(NOTE - The HTML code that I've always used for posting photos is messing with me and only partially working. If the photo is not visible, click on the little icon above the embiggen text and the photo will load. Right now all of my old photos will not load as I'm moving the domain of my old web site as something corrupted the old software and I wanted a shorter domain name.)

It has been almost two years since I posted any photos! I have been shooting, not nearly as much as I should, but tonight Russet got notification from her crew at the observatory that the aurora was visible down here! So off we go to the back door, which faces north, and out come the cameras!



(clicken to embiggen)

This was shot with my Canon R6 Mk 2 with the R15-30 zoom at 15mm, f16 for 20 seconds at ISO 25,600. This is a jpeg with no post-processing.

ETA: Very curious! Just posted the same HTML on Live Journal - and the photo popped up just fine! So maybe DW is having an issue at the moment and it'll be fine later? We shall see....

And by Leon, I mean Leon Muskbrat, the world's richest manchild.

(He's officially Leon 'cause the Prez called him that twice, so that makes it official.)

3am Saturday morning, Leon posted a Grok-generated video of a 'woman' that resembles his ex-wife and weirdly-named child's mother Grimes, who smiles and says "I will always love you" in a very bad lip sync.

I'm a little unclear whether he thinks this was a spiffy tech demo or showing off something that he did or just what this was.

The 87-y/o acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates had a very interesting observation:

“So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates— scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history,” Oates wrote.

“In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world,'” Oates concluded.

WOW. Pity he can't take Tylenol for such a burn as it might cause him to become autistic.

He, of course, retorted and tried to disprove her observations and, in doing so, pretty much reinforced them.

But I was thinking about her statement of how it could be used as a metric about what a lot of political figures post about. Now, Leon, AKA the Ketamine Kid, AKA The Edgelord, AKA the frat boy who never grew up and hires gamers so that he himself can appear to be a skilled online gamer, this clearly applies. I can't imagine how boring a conversation with him would be: he'd probably have to steer it towards himself and his companies so as to have something to talk about!

(tagged under Tesla since I don't have, and don't want to add, a Musk tag)

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-ai-girlfriend-love-grok-desperate-2000683797

The Attorney-General of Texas, Ken Paxton, has decided to sue the corporations Kenvue, and Johnson and Johnson, the makers and former makers of the Tylenol family of pain relievers, citing “deceptively marketing Tylenol” knowing that it “leads to a significantly increased risk of autism and other disorders.”

WHEEEEEEEEEE!

President Pudding Brain did that lovely press conference a few weeks ago where he repeatedly said, with minor variations "“Don’t take Tylenol. There’s no downside. Don’t take it. You’ll be uncomfortable. It won’t be as easy maybe, but don’t take it if you’re pregnant. Don’t take Tylenol and don’t give it to the baby after the baby is born”. There were some supercuts of this made that were quite amusing.

A couple of interesting sidenotes. The first is that Paxton will probably not be in office when this goes to trial as he's running for the U.S. Senate, so this is purely performative to appease the Orange God. He's also facing Federal Charges, which I believe are still pending, on some campaign finance irregularities - he was impeached on Texas charges but of course the Republican Texas legislature without surprise or irony found him innocent. It's definitely in his best interest to get out of Texas local politics before a change in political power takes place, which could happen.

The reality of autism and Tylenol, of course, is that autism was first classified as a disorder over a decade before Tylenol came to market. Still, this could cause J&J and Kenvue to bend the knee and cough up millions of dollars to the "Trump Presidential Library".

I hope they fight and drive Paxton et al into the ground.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/10/if-things-in-america-werent-stupid-enough-texas-is-suing-tylenol-maker/

Today Russet had an appointment in Las Cruces to get her eyes poked, and with the early sunset, plus dinner, plus not getting into the back of the office for almost two hours after her appointment time it was well after dark before we were driving across White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) going home.

So in Southern New Mexico on the west side of the basin is Las Cruces, then east of Cruces you have the Organ Mountains. On the east side of the mountains you have White Sands Missile Range, and an Army post of the same name. There's also a NASA engine test facility (I almost had a job there once) and who knows what else there. The space shuttle 747 transporter, complete with shuttle, once landed there when the weather was too bad for it to continue on to Florida from Edwards in California due to storms over the gulf states. Turns out it was a really bad mistake as the gypsum sand from White Sands really screwed over the plane (mainly the brakes, maybe some engine damage?) and they had to fly in a maintenance crew and work on that plane for the better part of a week before it could leave!

On the east side of the valley you have Alamogordo on the west base of the Sacramento Mountains. Just west of town there's Holloman Air Force Base, and just beyond that is the actual White Sands Desert, the largest gypsum desert in the world. Looks really cool on Google Earth. Pretty much the entire valley between those two mountain ranges is the White Sands Missile Range, with U.S. 70 running through it, about 60 miles or so. They close it occasionally when they test missiles.

WSMR is a HUGE test range that also includes the section where the Trinity Test took place! They offer tours there once or twice a year, I've been there two or three times.

So Russet's eyes are dilated and she can't see much, I'm driving east and suddenly I see four little red dots appear in a line! And they fade really fast. It sort of looked like the lights on a broadcast antenna, except they were at about an 80 degree angle, not a healthy angle for an antenna, and way too high for such a thing. Too close to be on top of the Sacramento Mountains and the antenna clusters that are on the mountains are much further south. I ask Russet, but she hadn't been looking, she'd probably had her eyes closed. If straight ahead was twelve o'clock as a compass point, this was probably at around 10 or 11 o'clock.

Just a couple of minutes later, on the right side of the car - call it about 1:30 as a point, four more! It was clearly anti-missile flares: a tight pattern, rapidly deployed, and quickly extinguishing. If they'd been illuminating flares, they'd have had a much longer duration. This time Russet saw them, and she was impressed!

That was pretty cool to see! But there's no way of knowing what type of aircraft was popping them. Odds are it was an F-16 Falcon (jet fighter/light tactical bomber) as that's the main aircraft based at Holloman, but it could have been a helicopter out of either WSMR or Holloman or some other plane visiting Holloman. Holloman used to base F-119s and F-22s, but those went away and we got a whole bunch of F-16s from Luke in Glendale, AZ. We also used to have a German Luftwaffe detachment that flew two different types of fighters that were very cool as they had great paint schemes! Sadly one of the jet types was retired and the other was moved to Goodyear, AZ to consolidate operations and the detachment left. They were really nice people, I liked working with them.

Holloman is famous for its rocket sled program which is still occasionally in use - at my wife's observatory they would slew the telescope around and watch this little bright light go ZIP! across the desert when a test happened, the base was also the home of Ham the Space Chimp, the first American monkey in space! Ham is actually an acronym for Holloman Airbase Medical, and Ham is buried in Alamogordo at the New Mexico Space Museum.

Still, those flares were something that I've never seen before at night.