The fires are out of control this year.

We're still contending with the Whitewater-Baldy fire (several hundred thousand acres burned so far), the Little Bear fire (tens of thousands of acres), one north of Santa Fe, another just north of my home, and now, this one that I just drove through.  It's raging up through the valley right now and growing.  It's near the main gas lines and is nearing numerous structures.  The pics below were shot from a vantage point in front of my house, looking just under 6 miles East.  The fire only started an hour or so prior to these shots that I grabbed going home. 
We are in a severe drought and everything in that valley area is just fuel for the fire.  No rain in sight, and intermittent high winds.  We have 3% humidity, 100 degree temps, and the winds are expected to reach 25mph with gusts up to 50mph starting tonight/tomorrow.  As you can imagine, this kind of thing obviously kills astrophotography, but in our case out here, it has a tendency to destroy a lot of lives.  Now we're praying because fires that start in the Bosque as we call it tend to rage out of control quite fast.  It's spread I'd guess about 4-5 miles in one direction, and it has hopped the valley from one side of the river to the other, so maybe a mile or so wide, and growing fast.  Winds will shift towards my home by the early AM.  I'll shoot more pics tonight and in the morning to get an idea of how much ground the fire has gained or lost.

OrionComplex

One last reprocess of my favorite object.  28 hours total integration time.

Venus Transit

Took about 7 GB of data so far of the Venus Transit.  Here's a quick still shot I took through the dobsonian.  Working on processing the high resolution stuff from my other camera system right now.  More to come.

Timelapse - Solar Eclipse - Chaco NM

Here's a 640x480 timelapse of the Eclipse from Chaco Canyon, NM.  Having a slight framing/alignment issue within the blog itself, I recommend breaking it out seperate and watching in YouTube directly @ 480p settings in the default frame size.  I'm working on a non-compressed, higher res version which I'll post when completed. 

Direct URL - Solar Eclipse Timelapse - YouTube link