Believe it or not, the title of this post is not clickbait! After some strong prompting from loving parishioners, I am currently on a rather unique vacation. A married couple from my parish went on a cruise to the Panama Canal about two years ago. They encouraged me: “Fr. James, they had a Priest on board! You should do that for your vacation time!“
Long story short, that conversation prompted me to contact Apostleship of the Seas about joining their group of Priest Chaplains to serve on various types of seafarer and maritime ministerial opportunities. What was the fruit of the conversation? As I type, I’m floating in the middle of the North Atlantic after a delightful week of short visits to port cities in Spain and am on my way to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It has been a very enjoyable and restful time celebrating Mass with and hearing Confessions for the passengers on Royal Caribbean’s massive cruise ship Allure of the Seas. Here’s a “hyper accurate map” of where I am right now (obviously, I say this tongue in cheek).
One of my hopes was to be able to stand on the deck at night and see what the stars looked like over the Atlantic. Sadly, its rained most nights with clouds overhead on the nights it didn’t rain. I still have a week on the open Ocean so I still may have that opportunity. Taking a picture of those skies will be next to impossible as much as the ship rocks in the Ocean. Nevertheless, I’ll still give it a try!
Something that has been a great blessing on this vacation has been literal detachment from the administrative responsibilities I have as both a Pastor of a Parish and a Dean (a type of overseer) for Eau Claire County in Wisconsin. I’ve experienced levels of decompression mentally, physically and spiritually that have been very healthy. It has made me sheepishly affirm that I need to do a better job taking care of myself – A request my parishioners make of me often.
Part of the decompression is having the time to explore astronomy. Years back, I had made a commitment to myself to follow the Juno Mission to Jupiter. In particular I wanted to do some editing of the JunoCam images. I was able to find a lot of images on the JunoCam site, but was saddened to see that due to political funding cuts the Juno Mission site is no longer being update. I will refrain from sharing my frustration with this development. What was also evident was the realization that my lack of follow through confirmed that I need to step back and safeguard my leisure time. A leisure time that has reaffirmed that my love of astronomy needs to be part of my Sabbath rest.
As I looked through the images of Jupiter, I decided to hit the “reset button” on my desire to edit Juno images. I’ve grown a lot as a photo editor and, with the AI tools I mentioned in my last post, I wondered what type of edits I could achieve years removed from my first attempts. In short – I’m pretty happy with them! Below are side by side images Jupiter and Io. The left image is the RAW (or unedited data) from NASA and the image to the right is my edit. What do you think?
I felt such a sense of growth looking at these images. Yes, the photo editing purist may argue I “cheated” by using AI tools to edit these images. As an enthusiast, the time I’ve saved with these tools is precious. I can only give so much time to my side interests so if I can find a tool to help maximize that time, I’ll use it!
Another gift of these AI tools is I can spend the rest of my afternoon doing step two of this post: Studying what we have learned through Juno Mission (at least what is currently accessible) and share that with you.
So, yes, I’m looking at Jupiter and Io with the help of AI on vacation in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean. No, that isn’t the start of a good joke, but an essential part of this time of rest.
