My Destiny 1 PvP mountain scale

My Destiny 1 PvP mountain scale

Hi, I’m Razor9604 on Xbox and here’s my story of how I went from a 0.72 K/D in year 1 to above 1.0.

First the background.  I’m a happily married, father to four, school aged children.  I used to be a console gamer, back in the ages post Atari 2600.  I had a paper route and got to upgrade to a Sega master system when my brother and I picked a used copy of Phantasy Star.  I played 2, 3 and 4 on the Sega Genesis and was very much hooked on Sci Fi, space travel and astronomy.  Gaming took a back seat to college and work life but I mostly dabbled in PC gaming but nothing very serious.  I had a good coworker who suggested I pick up a discount copy of Halo1 to play some online PvP with him.  It was great fun and LOVED the story line VERY much.  Around that time my wife and I started having kids and it wasn’t until the youngest was coming out of diapers that I said I would get back into gaming.  I very much wanted to finish the Halo story line and picked up and Xbox One for the Master Chief collection.  I filled out my Xbox order with EA sports games NHL and Madden, Call of Duty as well as Destiny.  I never did get Master Chief but something about that live action advertisement with the Led Zeppelin song really caught my eye, they were one of my favorite bands.  Destiny sat on the shelf well into November 2014.  On November 12, I put the game in and called the kids (https://www.bungie.net/en/Legend/PGCR?instanceId=789785154&characterId=2305843009249336792).  That opening cinematic with Mars was SO eye grabbing!  I mean my addiction to astronomy was deep enough that I built my own telescope ( http://i.imgur.com/LIY3ZSP.jpg ) and dream of stepping on Mars all the time!  Look at some of my photos of Mars here http://maphilli14.webs.com/mars – and one of my favorites.

http://i.imgur.com/VLDw9EZ.png

After the opening cinematic the style and theme of Destiny was VERY much in line with Halo, they share a common heritage after all.  I very much enjoyed playing solo, I had no Xbox live but combing through a possible future’s lost past in the Cosmodrome was great fun.  Shooting aliens and getting loot was awesome.  What hooked me the most was the patrol free play.  Being able to roam around with no linear constraints of story telling was quite liberating.  I remember the terror I had stepping on the moon for the first time following that long path in the lunar soil on foot battling over achieving vandals!  What really grabbed me was the descent towards the "Temple of Crota." when between the rocks I noticed the shadows creeping across the rocks.  It was then I looked up to see exactly what the scientific part of me expected to see, a dark, starry sky in the middle part of the lunar day.  That was it, I couldn’t wait to play more, I was VERY hooked!

The upcoming release of the first DLC, “The Dark Below” and lack of Xbox live, locking me out of specific activates, I did it.  I bit the bullet and got Xbox live, joined a clan and began to forge new friendships, diving deep into the Hellmouth for endless wipes on Crota, grinding for gear and sharing life experiences while we waited for the heavy ammo glitch is now deeply a part of gaming Mike.

So now I have a forever level 33 hunter and I let my oldest two create other characters of their liking, as long as one picked a titan and the other a warlock.

Flash forward and I’m a Level 34, kids are doing all the strikes, stories, ranking and PvP on the titan and warlock, those were their characters.  I owned the hunter and they never played it much so all the stats in crucible like my 1st game - http://guardian.gg/en/pgcr/1029713229

http://i.imgur.com/o5x4We0.png

Even after I started to get legendary weapons my gun skills were well out matched.  My love for the game carried on.  I did the entire y1 Thorn quest with a blue, void shotgun, which if you recall, dying made progress go backwards.   At the time of the end of Y1, when “The Taken King” was coming out, I had over 500 games on my hunter and poor 0.72 K/D:

Game Number	Date	Type	Map	KDR	KDAR	Kills	Rolling K	Deaths	Rolling D	Assists	Rolling KD
520	9/14/2015 22:09	Mayhem Clash	Frontier	0.38	0.44	3	4107	8	5699	1	0.720652746
521	9/14/2015 22:19	Mayhem Clash	Pantheon	0.64	0.73	7	4114	11	5710	2	0.720490368

I played a lot of Iron Banner and as of the end of Year 3, I still have a lot of Y1 gear in my vault.

http://i.imgur.com/YeBQRwL.png

When Trials of Osiris came out in Y2, I tried and ended up realizing that I’m just not that good.  I found some sweaty team mates that helped me get all the Y2 trials gear, you know back when it went on rotation not RNG.  Still, trials left my empty and for some strange reason my way of getting better was to dig myself out of a 0.72 K/D and I set a goal as 1.0 or nothing.  My initial projections in a spreadsheet put me at a 1.4 k/d per game and had me a many hundreds of games to make it out the pits.

I have been making charts, like the one above, to help plot my progress.  My routine is this:

1. Use chrome extension "http://www.destinychecklist.net/"

1. Go to PvP Tab
2. Click "PVP History CSV"
3. Save'd as csv
1. Open CSV in Excel - We're going to calculate a rolling total of K and D to make a full history of all PvP K/D

1. Re order to chronological.  It is easier to start from the beginning and add up totals as you more towards today.  To do this, add a column A.

1. Right click Column A
2. Insert
3. Click into cell A2 and type 1
4. Click into cell A3 and type 2
5. Highlight both and drop to bottom - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Automatically-number-rows-76ce49e3-d8d2-459b-bd85-ee1d3973e6e6
6. Now sort inverse cronology.  This will change the current view of most recent at top to the oldest at top.

1. Click the top leftmost cell boder with the triangle in it, which will highlight the whole spreadsheet
2. 
3. Click Data then Sort
4. Sort by Column A, the one we created in Step 2ai
5. 
1. Now let's calculate the running totals for both K and D.  A running total will give you the cumluative totals over each match you play.

1. Highlight the Kills Column, which should be G
2. Scroll the bottom and use this syntax to

Summing - https://fiveminutelessons.com/learn-microsoft-excel/calculate-running-total-column-cells-excel

• =SUM($G$2:G2)

From <https://fiveminutelessons.com/learn-microsoft-excel/calculate-running-total-column-cells-excel>

Export as image - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Save-a-chart-as-a-picture-in-Excel-for-Windows-254bbf9a-1ce1-459f-914a-4902e8ca9217

So the long and shot of it is, I did it!

http://imgur.com/n2Ietvf.png

All three years of overall K/D by game number from 0.72 to 1.015

Here’s the last two years without all the cruff from Y1 cluttering it up.  

http://i.imgur.com/PwmzWl0.png

A long, slow, and steady grind up hill.  I ended my hunter’s challenge of going over 1.0 with these stats:

http://destinytracker.com/destiny/character/xbox/Razor9604/2305843009249336792

Games = 2,611

Kills = 25,904

Deaths = 25,522

There’s countless clannmates, friends, forums and subreddits that I need to credit along this long way.  You know who you are and you’ll be in my heart and memories as long as I have them.  I love you all and this game and I’ll see you in D2!

2016 Solar System Bests

My 9th annual best photos of planets and solar system bodies for the year of 2016!

2016 gave me 37 nights of imaging for the year.   Being a Mars year I would have expected an uptick from 2015 which gave me 33 nights.  So I guess 4 extra night is somewhat an improvement in conditions.  I did also get a whole week's worth of weather during Mars season.

The other huge highlight was the Mercury Transit.  Seen in crossing the sun in the upper right I made a nice slideshow on youtube.

In keeping with tradition of the past 9 years here is my short list of best of's!

Clicking this link will bring you to the desktop wallpaper sized version.

Here is the labeled version.  Clicking this will bring you to the desktop wallpaper sized version.

I hope you enjoy my photos as much as I do.  Here's to a wonderful 2017.  Keep smiling and keep looking up!

Venus' clouds in motion!

I love astronomy that's no secret and one of the reasons why is that there is constantly something new to discover or a first to be had.  On December 28th, 2016 I had two firsts.  I was out to shoot Venus one last time for my yearly mash up (2016 pending!) and was in for a surprise or two.  First surprise is seeing a daytime Venus with the unaided eye.  I had a hard time getting my scope, +Akule  centered on my target.  So I whipped out my binoculars only to find it quite easily.  Realizing it was just above the trees I got excited as it should be easy to find.  Sure enough there it was, no telescope no binoculars but it was MID AFTERNOON in broad daylight!  I was astounded how clear the atmosphere was, 5/5 for transparency!  Second first for came after getting the the telescope and camera setup I was able to get a nice animation of the cloud tops.  I found the seeing above average and I had a long period of time to shoot before Venus slipped into the trees.  I shot from 20:49:24 UTC to 21:44:31 and was able to use the best seeing conditions to make this animation from time 4:19 to 4:38 EST or 19 minutes.  This animation of UltraViolet light shows how fast the cloud tops of Venus move in NINETEEN minutes!

So how fast do the clouds move? According to my good friends at Universe today, the winds "At the very top of the cloud layers on Venus, wind speeds reach 355 km/hour (or 100 meters/second). This is the same the jet stream here on Earth." 

But Mike are you sure it's not rotating? Yes, Very!! Why? Because the rotation period, aka a day on Venus is 116d 18h 0m. So you are certainly seeing the cloud tops blowing across the top of the atmosphere.

I also shot Venus in Infra Red and when you use Infra Red as Red, and UltraViolet as Blue, you can make a 50/50% mixture of those to make a fake green. Then using IR as R, UV as B and a synthetic Green you can make a false color or IR-sG-UV image of Venus. It looks like this...

After 

The UV is actually a derotated version of 8 x 90s or 12minutes of 'sub' time.  Here's the UV and IR alone.  Since it was daytime and the background levels were not dark, I left it bright enough to show the daytime UV levels.

Thank so much to my friends and family for sharing these firsts with me it was quite a fine way to end my 2016 observing season.  Stay tuned for the 2016 best of's!!

Mike