Custom Jigsaw Puzzles

While I was on vacation this summer I visited one of my favorite stores and found they had a very cool new product - custom jigsaw puzzles from digital photographs!

The possibilities for this are just about endless. There are the usual applications like Christmas Cards, Vacation Photos, and Art Photos.

The store has some recommendations on their web site for what makes a good puzzle and an order form. If you want more information check out Board Silly in Old Orchard Beach Maine.



Hopefully it will be used only for good and no one will bring back the "Purple Dread" - a 5000 piece puzzle of pure hideous unvarying purple. :)

Snow Moon Eclipse - simple astrophotography

The night of the BP banquet also coincided with the Snow Moon and a lunar eclipse. As we were leaving the banquet, the shadow of the Earth had just begun to take a bite out of the moon.

I wanted to try and photograph the eclipse as simply as possible. Using just a camera tripod and digital cameras setup for self-timed exposures to reduce vibration. I was able to catch the Moon framed by Regulus (above) and Saturn (lower left).

The photograph was taken with a Nikon 995 digital camera in manual mode (while Nikon makes wonderful cameras with great optics, I could go off on a nice rant about the user interface). It's the best one of a series taken with maximum aperture, maximum optical zoom, and exposures of between 2 and 8 seconds (I believe this is either a 4 or 8 second exposure). It was also taken from my driveway with all the light pollution of Toronto's west end.

There is a nice composite exposure of the eclipse over here at Visual Astronomy. And another over here at Universe Today.

There was also an article on "What they don't tell you about" lunar eclipses at over here at Breaking News for Sky Afficionados.