So if you’re not aware, I post stuff on Twitter. The only things I post on Twitter are astrophotos, or comments related to shots I’ve taken. This keeps me out of the wide swaths of the Twitterverse which devolve rapidly into meme stupidity, vitriol, and general political nonsense. At the beginning of my IBM TWI fellowship, I got to work out of the IBM Center for the Business of Government, sitting next to John Kamensky (@JMKamensky). So, in November of ’16, when I finally caught the full moon setting behind the Air Force Memorial, John saw the shot and recommended that I tag the Capitol Weather Gang guys. Of course when the Weather Gang’s chief meteorologist wrote a quick piece for the Washington Post highlighting all of the best Supermoon shots from around the region, my shot was included.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I have continued to tag Celestron, Sigma, Canon, and other companies who make the imaging gear I have used for particular shots. I don’t get lots and lots of interactions, but just occasionally get a response. For instance, I set up the big scope last night and got up at 0330 this morning to catch Markarian’s Chain while it was as high overhead as possible. Since it’s a much wider swath of sky than can be seen through the NexStar 8, I mounted the EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L I’m borrowing piggyback on top of the big scope, and fired off an hour’s worth of 30-second shots (short enough that I didn’t need to worry about autoguiding). After screening out the non-keepers on the camera, I managed to stack together the following shot of the galaxies in Virgo:
M84 and M86 are at center, with M87 in the lower left third, M88 to the upper left, and M99 in the upper right. Stuck the shot up on Facebook and over on Twitter I tagged the Canon USA Imaging folks, who saw it and responded! I still typically restrain my hashtag usage to whatever the Twitter autofill options pull up (i.e. #Supermoon, or @SuperBlueBloodMoon for the one last month) since I don’t really care about getting some special hashtag to trend.
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