Last week was the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. The shower peaked Thursday night, but Sarah and I went out both Wednesday and Thursday nights to see what we could see. We drove outside of town a good 20 minutes or so, into a very dark state forest and laid on the ground, on the dam of our favorite lake, looking up at the night sky.

Wednesday, we saw about 15-20 meteors, include 3-4 really long/bright ones. I tried to take some photos, and while I did get some good shots of the stars, the meteors proved difficult to photograph.

In this crop, you can see a meteor. I had to increase the brightness a lot to be able to see it, but it’s there.

The next shot appears to have a meteor, but it’s actually an airplane.

Thursday night, my mom and nephew joined us. I was worried that my nephew, who is 12 1/2, would get bored — even at the peak of the shower, in a very dark location, it can be 10 minutes or more between meteors. It takes a lot of patience. But he was fascinated! And, he was great at spotting meteors. He counted 22 meteors … and he noted that number 5 was the best.

Even if there hadn’t been a meteor shower at all, it would have been a great experience. It’s shocking how many more stars you can see, just by going a ways out of town. We all also enjoyed the sounds of various insects, and the occasional ”ploop” sound of a frog jumping in the water, or a fish coming to the surface.

Watching the meteor shower certainly gave me a renewed sense of appreciation for astronomy, and I’m glad my nephew was fascinated as well. My great-great uncle discovered Morehouse Comet, so I guess it’s in our blood!

A bit of a rant … feel free to skip down below for some recent photos

Riding lately has been a mixed bag. I’ve done some fantastic weekend rides, long and short, but aside from commuting, I’m hardly riding during the week at all. I am planning on riding an upcoming century ride with Bill Lambert, of the Bike Oak Bikes blog. I should be training for that, but I’ve been having a hard time finding time for evening rides. And it’s rained the past two weekends; I still got out a little bit, but not the long miles I’d like to be riding. I have enjoyed the weekend rides I’ve been able to do, and I’ve enjoyed my commutes and even the few weeknight rides I have done, but for some reason that isn’t translating into frequent rides during the week.

I think part of the issue is my new commute. My round trip is now over 10 miles each day, and hillier than my old commute. I like that this encourages me to ride more miles each day, but I feel less inclined to go out for training rides afterwards.

I’m also trying to strike a balance. Family and work are important to me, and cycling is not my only hobby, either.  Each year, the balance seems a little different. This year, riding seems like a little less of a priority. But oddly, at the same time, I reached 1,000 miles for the year a couple weeks ago, which is earlier in the year than ever before. So, obviously I have been riding more than I realize.

I think what I really need is a few defining rides to point me in a new direction. I’m itching to do more mountain biking, and to find new gravel roads. The obvious solution is to further explore Hoosier National Forest; it’s nearby, and has hundreds of miles of gravel and trails. I also want to branch out and do some longer road rides, and of course some touring/bike camping. There is so much I want to do that it’s almost paralyzing.

So, it’s safe to say that I’m in a bit of a rut. I need to mix things up. With a few upcoming riding opportunities, maybe that’ll happen.

New camera

On a positive note, I got a new point & shoot camera. My old camera got some scratches on the lens and developed a real problem with lens flare. Plus, I wanted to upgrade a bit anyway. The new camera is a Ricoh CX2. This is a bit of an oddball camera, with limited US distribution. It’s only available in the US from Adorama.com, for some reason. This will be my new primary camera for rides and such. It has a fantastic high contrast black & white mode designed to simulate high-contrast film photography, complete with lots of very pleasant grain … and lots of other tricks up its sleeve as well.

I’m finding I can tweak the settings more on this camera, to the point where I think I will be able to get the results I want directly out of the camera, with little or no post-processing. All these images are directly from the camera. Note that the color shots are in “vivid” mode, which yields more-saturated images. In general I like to push the saturation a bit, but some of these are a little over the top, I think. I’m still learning.

I’ll write more about the camera later, but here are some recent photos.

On Saturday, I went mountain biking with Dave. We rode the North Tower and Aynes loops. A short ride, but it was my first trail ride since my foot surgery, and I had a big ride planned for the next day. We ran into some friends of Dave’s out there, and ended up riding part of the ride with them.

Here is part of our ride, this includes part of the long descent on the Aynes loop. I tried to include some fast flowing parts and some of the slower, trickier stuff as well.

My helmet cam struggled with the level of detail a little bit, but overall it looks pretty good. I really like the wide angle lens, as it portrays well how the trail skirts the edges of some ravines.

I took some more footage of the North Tower Loop, but I haven’t had a chance to edit it yet.