As an important part of the launch of my new website, I reviewed and converted most of the content I had written prior. I wanted the new site to have my true portfolio of writing, even with the realization, based on WordPress stats, that nearly all the posts will never be viewed. It is all important to me, and as a practical matter, everything that has come prior is a source of reference and sometimes inspiration.
Reading through my past articles gave me a perspective on how my writing has change and evolved from late 2016 through the Fall of 2021. It may be useful, interesting, or just amusing to jot down some of my key observations, and perhaps provide insight to where my writing is headed and the direction of this website in general.
- My early posts remind me a lot of how I wrote and my prior blog before I created a new primary blog focused on astronomy. It’s something I and likely me alone could sense, that those late 2016 through early 2017 writings would have easily fit into the blog I started back in 2013.
And for those wondering from Aperture Astronomy, yes I did indeed have another blog prior that I doubt I ever referenced. It covered a variety of topics such as sports, video games, and science fiction. One of those posts, my obviously most popular ever, won the old WordPress “Freshly Pressed” award. I had no idea what the award was. One afternoon while at work, my phone started blowing up with replies on a blog post I had uploaded days before.
I really didn’t think the post was that good! I guess the WordPress editor thought it was timely for a contemporary topic, as well as that it was about my life experiences on the subject, not the regurgitation of generic points everyone was posting.
I still have that post, along with most of the others from that blog, deep in my vault. I may be inclined to resurrect them in various forms on this new site. Stay tuned.
- In the ensuing months of 2017, I developed a newer writing style that fit the astronomy blog. I began timestamping my posts, and eventually categorized them as my “starlog.” The starlog still exists here and should remain as my backbone event-logging category.
- I had a lot of ebbs and flows of experimentation, focusing in bursts on different types of blog posts. This is when my “series” posts started, usually not from a pre-plan but from my own realization to pull on threads in subsequent posts. My constellations and planet hunter series are two clear examples where I explored either similar themes of continuations or certain topics I enjoyed writing about.
- We had a lot of cool astronomical events over the past five years. The solar eclipse of 2017, the ensuing North American lunar eclipses of 2018 and 2019, Mars at its brightest approach to Earth, fabulous angles of Saturn’s rings, and the spectacular Comet Neowise in 2020. I logged my experiences with all of them.
- Excuse the pun, but the Sun faded from my writings early on. I think this was largely due to the lack of solar activity producing any visible sunspots for years. The views through a common telescope with a 99.99999% solar filter are just not thrilling. I want to get a hydrogen-alpha filtered-telescope, I muse for my retirement, but that is still years away to enjoy viewing filaments on the Sun’ surface. If circumstances allow, I will seriously consider moving up my timetable for acquisition of a solar telescope.
- In my humble opinion, my astrophotography skills have improved greatly over the years. A simple comparison between my early Jupiter images and the ones I took in 2020 and 2021 proves his. One sticking point, though, is that I feel I stalled a bit with Saturn. While I have been impressed with my Jupiter imaging, sometimes I feel my latter Saturn images are inferior to my earlier works. Could this be, perhaps, a product of Saturn’s rings moving to less-desirable angles?
- 2020 was a bizarre year for many reasons I will not mention. Yet I do feel worth noting was when my writings deviated at times to non-astronomical topics as I looked to other discussion when the stars and planets were simply not worth new posts. I take all of these writings in perspective now, that they weren’t bad, just out of character, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Going forward, I plan to explore a variety of other topics beyond astronomy, and hope to leverage my 2020 writing experiences to strengthen my approach and delivery on new frontiers.
Enough reminiscing. Time to push forward. New adventures await, and I hope you will join me on the journeys.
