Night Sky Photography -- 01-18/19-2018 -- The Young Moon

Greetings fellow stargazers!

The Young Moon made her appearance in the western sky about 30 minutes after sunset on Thursday the 18th and Friday the 19th of January. The Young Moon refers to the phase of the moon following the New Moon when Luna is positioned more or less between the Earth and the sun during her monthly orbit. New Moon is of course when Luna officially transitions from the morning sky over to the evening sky from our perspective.

Over the course of two days I captured some pretty good shots of the Young Moon, including one really awesome shot of a plane's running lights flying in front of the Young Moon's path. You can see the difference between the thumbnail of Luna in Earth's shadow from the evening before to the next evening as the moon moves towards the next quarterly phase. In the third and forth photos taken on the 19th, you can also see some of the larger craters in the close-up shots, including Tycho near the bottom right.

Well folks, let me know if you liked these photos in the comment section and be sure to check back later this month for more planetary photography. Till then, keep your eyes to the skies, y'all!

Birds In The Snow

Greetings and Salutations friends and fellow travelers!

Recently we had a little bit of snow here in upstate South Carolina. I spent the time getting some great photographs of the local birds the frequent my bird feeders with the snow as a background to contrast our colorful visitors.

I managed to capture these great shots of four distinct species of birds common to my part of the United States. 

Beautiful Northern Cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis) sitting in
the snow and ice-covered branches. The Cardinal is
the official state bird of no fewer than seven eastern state,
particularly North Carolina. 

A lovely Chipping Sparrow (Spizella passerina).

A beautiful Black-Capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus)

An American Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura).
These are probably among the most frequent visitors to my
bird feeders.

Well I hope that y'all enjoyed these photos as much as I enjoy sharing them for all of y'all. Please let me know what you think in the comments section below. Thank you again for your visit and y'all come back now, ya hear?

Night Sky Photography -- 01-07-2018 -- Mars & Jupiter Conjunction With Galilean Moons

Greetings fellow stargazers! 

Well folks, for my first planetary photography of 2018, I have a real treat for y'all. 

In the morning hour before sunrise I woke to clear skies and a perfect view of the Jupiter and Mars conjunction in the southeastern sky. Here is the best photo I managed to get of the two wanderers at their closest proximity.

Mars is approximately 0.25 degrees south of Jupiter (equivalent to half of the moon's diameter), and you can just barely make out the red coppery coloring. The two appear to join though in reality they are just over 342 million miles apart. Jupiter appears brighter to the naked eye, approximately 20 times brighter than Mars at the moment due to the relative positions of the planets. 

This will change by summer of 2018 when Mars once again reach its closest approach to Earth and grow larger in the night sky. By the end of the first week of July 2018, Mars will finally catch up with Jupiter in brightness. Then on July 31st, Mars reaches its closest proximity to the Earth and will shine the most brilliantly in Earth’s sky since 2003, actually outshine Jupiter by some 1.8 times in late July and early August. The Red Planet will reign as the fourth-brightest celestial body (or third brightest in the nighttime sky, after the moon and Venus) will last two months from about July 7 to September 7. 

It's also good that I managed to capture the conjunction of these two wanderers and blessed that the skies were clear of cloud cover. The next conjunction between Jupiter and Mars will not occur until Friday, March 20, 2020. 

Now folks for the unexpected, but pleasant bonus: when I checked my close-up photo of the conjunction, I discovered that my 35X optical lens managed to capture all four of the visible Galilean Moons: Io, Europa, Castillo, and Ganymede! 

These four moons are also known as the Galilean Moons in honor of famed Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei who discovered them in January 1610 using an improved telescope with a 20X magnification lens. 

These four are the largest of Jupiter's 69 known moons. Three of them: Io, Castillo, and Ganymede are just slightly bigger than our own beautiful Luna. Io is the closest at around 218,000 miles from Jupiter's clouds and Castillo is the most distant at a whooping 1,168,180 miles from Jupiter, giving y'all an idea of the scale and distance of the largest planet in our solar system as seen from Earth's sky. 

Well folks that is all for now, but this won't be the last time we see Jupiter and Mars this month. The two will stay pretty close together throughout the month of January and will meet up with the waning crescent moon on the morning of Thursday, January 11th. 

Thank y'all for checking out this blog post, be sure to leave a review, and as always keep looking to the night skies, y'all hear?

Happy New Year 2018 And Expanded Content Update

Greetings and Salutations, Y'all!

This year begins the 4th official year of Southern Fried Common Sense & Stuff. 

Folks, when I began this blog in December of 2014, I did so largely to have a platform for this blogger to share his opinions about various topics, not the least of which was countering the misconceptions and outright lies promoted about Southern heritage as a whole and Confederate historical heritage in particular. 

I also like to travel to many local places of interest and wanted to share those with you, the reader. I am very proud of upstate South Carolina where I was born. I am proud of it's various history and of the multicultural heritage of the area. Sharing them with you and telling the local history of many of these events from the perspective of a simple small-town country writer has been and continues to be a pleasure for me.

Last year this blog reached a number of milestones, not the least of which was crossing the hundred-thousand views mark. I could not be more pleased to know that folks around the world on every continent enjoys my various posts. It is this blogger's hope to cross the next major milestone and achieve another hundred-thousand views by the end of 2018 -- or at the very least halfway there.  

As I promised y'all near the end of last year, this blog will be branching out a bit more on it's mission statement and bring y'all more expanded content. 

Certainly I am going to continue countering the regressive narratives seeking to demonize and denigrate Southern identity, Confederate historical heritage, and free-thinking individuality as a whole. If anything I intend to double-down on those and counter the anti-Southern stereotypes. However instead of just Responding To Regressives posts, I will go into more specific details about what Southern heritage as a whole is, and what Confederate heritage in particular actually means to those Southerners and Americans like me who continue to do those eyebrow raising things like place flags on graves and wear hot wooly uniforms honoring ancestors who lost an ugly and terrible war.

This blogger will also continue to bring you more stories about local history and the cultural impact it has had on American identity as a whole. My Travel & Photojournalism posts will also continue, as will my Planetary Photography posts. 

Among other things, this blog's new expanded content will include details about the personal likes and history of yours truly, Carl W. Roden (esq). This isn't to stroke my own ego, but rather to give you the reader a better understanding of who this weird pseudo-adult whom many in the Southern heritage community call The Man Deniers Fear The Most really is as a free-thinking individual rather than someone's build-up stereotype.

These details will be included into a new segment on this blog which I will call the Tales of My Existence. These tales will detail true slice of life stories about growing up in upstate South Carolina and my dealings with various situations in my life till present. Some of this personal stories and experiences will also be included into some of my social commentary on other causes I sympathize with, such as how I deal with my autism and how it impacts me on a daily basis.  

Some of these stories are quite humorous -- including several mishaps during my childhood and adolescence, which are a bit embarrassing -- while others are a bit painful to talk about on a personal level, a couple of which I have never even told my own family about. None the less, I hope that by sharing some of them with y'all, maybe they may help someone else who went through similar experiences in the past or present day.

In addition to this expanded content will be Southern Fried Fandom & Reviews. This will include personal reviews of movies and television shows that this blogger enjoyed growing up and how they affected and influenced me as I grew to maturity (sic). These reviews will include everything from cult classic science fiction and fantasy stories to cartoons, anime and animated series that I loved from my youth in the 80s and 90s to present day. This will also include top 20 lists of my favorite shows and series episodes, and how said shows had an impact on my life in general. 

Finally, the expanded content will include reviews of graphic novels and webcomics that this blogger enjoys, or finds relevant to various topics on this blog. As a former librarian and someone who loves books having practically grown up in a library, I enjoy reading and have found it fun to look through and collect graphic novels for my reading collection. Many of these are really good reads, and have really important lessons that young people need to learn today -- for instance how to handle bullies the right way, or learning to empathize with those who are often overlooked and neglected. Some are just fun action and adventure stories told by really talented authors and artists. I am looking forward to sharing my two cents about these great literary works -- and yes, graphic novels may not be Shakespeare (expect or course for his works written in graphic novel form), but I would put a good many of them right up there with much of the modern young adult stories and even a few serious adult writers as well. How one tells a story is just as important, if not more so, than the manner in which it is put to pen.

Many of these subjects will overlap in a few cases, like the upcoming story about how one old cult classic sci-fi film largely helped influence my love for science, space exploration, and ultimately my support for Martian Colonization efforts promoted by far-thinking people like Elon Musk and Robert Zubrin of the Mars Society, a group I happen to be a supporting member of.    

Since this blogger doesn't set a particular timeline for what content I post to this blog, you the reader will just have to keep checking in to see what's coming up next here at Southern Fried Common Sense & Stuff. Will it be more local history? More photojournalism? Movie or animation reviews? Book or graphic novel reviews? More Southern heritage and Americana? More planetary photography? Or will be the upcoming true story about how this blogger once stowed away on a class field trip he was not supposed to go on in 3rd grade? 

To quote actor Johnny Depp in the okay, but somewhat unnecessary remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by director Tim Burton: "The best kind of prize is a sur-prise."  

Find out next time, but until then: Have A Wonderful Dixie Day, Y'all! 

Lowrys Christmas Parade 2017

Hello Y'all!

Well, it's that time of the year again! The 2017 Christmas Parade in the small town of Lowrys, South Carolina. Once again this blogger was in attendance to photograph all of the highlights of this rural community's amazing parade, particularly the float made by friends of mine from the Brig. Gen. Micah Jenkins Camp #1569 Sons of Confederate Veterans. 

To read more about this parade that takes place annually in my own Chester County, please check out the past blog posts on this parade HERE, HERE, and HERE.  

This year marked the 36th year anniversary of the parade and drew close to a whopping 20,000 people attending -- not counting the parade participants themselves, or the hundreds of animals in the parade.

The following are the photos I took from the event, which took place on Saturday, December 16th.

Members of the Brig. Gen. Micah Jenkins Camp #1569
Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Ann White Chapter #123
United Daughters of the Confederacy &
the 6th Regiment SC Reenactors.

The parade begins a few minutes after 1 PM and lasted just over 90 minutes. Several hundred buggies, tractors, carts, floats, and animals took part in the parade.

My cousin Roger Dickey as Jesus.

These loveable goofballs are my Aunt Betty Roden Dickey,
Uncle Jerry Dickey, and cousin, Shannon.

Camp Commander Bucky Sutton passing out some of the 1200
small Confederate stick flags the camp brought.
I am happy to report that every one of them was taken before
the end of the parade.

Well folks, once again I hope that y'all enjoyed taking this journey with me. The annual Town of Lowrys Christmas Parade is always a joy to attend each December. Already looking forward to the next one!

Until then, y'all have a wonderful day and a very Merry Christmas 2017!