Friday, January 17, 2025

Stand back

Rob Rogers

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Fact-checking the next Attorney Gemeral


....Bondi refused to deny falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election being “stolen.” 

In the January 15 hearing, Senator Alex Padilla, for California, asked Bondi whether she would retract her previous statements that Trump won Pennsylvania in 2020. 

The two spoke over each other as Padilla pushed for a “yes or no” response, and Bondi tried to answer differently. 

Eventually, Bondi told the senator she was “not going to be bullied”....

Rob's comment;
Her answer to Padilla's question is obviouisly "no." She's not going to retract any of her or Donald Trump's bullshit about the 2020 election.

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Noem lies abour fire and immigration

From Daily Kos:

Noem pushes immigration and wildfire lies at Senate hearing

Dog-killing South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem fearmongered about the threat immigrants pose to the United States and lied about the California wildfires during the confirmation hearing for her nomination to lead the Department of Homeland Security Friday.

As head of DHS, Noem would be in charge of Customs and Border Patrol and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which helps respond to natural and manmade disasters. Her answers about how she would handle both of those areas should scare everyone.

During the hearing, Noem lied that the U.S. border is "open," and claimed that "the No. 1 threat to our homeland security is the southern border.”

Of course, the border is obviously not open. In fact, border crossings have dramatically declined in recent months, achieving similar levels as those during Donald Trump’s first term.

What’s more, the head of the FBI has actually said that homegrown extremists are the biggest terror threat, and that China’s cyber program and its impact on U.S. infrastructure is a bigger danger to the United States than immigrants crossing the border....

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Wednesday, January 15, 2025

The Undamaged Zapruder Film

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Human Be-In 1967

I was there since I lived nearby on Second Avenue. It was a festive occasion, with Timothy Leary telling us to "turn on, tune in, and drop out." Not bad advice if you could afford it. 

I was turned on and tuned in, but I couldn't afford to drop out, since I had to work to pay rent on a large nearby apartment I shared with others.

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Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Criminal elected President of the United States


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Sunday, January 12, 2025

"Just give it up. There’s no one to blame for the LA fires."

Want to vent about the fires? Or read some good venting/blaming as we burn? Try Kevin Drum's blog:

USA Today

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Trump 'morally responsible' for January 6

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Saturday, January 11, 2025

Rob Rogers

Jimmy Carter raised climate change concerns 35 years before the Paris Accords

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Friday, January 10, 2025

Chief Justice complains about threats to judges

To the Editor of the New York Times:

Re “Roberts Condemns Threats to Judicial Independence” (news article, Jan. 2):
In his year-end report on the federal judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts decries the threat to judges posed by “an unstable individual carrying a cache of weapons.”

Does the chief justice think that the threat of gun violence today is unique to judges? Thanks to the Supreme Court’s radical interpretation of the Second Amendment, this same risk is shared by all Americans, including — and perhaps especially — young children in school.

The Supreme Court should address these concerns by overturning District of Columbia v. Heller, not by complaining that the justices must share the same concerns about gun violence that the court has imposed on the rest of us.

Lisa Christian
Denver
The writer is a lawyer.

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2024: Hottest year on record

Last Year: Hottest on Record

Trump: Climate change is a "Hoax"!

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Friday, January 03, 2025

Happy new year?

Pedro Molina

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Immigration

Daily Kos

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Breeding season in Marin

 Photo: Alan Dep/Marin Independent Journal

Drakes Beach: Elephant seal breeding season

by Adrian Rodriguez

Drakes Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore is temporarily closed to accommodate elephant seals that have set up camp for the breeding season.

The annual ritual has brought at least 30 males to the shore in front of the Kenneth C. Patrick Visitor Center as of Thursday, with more farther down the beach, said Earl Perez-Foust, a member of the park’s staff.

At least four pups have been born near the overlook area of the beach, Perez-Foust said. The first was spotted on Dec. 20.

“Closures are a critical way to protect both elephant seals and the visiting public,” Perez-Foust said. “The unpredictable nature of elephant seal behavior, coupled with potential impacts to their health and well-being, means that sometimes the best way to protect wildlife and visitors is to prevent the potential interaction between the two.”

Each year, hundreds of elephant seals fan out across Marin’s beaches for the winter pupping season. 

But until recently, the blubbery beasts preferred the secluded south-facing pocket beaches of the Point Reyes Headlands. That changed in the 2018-2019 season, when they began expanding their claim on not-so remote locales, such as Drakes Beach....

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Thursday, January 02, 2025

Bob Dylan at the Masonic Auditorium in 1964

My 13-year-old sister---I was 21---talked me into going to this concert. I'm an old man now, so my memory is hazy about whether I had even heard anything Dylan had done, though I at least had heard of him. 

My sister probably had one of his early "vinyl" albums.

It was interesting to note that most of the audience in the Masonic Auditorium was also young girls. That was true too of the advent of the Beatles. All of those screaming audiences on TV, like their Ed Sullivan appearance, made it hard to really hear the music and understand what all the fuss was about. Like Dylan, they were so good I soon came around to liking the Beatles.

At the Masonic, only Dylan was on stage in front of a microphone with a guitar and that harmonica rig. Joan Baez joined him at the end of his set to do a duet, which isn't on this recording. (Later: Wrong! I didn't listen to the whole thing. She's on the last cut.)

Baez also joined a sparsely attended anti-war demonstration in front of the federal building in San Francisco, as the Johnson administration was signaling an escalation of the US attack on/invasion of Vietnam.

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Wednesday, January 01, 2025

Back from the nuclear brink

Back from the Brink

Letter to the editor in the NY Times:

When President-elect Donald Trump assumes office on Jan. 20, 2025, he will once again be the most powerful man in the world as he retakes control of our nuclear arsenals. 

Your article offers a blueprint for Mr. Trump to save humanity and ensure a legacy to be among the greatest presidents ever by abolishing nuclear weapons.

Nearly 80 years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the nuclear age, the world finds itself in the midst of a new arms race and arguably closer to nuclear conflict than at any time since. 

The president-elect has acknowledged the danger, referring to the fire and fury of nuclear war and the fact that the world would never recover.

There is a grass-roots movement, Back From the Brink (I am on its steering committee), that calls on the United States, and by extension the president, to indeed step back. 

Like your editorial, it calls on the United States to resume arms-control talks. 

In addition, it calls for renouncing the first use of nuclear weapons, ending sole presidential authority to launch, canceling the rebuilding of our nuclear arsenal and ending hair-trigger launch alert.

The people are demanding these weapons be eliminated before they eliminate us. What is needed is the courage to act.

Robert Dodge
Ojai, Calif.

The writer sits on the national board of Physicians for Social Responsibility

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President Carter in San Francisco

Greg Gaar Photo

Lily CastelloSan Francisco Remembered

October 31, 1976
SF Ghirardelli Square Campaign Rally for President Jimmy Carter 
died at age 100 today RIP

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Monday, December 30, 2024

JFK assassination: Case still not closed

From JFK Facts:

What we learned in 2024 was that the “lone gunman” theory persists in the mainstream media and Wikipedia despite continuing revelations from the new JFK files that undermine the official story and the emergence of Artificial Intelligence chatbots that offer a more nuanced understanding of November 22.

We saw Robert F. Kennedy make the JFK files a central part of his independent bid for President. We saw Donald Trump narrowly avoid assassination and, when RFK Jr. joined his campaign, we heard his promise to release all the JFK files. 

With Trump’s victory, we saw new possibilities (and perils) to the cause of full JFK disclosure.

All told, JFK Facts published 309 posts in 2024 about all aspects of the JFK story, enlarging readers’ understand of November 22, 1963 and its relevance today.

Case closed?

Not at the CIA. In 2024, we learned that the CIA itself did not believe the lone gunman theory. After President Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas, top officials at the CIA station in Miami investigated Cuban exiles known to the agency—not Oswald, not Fidel Castro, not the KGB—for orchestrating the ambush in Dealey Plaza. 

The results of this internal investigation of JFK’s murder have never been made public.

Stephen Jaffe, a former investigator for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, told the JFK Facts podcast that French president Charles De Gaulle didn’t believe the official story and instructed his intelligence service to assist Garrison’s investigation.

“There’s no new evidence”

In fact, JFK files released in 2024 shows that the CIA lied to the Warren Commission when two top officials testified under oath the Agency had only “minimal” information about Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, before JFK was killed. 

JFK Facts revealed that, on the day JFK was killed, the CIA already had a 181 page dossier on his supposed assassin.

Either top CIA officers were extraordinarily negligent when it came to Kennedy’s killer or they were running an operation to transform Oswald into what he said he was: a “patsy” for others who committed the crime for which he was blamed.

“Somebody would have talked”

More than one somebody did. James Sibert, the veteran FBI agent who attended JFK’s autopsy, told a friend it was obvious the president had been killed by a gunshot from the front....

“There’s no JFK whistleblower”

In fact, a former CIA contract employee told JFK Facts that the Agency maintained a secret archive of JFK assassination records in a Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF) in a CIA office building in Herndon Virginia. The whistleblower spoke out, he said, because he “saw something that disturbed him.”

Asked to comment on the JFK Facts report, the CIA did not deny it....

“Mainstream news organizations couldn’t all be wrong about JFK”

Yet JFK Facts pointed out that the BBC’s coverage amounted to “journalistic malpractice.” The New York Times solicited and then rejected David Talbot’s cogent case against the official theory. And the Times and the Washington Post proved incapable of understanding the late Donald Sutherland and his scene-stealing role in Oliver Stone’s JFK.

“The government was just doing CYA (Cover Your Ass).”

In fact, Chad Nagle’s revelatory series showed that JFK’s assassination was followed by a trail of destruction of relevant evidence by a wide variety of actors atop the federal government. 

Only the willfully naive will regard such a pattern of misconduct as exculpatory. 

Common sense suggests it is incriminating. After all, if the evidence supported the official theory of a motiveless “lone gunman,” why would anyone have destroyed it?

Later: I have to quote myself here from my 2008 article:

"It’s just peculiar that defenders of the official version of the assassination still can’t even convincingly line up the bullet holes."

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Friday, December 27, 2024

Democrats, Republicans and federal judges

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Thursday, December 26, 2024

Crime boss elected president

The Boss

US elects crime boss President of the United States.

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Jamie Raskin

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Saturday, December 21, 2024

Recall Supervisor Engardio?

San Francisco Public Press


Editor:

The issue that I and other residents of the Sunset and Richmond districts have with the Sunset supervisor[Joel Engardio] is that, while his conduct did not rise to the standard of a “serious ethical breach” by legal standards, it does meet the standard of ignoring the constituents you were elected to represent. 

He could have supported the compromise (as he stated he would time and time again when he was running for office) that the supervisor in the Richmond District supported.

The great majority of the residents of the Sunset and Richmond districts who are behind the recall are not “petulant” nor are we seeking revenge. What we would like to see is politicians held accountable to their constituents for their conduct. I voted for him and donated to his campaign. He’s a nice guy. I will vote for his recall and give money to support the recall. This is just the business of politics!

Underlying this divide are the bigger issues: Values. Sunset and Richmond residents want to raise their families in their neighborhood, go to the schools they choose, go to the churches they support. They are not YIMBYs or bike coalition proponents. We are not going to apologize for espousing middle class values. Most of us are fairly well educated and pragmatic---hence willing to compromise.  

As a lifelong surfer of Ocean Beach and retired ocean lifeguard and firefighter, I have raised my family here in the Sunset. I had my first grandchild a couple of weeks ago! I’m sure my son will pass on the values that we take pride in, paramount being love and tolerance. Having said that, make no mistake that we will stand up for ourselves.  This is what the recall is about. 

Marty Murphy

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Friday, December 20, 2024

How Kamala Harris becomes president

Vice President Harris

Kevin Drum's excellent hed yesterday on his blog:


The comments to his post get into the constitutional issues if, as seems possible if unlikely, Congress doesn't have a speaker to read the election results as per the Constitution.

Interesting comment by "Altoid":
On a strict reading, I think what formally makes somebody president is the action of the VP reading out the tally of electoral votes and declaring who the president is, per the 12th amendment

The timetable in the 20th amendment presumes that this has occurred. And the House has to have elected a speaker and adopted rules so it can be ready to choose a president if no candidate has a majority---even if that isn't a real possibility, they have to be organized as a legislative body just in case. Until then they're just a random mass meeting.

The absolutely most interesting sidelight here is that if the House can't pick a president, guess who takes the office? The outgoing administration's VP, that's who.

That provision is for a very narrow case that hasn't [ever] happened yet, but I think that situation is a decent analogy, and so a good guide to what should happen if the House can't get itself organized and pick a speaker.

The presidency really can't be vacant (a survival of the monarchy the office descends from) so somebody has to exercise its authority. 

I'd argue that the 12th amendment says that person would be the current VP.

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Tuesday, December 17, 2024

The choice

Driftglass

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Drones, UFOs? Ask Trump

New York Times

Easiest way to settle questions about drones and aircraft in our skies? Just ask Donald Trump. He knows all about the issue:

"Technology — nobody knows more about technology than me." (December 2018.)

"I know more about drones than anybody. I know about every form of safety that you can have." (January 2019.)

"Having a drone fly overhead — and I think nobody knows much more about technology, this type of technology certainly, than I do." (January 2019.)

If you're ancient like me, you probably remember Watch Mister Wizard, an early TV show that explained scientific principles with simple experiments. 

Trump could call his press conferences "Ask President Trump" and use them for monologues about, well, everything, because nobody knows more than Donald Trump.

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The Biggest Lie of the Year? Trump and Vance

Biggest Liars of the Year

....To get media attention, then-vice presidential candidate JD Vance acknowledged, sometimes “I have to create stories.”

And so, with a brazen disregard for facts, Donald Trump and his running mate repeatedly peddled a created story that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants were eating pet dogs and cats.

With this claim, amplified before 67 million television viewers in his debate against Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump took his anti-migrant, the U.S. border-is-out-of-control campaign agenda to a new level.
“In Springfield, they're eating the dogs,” Trump said Sept. 10. “The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame.”
City and county officials said repeatedly that it was not happeningRebuttals did not diminish the consequences: Dozens of bomb threats at schools, grocery stores and government buildings....

After the threats subsided, some Haitians didn’t want to go in public or send their children to school. The police department sent an officer to protect churchgoers at a Haitian Creole Sunday afternoon mass. Haitian restaurant owners and schoolchildren heard taunts from people using Trump’s words.

"‘Dad, do we eat dogs at the house?’" Jacob Payen, a Haitian Community Alliance spokesperson and business owner, recalled his 7-year-old son asking.

The Haitian population in Springfield swelled since 2021 as people fled Haiti’s violence and instability. City officials estimated 12,000 to 20,000 Haitians had come to this city of about 58,000 residents in 2020, after hearing about jobs and low living costs. Most Haitians live in the U.S. legally under a temporary federal protection President Joe Biden extended....

Vance’s central role in fanning unwarranted attention on a city in the state he represents in the U.S. Senate caused resentment among some locals. "Vance threw us under the bus," said Rob Baker, a political science professor since 1987 at Springfield’s Wittenberg University.

....Trump increased his voter support in Clark County, Ohio, which includes Springfield, this year above what he garnered in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.

In choosing the 2024 Lie of the Year, the claims by Vance and Trump about Haitians eating pets stood out. It was an absurd statement that Trump raised unprompted on the debate stage.

And neither Trump nor Vance stopped there. They stuck with the narrative for the rest of the campaign over objections of allies who debunked it and pleaded with them to let it go. When challenged by voters and interviewers, Trump said he heard it on TV; Vance said constituents had called his office with the claim.

"What am I supposed to do? Hang up the phone and tell them they’re a liar because the media doesn’t want me to talk about it?" Vance said in October.

Emboldened by Vance’s embrace of the rumor, Trump’s debate outburst cemented lasting consequences, stigmatizing a town and its residents in the name of campaign rage. For those reasons, Trump and Vance own the 2024 Lie of the Year....

Rob's comment:
Vance: "What am I supposed to do? Hang up the phone and tell them they’re a liar because the media doesn’t want me to talk about it?"

Surely even Vance isn't that dumb. He and Trump should have investigated the validity of the claim before using it. The Biggest Lie of the Year makes them The Biggest Liars of the Year.

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Monday, December 16, 2024

Trump walks back lowering grocery prices because 'It's very hard'

Trump's campaign promise to lower grocery prices was pure bullshit. He now suggests that asking him to do something difficult like that is unfair.


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Drones, planes or UFOs?


See also Game this out

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Our know-it-all president-elect

Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Add another area of expertise to Donald Trump's encyclopedic knowledge of, well, just about everything: he knows more than anybody about cryptocurrency.

Want to know more about the guy who knows more than you and everyone else? See Nobody knows more than Trump.

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Saturday, December 14, 2024

Kimberly Guilfoyle

2024: Kimberly Guilfoyle

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Trump already walking back campaign promises

Photo: Nicholas Kamm

Gee, what a surprise: Trump is reneging on his campaign promises even before he takes office.

Kevin Drum on the unsurprising news:

....Trump has been lying for so long about how terrible things are that he can hardly claim they're even worse than that.

But that's not stopping him. On Sunday he told NBC's Kristen Welker he "couldn't guarantee" that his tariffs wouldn't raise prices. That's certainly not anything he's said before.

Then today he told Time that maybe he wouldn't be able to bring down the price of groceries after all. "It's hard to bring things down once they're up." he said, accurately. "You know, it's very hard." This, of course, was widely known all along. In fact, it would probably be disastrous if prices fell.

I expect these are just the first of many walkbacks. He can't do most of the ridiculous shit he promised over and over, and the stuff he can accomplish will mostly be because Biden already accomplished it for him. But he'll figure out a way to take credit for it anyway.

 See also Trump "making shit up"

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Monday, December 09, 2024

Trump tries to bully Democrats

Now Senator Adam Schiff
From The Hill :

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said President-elect Trump's threat to throw members of the House committee that investigated rioting at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in jail is a signal “that no one better hold him to account.”
“This is not just about retribution against those of us on the committee,” Schiff said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Monday.

“This is about sending a message that no one better hold him to account in his second term.…He is intent on trying to break down these checks and balances in our system,” Schiff added, referring to Trump. “That’s where the danger lies more so than to the members of the committee.”
During his first sit-down interview since winning the election in November, Trump indicated to “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker that he would not explicitly order those he’s appointing to top positions to go after his political enemies, but he referenced jailing members who served on the House panel that investigated Jan. 6.

“All of us that worked on the Jan. 6 committee are proud of the work that we did,” said Schiff, who served on the panel. “We exposed one of the darkest chapters of our history when a president incited a violent attack on the Capitol just to try to stop the peaceful transfer of power.”

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who served on the Jan. 6 committee, also spoke out against Trump’s threat, calling his remarks an “assault on the rule of law.”

“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power,” she said in the statement provided to The Hill.

Meanwhile, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who also sat on the committee, said he has “absolutely no worries” that Trump will put him behind bars....

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Saturday, December 07, 2024

Old San Francisco

Seals Stadium 1960

I was thrilled to see Ted Williams play in an exhibition game at Seals Stadium when the Seals were a farm team for the Boston Red Sox. In his first at bat, he drilled a line drive single to right field. A home run would have been better, but I wasn't disappointed.

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Remembering KSAN

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Friday, December 06, 2024

What's next for the Great Highway?

Photo by Michael Durand


The four-lane highway overlooking Ocean Beach became the site of one of the most heated political disputes in San Francisco this election cycle.

Proposition K, a ballot measure which aimed to permanently shut-down the stretch of the Upper Great Highway (UGH) from Lincoln Way to Sloat Boulevard and convert it into a full-time city park, passed Nov. 5.

Supporters find excitement in the expansion of the City’s part-time public space, which has been closed to most vehicles on weekends and holidays since 2020. Opposition for shutting down this space largely comes from residents who commute to Daly City and the South Bay via the highway, along with those who have concerns over the rerouting of commuter traffic.

Despite being shot down by approximately 60% of Sunset District and 70% of Richmond District voters, the measure passed citywide by 54.7%, with support coming mostly from the City’s eastside residents.

Now, the City is quickly working to fully activate the space as a “car-free promenade” by early next year. On Nov. 21, the City was awarded a $1 million grant from the California State Coastal Conservancy to fund art projects, water fountains, trash bins, event programming and dune restoration.

The City is also in the process of applying for a Coastal Commission permit, which is needed before the space can be actualized as a city park. 

The current weekend shutdown agreement remains in-place until the City obtains this permit, or until the already scheduled end of the program on Dec. 31, 2025, whichever comes first....


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Group photo

Everybody smile!
Kevin Drum
This is the Flaming Star Nebula, aka IC 405, a combination emission/reflection nebula in the Auriga constellation.

I took this picture Sunday night after a multi-month layoff, and it was the best night of astrophotography I've ever had. Usually something goes wrong during the imaging session—it's always weird and different each time—but the sky was perfect on Sunday and everything went great. 

I set up the scope with no trouble, pressed Go, and it took pictures steadily for the next eight hours with no complaints. 

In the end, I got more than 100 subs of four minutes each, partly because it was a long winter night and partly because everything went so smoothly. This is by far my most productive session ever....
Rob's comment:
Like all pictures of the cosmos, it looks like a flaming nothingness, which, I suppose, is a form of cosmic realism. Not that there's nothing there but that there's nothing human, except the fact of the picture itself.

Later: I should add that whatever of human interest is there is so far away that we'll never know about it.

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