Welcome

Pull up a chair. Well, pull up the stool, if I’ll move my feet.

That’s my workroom in the photo above, and I left it exactly the way it really looks. I could have tidied up, but then it wouldn’t be honest, and it wouldn’t explain this blog nearly as well. Almost everything I’m interested in is somewhere in that frame, and almost everything I plan to write about here started in that room.

A quick tour

The whiteboard. That’s not decoration, and it’s not a random date. It’s a hand-worked Julian Day calculation for the exact moment this photo was taken, converted to Zulu time (UTC) the way any pilot or astronomer would. Convert the time, adjust the year and month, apply the Gregorian correction, and out comes a single number astronomers use to count days without worrying about calendars or time zones. In other words, the photo carries its own timestamp. If you look on the desk, you’ll see the book that teaches the method, Jean Meeus’s Astronomical Algorithms. Working these out by hand is how I make sure the code I write later gets them right.

The monitor. That’s an iPhone app in progress. Under my AlwaysPhotographing brand I build apps for photographers, the kind that know where the sun and moon will be, which way you’re facing, and when the light will be right. Astronomy, math, and photography all in one place.

The big screen. Air racing. Specifically, a race plane slicing through the course at Texas Motor Speedway. I’m an instrument-rated pilot, and I spent part of my career in avionics working on altimeter development at Kollsman. That well-thumbed FAR/AIM on the floor is there for a reason.

The printer on the right. That’s a large-format photo printer, and the print coming out of it isn’t for show. I am and have been a member in several camera clubs. A photograph isn’t finished for me until it’s on paper. The color charts scattered around the floor are how I keep what I see on screen honest with what comes out of the printer.

The posters. A Hasselblad and a Breitling Navitimer. One is a camera, the other is a flight computer you wear on your wrist. Both are precision instruments built by people who cared about getting it exactly right. That’s a theme you’ll see a lot here.

The book on the floor with the cartoon cover. Lost in Scale, my attempt to make enormous numbers make sense by comparing them to things you can actually picture. It’s also a video series I’m working on for GeekDistractions.

What I’ll be writing about

• Aviation: flying, instruments, the history and the hardware, and the occasional story from the cockpit.
• Photography: technique, gear (old and new), printing, and the stories behind particular images.
• Science: the things that make me stop and say “wait, really?”
• Astrometry: where things are in the sky, how we know, and how to calculate it yourself.
• Software: what I’m building, how, and what I learned the hard way.
• Fun Facts: short, surprising, and usually something I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Why another site?

I already write technical pieces at GeekDistractions.com and build apps under AlwaysPhotographing. Those are about specific things. This site is about me: the guy with a background in applied mathematics and computer science, three patents, a pilot’s certificate, and a camera that’s never far away. It’s the place where the threads cross, where a Julian Day calculation turns into a photography app, or a cockpit instrument turns into a fun fact.

Some posts will be long and technical. Some will be a single photograph and a paragraph. All of them will be things I genuinely find interesting, and I hope you will too.

Thanks for stopping by. Come back often, and if something here sparks a question, leave a comment. I love talking about this stuff.

— Richard Cox