Cold and Snowy

It seems like winter has finally arrived. This past week the highs didn't go much above 20 degrees and Friday night we had a dusting of snow. So in order to get some riding in I decided to take the MTB out. Chris and a few others were riding out of Mercer a 9:30 am but it was only 17 degrees at that time so I waited a couple of hours until it got a little warmer and decided to ride the canal path.

I headed over to Princeton and started the ride by Carnegie Lake. In the summer the path is a nice place for a quick trail ride along the canal. Today the coating of snow made it a little more scenic. Riding in the snow is not something you can do that often so when the conditions allow I try to get out.

I spent about a hour and a half on the path and went up to Rocky Hill and back. I took a few pictures along the way. It hovered around 25 degrees for most of the ride which is close to the my lower limit for an MTB ride. Any colder and my camel-back starts to freeze. Still if you dress right and keep moving its not too hard to stay warm. Although my feet were a little cold by the end of the ride I was warm otherwise and was glad to get out on the bike for a little while. There are a couple more months of winter ahead so you have to get out when you can.

Winter Exploring

This past Saturday was just a few degrees too cold and a little too windy to hit the road. I thought about taking the mountain bike to the canal but decided instead to check out a new trail that is a little closer to home. It's called the Union Transportation Trail. This trail runs from Davis Rd by the Creme Ridge golf course down to Millstream Rd just outside of New Egypt.

This trail was once the Pemberton & Hightstown Railroad. This was a short railroad line constructed in 1864 to provide dairies and farms access to the main rail road lines in Pemberton and Hightstown. The current trail is currently little less than 5 miles long but when finished it will be 8.6 and go all the way to the Assumpink. There are future plans to further extended it all the way into Hightstown.

The trail is crushed stone and pretty smooth. From the hoof prints and other debris on the trail I could tell it gets a lot of use by horses. Since this is an old rail bed it is relatively flat although if felt like a slight uphill in both directions. I spent about a hour and a half going out and back on the trail. It was a decent way to get quick ride on a cold day. I'll probably check it out again once they add a few more miles to it.

Star Trails

The weather since Christmas has been a little too cold to get out and ride. I don't mind the break but will probably do some mountain biking if it doesn't warm up soon. This break has given me a little time to experiment with my camera and do some long exposures of the night sky. I don't have a good DLR camera just a decent point and shoot. My camera does allow me to take long exposures of 15 seconds but this is really not long enough to get a good picture of the night sky. There is however some free software that you can use to stack a few hundred photos to get exposure of a couple of hours. This allows you to get some pretty cool long exposure shots that wouldn't normally be possible with a cheap camera. You can see my results of the first few tries from my backyard here. These aren't real spectacular shots but it proved the technique.

To create these photos I used two pieces of software. The first one was the Canon Hack kit that you can find here. The Canon Hack kit allows me to run a script that automatically takes a photo every so many seconds. This allows me to set up the camera to take a photo every 30 seconds for hours at a time. This way I just put the camera on the tripod pointed it at the night sky, push a button and walk away for a few hours. When I come back I now have a couple hundred long exposure pictures of the sky.

To create the star trail photo I had to stack all the photos together into a single image. This can be a tedious process in a program like Photoshop but luckily some one spent their free time creating a program to do this and best of all it is free. It is called Startrails application and you can find it here. It is simple to use and produces great results.  All you have to do is point the program to a folder that contains all the pictures and it will automatically stack all the pictures. It will also alternatively make a video out of the photos which I did here.

With the software the process is pretty simple. It only take a few minutes to create the star trail photo. So now that I have everything set up I will probably take some more of these when the sky is clear. With a little better composition I should be able to get some pretty cool shots.