Notices by Nate :verified: (jeang3nie@social.linux.pizza)

Some more honeymoon photos. This time from Cherry Springs State Park in Northern PA.

Cherry Springs is a dark preserve. It is located in a remote area to begin with, sits on top of a mountain and there is no artificial light allowed. This makes it one of the best places to view the night sky east of the Mississippi in the continental US.

Our first night we didn't think to consider how much the moon would affect the viewing and photos, but it allowed for some cool effects playing with exposure. For our second night, we set an alarm for 3:30AM and arrived at the park just after the moon had set. The photos on this post are from night one.

Photos from night two at Cherry Springs, taken after the moon had set in the hours before dawn. These were 30 second exposures at, so the stars show a slight "track", but this allowed us to bring more distant stars in without going above 800ISO.

@clacke in hindsight, all of the signs were there from a young age. I didn't speak until I was three, used to stim like crazy and have always had special interests. Plenty of other signs as well, but nobody connected the dots.

Part of me still occasionally wants to be upset with my parents for being clueless about it when I was a child, but I can't blame them really because I was so good at masking. As I've gotten older, I feel a lot less need to do so. I'm in a place I'm comfortable being me.

@clacke that's not too dissimilar to myself. On my mother's side of the family there have always been a lot of brilliant people, a lot of odd people and a few who had obvious differences from "normal".

My mother has a cousin who is autistic and developmentally delayed. Since that was my first experience with Autism, that is what I thought Autism was when I was younger. It never occurred to me that it could apply to me until I was an adult and began some serious self reflection.

Imagine a parallel universe where Star Wars was directed by Tim Burton and scored by Danny Elfman.

@clacke I do think you'll get a better picture by taking several off the self evaluations on the embrace-autism site. I think you'll probably get an even better picture by talking with autistic people about shared experience. If you follow the #actuallyautistic hashtag and begin interacting with the people you come across you're likely to find that you have a lot in common with some of them if you are also autistic. I definitely have, and it's also been a life changing experience for the better.

@clacke like so?