gartersnake.info, where more people use IE in general.

In other words, more people visit The Map Room and this site using Apple’s Safari browser (in all its versons, on all its platforms) than use IE 6.

IE 6 usage relative to other browsers is only going to decline over time, so if it’s not yet time to stop coding for IE 6, it will be soon.

It can’t come soon enough.

If you’re at all curious about the equipment I’ve been using to shoot my recent Moon photos, click on the above photo to see the annotations on its Flickr page.

From left to right: a DR-6 right-angle finder for Nikon digital SLRs, which is mounted on my Nikon D90 digital SLR, to which is attached a T-ring for a Nikon F-mount, which allows the camera to connect to my Televue 2× Powermate with its T-ring adapter, which, in turn, is inserted into a two-inch extension tube, which is inserted into the focuser of my Sky-Watcher Equinox 80 apochromatic refractor.

All of which is completely unwieldy on my now surprisingly flimsy Manfrotto tripod. Time for a better mount. For lunar photography, a computerized equatorial mount is overkill; I can do this with a sturdy alt-azimuth mount that would normally be used for observing. Candidates include Astro-Tech’s Voyager, Orion’s VersaGo and Vixen’s Porta II; heavier-duty possibilities include Orion’s SkyView AZ, Sky-Watcher’s HDAZ, and similar mounts. Time to poke around.

Early reviews of the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros (or is that MacBooks Pro?) gush about the crazy-stupid battery life afforded by the new machines’ larger, non-removable batteries, which Apple claims last seven hours. “This battery lasts forever,” writes Leander Kahney in his review of the “freakin’ awesome” 13-inch model; he got more than six hours in ordinary use. Anand Lal Shimpi can’t believe that he got more than “eight, freakin’, hours” from the 15-inch MacBook Pro; his multi-page review begins here.

Which is making me rethink my plans to buy a small, Windows-based netbook for autoguiding purposes (see previous entry). While the 10-inch Asus Eee PC 1000HE claims a battery life up to nine and a half hours and costs only $450, the fact is, it would only be used for astrophotography. A low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro, on the other hand, may cost $1,400, but it would certainly not be a one-trick pony — the Windows-only astrophotography software could be installed on a Windows partition, and I’d be much happier with a Mac portable when doing virtually anything else. (It’d be nice not having to wait to get home before processing photos taken on trips, for example.)

In other words, I’ve just rationalized spending an additional $950. Oh hell.

(Image courtesy of Apple.)

He still eats well and has a good disposition. Go figure.

1. AF Nikkor 85mm f/1.8D ($500¹). Fast portrait lens. DX crop factor: 127.5mm. Expected uses: portrait photography (girls!), low-light telephoto, astrophotography. Already have the AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D, which fulfils some of these uses. Nikon will probably replace this with an AF-S lens that costs more at some point.
2. AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED ($600¹). Telephoto zoom. DX crop factor: 105-450mm. Expected use: wildlife photography. Already have the AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 55-200mm f/4-5.6 G IF-ED, which is the DX analogue of this lens. Using the 70-300mm on a DX camera would give me more reach; there are times when 200mm isn’t enough (and I can’t afford fast telephoto primes).
3. AF DX Fisheye-Nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8G ED ($850¹). Fisheye lens. Expected use: astrophotography. Wide-field astrophotography would be really impressive with this lens, but it will have to wait until I get a tracking mount. Maybe a one-trick pony until I can find some terrestrial uses.
4. AF-S VR Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED ($1,050¹). Macro lens. DX crop factor: 157.5mm. Expected uses: macro photography (small reptiles), portrait photography, astrophotography. An f/2.8 lens at this focal length has several uses; while it’s the most expensive lens under consideration here, it would probably get the most use overall. And, of Nikon’s three macro focal lengths, this is probably the one to have if I can only have one.

Any suggestions or recommendations?

I’ve already bought all the cheap, general-purpose lenses I will have a use for, so I’m now moving into the realm of lenses to get for specialized purposes. Now I don’t think I can afford to get all four of these lenses — at least not all at once, so I’m going to have to figure out which lens (or lenses) I will have the most use for. It depends on where my photography goes next: if I get into portrait photography for some reason, the 85mm and 105mm macro lenses make sense, for example (the macro lens can double as a portrait lens), whereas wildlife and reptile photography points to the 70-300mm and the 105mm macro. Wide-field astrophotography would benefit from any prime (i.e., non-zoom) lens, but will requires a tracking equatorial mount.

My financial self-discipline demands that I hold off any lens purchase until I have a use for that lens: there’s no point in spending money on a lens and having it sit on a shelf for months, or buying a lens and then trying to figure out what I can do with it. Then there’s the issue of having the time to shoot photos in the first place: I usually don’t have much of that when I’m off earning enough money to buy lenses.

But this is fun to think about anyway. Thinking about buying toys usually is.

¹ Canadian MSRP, for reference; I’ve sometimes seen them advertised for less than this.

I’ve added still more photos to my Little Ray’s Reptile Zoo set; we visited that zoo again on Saturday. Highlights of this trip included some extraordinarily personable marmosets (which weren’t there the last time), an unlabelled mamba, and, found outside the building, a gravid Northern Red-bellied Snake.

Previously: More fun at Little Ray’s.

I had the Powermate’s T-ring adapter on order at Focus Scientific (great people; shop there); I picked it up on Monday, along with a two-inch extension tube, which I hoped would allow me to achieve focus with all this gear. I got to test this combination out on Thursday night. As you can see, it worked:

The advantage of photographing the Moon with a 2× Powermate is that it doubles the focal length — in this case from 500 mm to 1,000 mm — making your target object much larger to the camera and covering more pixels on its sensor. But it’s not without its challenges.

Because it doubles the telescope’s focal ratio — in this case from f/6.25 to f/12.5 — it requires longer exposures. At nearly a full moon, this image was taken at 1/250 s, the same shutter speed as this crescent Moon shot without the Powermate (a crescent Moon is much less bright than a full Moon); this shot of a full Moon, similar to the one above, was at 1/2000 s.

The combination of these two factors — larger image, slower shutter speed — is going to require me to get a better, sturdier mount than the camera tripod I’ve been using in an improvised manner. The tripod was jittery to start with, but that wasn’t really a problem because (a) I was using ridiculously fast shutter speeds when shooting a bright moon at f/6.25 and (b) I was photographing a tiny Moon that could bounce all over the camera’s field of view without disappearing. Not only am I now trying to capture a larger image at slower speeds, but the Powermate adds more than half a kilogram to the back end of the telescope, making it harder to hold steady and to centre it on the image. I was actually supporting the camera in my hands as I took pictures. I’d never be able to take a shot like this with this setup — especially since the exposure would have to be much longer with the Powermate.

So my next step is to graduate from using a rather flimsy camera tripod to a sturdier mount, perhaps a grab-and-go alt-azimuth mount for observing that would also double for lunar photography. But that’s a topic for another post.

¹ A T-ring adapter is one of two items used to connect a camera to a telescope. The other part is the T-ring, which attaches to a camera’s lens mount and allows the camera to connect to a standard T-ring adapter, which then goes where the eyepiece or star diagonal goes.

I expected that the size of our reptile collection would shrink through attrition, but I expected it to be a result of snakes succumbing to old age (some of the garter snakes are starting to get up there, for example). I did not expect to find the male Cape Gopher Snake (Pituophis catenifer vertebralis) dead in his cage this morning, from unknown causes. He was the youngest snake in our collection and our most recent acquisition; we acquired him in November 2007 (the picture above dates from that time).

This isn’t just an unexpected shock; it’s annoying. Pituophis are so robust, you don’t expect anything like this to happen: we’ve kept four pairs of them and raised an additional five babies, and this is the first loss we’ve had of this genus, ever.

Meanwhile, George is still not dead (previously).

It’s been almost 11 months since I was last there, and it’s almost like I never left. It’s surprisingly good to be back.

My blogging rate is about to take another nosedive, though. Just sayin’.

• We need a modern Apollo program by Phil “Bad Astronomer” Plait;
• Orion and Ares — the future of NASA by former astronaut Tom Jones;
• Lost in space by Buzz Aldrin (whom you may have heard of).

The status of the Constellation program (especially the Ares booster) is causing no shortage of angst, it seems, but the big picture is of concern either way: insufficient funding, insufficient vision.