Cosgrove’s Cosmos Wraps Up 2022! Metablog Update #9
Jan 1, 2023
Hi Folks,
First - Happy New Year, Everyone! I hope 2023 brings you a year of health, happiness, and many clear skies!
Second - Wow! I am so late doing this update!
Typically, I try to do an update once a quarter, and I completely missed the last one! Here we are at the end of 2022 and the very start of 2023, and finally, I am getting to it!
Continued Growth
My last Metablog covered the one-year anniversary of the website. Now we are six months further down the road, and a lot has happened:
11 New imaging Projects published
Three new technical articles published
Greatly expanded the depth and detail in my Imaging Project Posts
Created a new Youtube Channel and added video content to my posts
and significantly Increased visitor traffic to the site
I realize that this website is a niche offering - attractive to the relatively small percentage of the population that has interests in these areas, but still, I have been pleased with the growth we have seen.
In my last update, we saw visitors from 122 countries and were averaging about 100 visitors a day.
Today, we are averaging 150 visitors a day, and according to Google Analytics, we have had visitors from 226 Countries!
Wait - What? 226 countries? I thought there were only 197 countries in the entire world! Digging further, these are countries and geopolitical entities, which include islands, principalities, and such. Even so, it is a bit humbling to realize that I had visitors from so many places worldwide visiting Cosgrove’s Cosmos!
From Google Analytics.
At the time of the last update, most traffic come to the website via social media, following links from Facebook, Twitter, Fickr, and Instragram.
Organic search was just starting to pick up - which basically means that search engines were bringing up Cosgrove’s Cosmos more often than they had in the past.
This has evolved quite a bit in the last six months. Now organic search has grown substantially and over half of our traffic comes from this source. Below you can see the traffic source pie-chart form six months ago, and again what it looks like today!
It is gratifying to see that the search engines are now seeing Cosgrove’s Cosmos as a valuable source of info!
The situation in summer of 2022.
The situation at the end of the 2022!
Recently Published Image Projects
Since the last update, the following imaging projects have been published:
Recently Published Technical Articles
The following Gear Related articles have been published since the last Update:
And the Following Technical Article was published:
Image Honors
My image of IC1396A - The Elephant’s Trunk - was published in Amateur Astrophotography Magazine, in their Issue #106, Nov 2022, on pages 72-73!
I was also honored when the Webb DeepSky Society named my image of M31 as their Image of the Month for October:
The Webb Society Image of the Month!
The link for this page can be seen here:
Video Content!
For a long time, I had been thinking about adding video content to my posts. I held off doing this for several reasons:
I don’t know anything about video production
I have zero video editing skills or experience
I don’t generally like how I look on video - I have the stage presence of wet cardboard
Every time I sit in front of the camera and push the record button, I remain convinced that it emanates some EM field that seems to negatively impact the neural pathways between my brain and mouth, and I can’t string two words together to save my life!
But not knowing what I am doing has never stopped me before, or I would have never started in Astrophotography or web design! So I figured that one way or another, I would just figure things out.
I started to create some short videos. I would show the Blink analysis from an imaging project. Or I might illustrate a technique for a technical article. Along the way, I began to figure out how to:
Light the area where I shoot
Setup and adjust some quality audio mics (trickier than you might think!)
Capture videos of myself talking and working on the screen
Do rudimentary video editing using IMovie on my MacBook Pro.
Post things on YouTube and link them to my web posts.
My biggest problem was memorizing lines and speaking them into a camera - and being coherent while doing so. I had a horrible time with this at first.
Now I look at my script, look back at the camera, say a few lines, and then repeat the process. If I blow a line, I just do it again.
This results in a video that is very long and filled with mostly bad takes and a few good takes. In editing, I cut out the middle parts where I have to look away to read the script and the takes that are bad. Then I try to enhance the video by adding images, graphs, and charts that are pertinent to what I am talking about.
The first videos were pretty bad…..
Well, to be honest, even the current ones are pretty bad and lack a certain level of polish. But then again, so do I!
But I am trying and slowly learning. I created a dedicated YouTube Channel for Cosgrove’s Cosmos and started to host my videos there.
I wanted to make them a bit more polished, so I learned to use Fiverr.com and to use the Gig Economy to have someone create branded intros and outros for my video. These cost me about $25 each - a real bargain!
As of this writing, I have a huge following of 202 people on my channel. I now have worked up to 5000 views, and so things are slowly beginning to pick up.
You can see my Channel Here:
If you have not checked out my videos, please do so!
Better yet, Please subscribe and “ring the bell” - this will support the channel and ensure you are aware of new content when posted!
I have started to create about a 30-minute video for each Imaging project I complete. This adds more time and effort:
Planning a project: ~ 1/2 day
Capturing Subs: Anywhere from 2-5 nights
Image Processing: ~1 -3 days
Web Post Creation: ~2 days
Video Planning and Shooting: ~1-2 days
Video Editing: ~1-2 days
So every imaging project now requires a commitment of between 7.5 to 14.5 days!
New Video Content Page
While all of my videos are available on my Youtube Channel - this content should really be seen as a companion to posts on the website. To facilitate this linkage, videos are embedded within the body of my posts, and I have created a new page under the “Home Menu” called Video Content.
That can be seen here:
https://cosgrovescosmos.com/video-content
And here is a snapshot of the page:
Observatory Update
A long time back, I announced that my wife and I were searching for land to buy where I could build an observatory. Then you might have noticed that I have posted no follow-up to that. That was because there was no news to report!
We have searched for the past year and have not been successful in finding something that would meet our needs.
We did find one place that might have worked, and we put an offer on a house and some land south of Rochester - - and lost out when the bidding drove the price WAY beyond the asking price.
We plan to continue searching this year. We recognize that this will be a challenge as the interest rates have gone up significantly and what we have been looking for is just plain hard to find in this area.
In the meantime, I have been working with an Architect, and we are currently finalizing the floorplan for a house - and a design for an observatory. Once that has been finalized, I will be doing an update on that. Stay tuned!
Hopefully, 2023 will allow us to find what we are looking for, and we can move ahead.
If anyone knows of some suitable land for sale or someone that might be motivated to sell or parcel off some land, please let me know!
An early version of the ROR 4-Pier Observatory design
Print Store Update
I also mentioned, in one of my previous Metablog updates, that I was planning on adding a print store to the website so that folks who had an interest could order prints, posters, calendars, and such made from my images.
I am still planning on doing that during the cloudy winter months. I have a list of technical articles that I plan on writing during the month of January, and then I am planning on working on the Print Store section during the month of February. Again - Stay Tuned!
Thanks again for your interest and support over the past year!
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please contact me!
May your skies be clear!
Pat
This version of M31, taken in November 2021, is my favorite. But it has been a few years since I first captured and processed this data. I have learned a lot since then, and I also have some excellent new processing tools at my disposal, so I wanted to see where I would end up if I were to start from scratch with the data, and this is the result!
Let me know what you think of this new image!