The snowbird season is coming to a close. Many of the winter visitors at Viewpoint have departed for points north. Golf league and tennis league play has ended and I had my last tennis lesson of the season.

Donna and I intend to continue to play tennis through the summer in the mornings with other full-time residents. My goal is to become proficient enough to join a team in league play in the fall. I held my last pickleball class of the season at the end of March.

Donna found information for free admittance at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix on the second Tuesday of the month. So this past Tuesday, I grabbed my camera and few bottles of water and we headed there. We arrived around 9:30am and I was surprised at the full parking lots. We parked in the overflow lot and got our second surprise at the entrance. At the check-in area, we were asked if we had a reservation!

I thought this was really odd – like needing a reservation to visit the zoo or something. We told the guy we didn’t have reservation and it didn’t seem to matter. He just handed us a map and waved us in. We entered and it felt like we were at Disneyland. The walking paths were all crowded and little kids were everywhere. I brought my camera thinking I would be able to photograph birds in the gardens, but with all the people the birds seemed to have fled to the open desert.

We walked around for a bit, but it was like going down a crowded Walmart aisle. Oblivious people would stop in the middle of the path, blocking others from moving through. I shot a few pictures of flowers, but we soon tired of the place and left. I would not have been happy if we had paid for admission.

I wrote about a new natural whetstone I bought in my last post. Like most things I do, I had to take it up a notch. I enjoy sharpening knives – I find it almost meditative and doing so on natural stones adds another element to my enjoyment. The use of stones for sharpening tools by humans predates any historical reference. Homer wrote about Cretan whetstones in The Iliad and Odyssey more than 12 centuries ago.

The truth is, natural whetstones are harder to use than man made synthetic whetstones. The biggest difference is the consistency of the stones. Modern synthetic whetstones have abrasives that are usually some form of aluminum oxide or silicon carbide. These abrasive particles are uniform in size and shape and are held by a binder that wears down and constantly releases fresh abrasive particles. The stones are engineered with different binder compounds that can be relatively soft or hard.

Natural stones on the other hand are cut from various types of rocks. They are quarried or mined from seams of mostly homogenous stone types that are naturally abrasive. The abrasive particles are randomly distributed and are bound together with other natural compounds that have fused together from heat and pressure over millions of years. These stones are found and mined all over the world, but the most desirable stones originate from Japan, Belgium and Arkansas in the USA. There are many other lesser known stones from other countries.

The Japanese and Belgian stones can be very expensive – some are considered collectible. I didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole, so I sought out lesser known stones like the Indonesian stone I wrote about before. I bought two more Indonesians – a medium and a medium/fine to go with the fine stone. These stones are called Red Stone (Batu Beureum in Sundanese – the language of West Java), Black Stone (Batu Hideung) and White Stone (Batu Bodas) respectively.

I don’t let my Japanese kitchen knives get very dull, so these three stones are a good progression for sharpening them. If the knives were very dull or chipped, I would start with a soft, coarse synthetic stone. I would do the same if I was sharpening a softer stainless steel knife like a German Henckels or Wusthof.

I took things a step further and added a couple of fine finishing stones. The first one is Japanese – an Ocean Blue Tsushima whetstone. Tsushima stones come from two mines – one on a mountain on Tsushima Island – these are usually brownish – the other mine was under the ocean off of the coast of Tsushima. These are black or dark blue. The mines closed in the 1980s, but there are still plenty of stone blocks available.

The other finishing stone came from a mine on Velky Rozsutec – a mountain in the Mala Fatra range in Slovakia. These stones are favored by farmers in that part of the world for sharpening scythes and for knives. The stones were mined and cut by one man until his passing in 2013. A few years later, his son and daughter took over the business and began cutting and selling whetstones.

Rozsutec stones are unique. They are cut from a very hard strata of sandstone. I usually think of sandstone as a soft, crumbly type of stone. Not these. They are very hard and long wearing stones. The silica grains cut the metal when sharpening. Over time, these grains don’t release, they slowly flatten and the stone get smoother. At some point it needs to be conditioned by flattening the surface with a harder stone or diamond plate to expose fresh grit.

I use the Tsushima and Rozsutec in the final stage of sharpening. These require a very light touch and can provide an extremely keen, razor-sharp edge on hard steel. I used all these natural stones on my Sanjo sujihiki ( a Japanese slicer blade) and got a very fine edge. When I used it to cut a pork tenderloin, it practically fell through the meat. As an experiment, I held the blade between my thumb and first two fingers and slid the 240mm blade across the tenderloin with no pressure other than the weight of the blade. It cut cleanly through!

For the past several weeks I’ve been striking out on astrophotography. The nights have been either cloudy or the targets were too close to nearly full or bright full moons. When I shoot from the east tennis court lot here at Viewpoint, my preference is to locate targets that are in the north or east. This keeps me pointed away from the worst of the light pollution, but it’s still a light polluted sky.

Last week I caught a break. I set up on Tuesday night, March 2nd, but was stymied by technical problems (software). I went back out on Wednesday and was able to begin imaging a little after 8pm. I shot 80 exposures, 90 seconds each and packed up. I knew it wasn’t enough – I was targeting a very distant and dim galaxy – the Needle Galaxy (NGC 4565). This is an edge-on galaxy around 40 million light years away from earth.

A week later I had favorable conditions and went after it again. I repeated my earlier effort and picked up 80 more exposures. I used my Astro-Tech 115EDT telescope with a 0.8X reducer/flattener. This gave me a focal length of 644mm and an F5.6 aperture – you photographers out there will know what I mean. I try to keep exposures under 90 seconds in the heavy light pollution – preferably 75 or 60 seconds. This galaxy was so dim, I knew I needed to push the envelope and F5.6 allowed me gather enough light at 90 seconds.

My APM 140 with a focal length of 980mm would have been a better field of view for this target, but at F7 I think I would need a lot more time on target. It worked out better than I expected with the AT 115EDT.

If you click on the photo above to enlarge, you might be able to find three more galaxies in the image – they are much farther away and small.

As usual, Donna is feeding me well. Here are a couple of typical dinner plates from the past month. I bought a USDA Prime tri-tip at Costco and smoked it on the Traeger smoker/grill. Donna served it with sweet potato and green beans.

Another meal was simple grilled chicken seasoned with salt and pepper served with grilled peppers and onions with feta and grilled bok choy.

The weather for the past month has been a little strange. We’ve had very pleasant stretches with highs in the mid-70s, but also had rain at least one day per week accompanied by a couple of cool days with highs in the low 60s. It seems like that’s all in the past now. Today the forecast calls for low 90s. The next two weeks call for highs ranging from the mid-70s to 80s and sunny skies.