Thanks!

Thank you! I tell my friends that my camera made some good photos in spite of me!

Nicely done!

Many thanks!

Really nice photos with a good variety of birds!

My partner is a dedicated amateur astronomer, having viewed over 25 solar/annular eclipses around the world. We originally made travel arrangements to Texas for the eclipse, but weather reports predicted more probability of cloudiness, so we cancelled and decided on driving to Plattsburgh NY. By Sunday morning (day before eclipse) weather reports were not looking too good for NY, so we ended up in Sherman Maine. It was a beautiful, unusually warm day for northern Maine and it was well worth the almost 9 hours driving time from NJ. I used my Nikon d800e at ISO 200, f/8 with various shutter speed and 600mm focal length with the Tamron 150-600 G2 lens. My partner fashioned a solar filter, using the lens hood and SolarSkreen (mylar type material patented by his deceased friend and boss.) We spent 4 days on the road visiting Bar Harbor and parts of Acadia National Park while in the area.

(Download)

Two possibilities that I can think of:

"In response to a May 2023 data breach, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has notified Medicare beneficiaries who may have been affected. The agency is mailing approximately 47,000 new Medicare cards with a new Medicare Beneficiary Identifier (MBI) to those affected."

or:

"Medicare is getting rid of the old card because the old Medicare Number was based on a person's Social Security Number. Scammers sometimes use Social Security Numbers to try to steal someone's identity, open new credit cards or even take out loans in someone else's name."

Yeah, we also did Dachau (depressing) and Neuschwanstein. . . the Lost and Found section at the very crowded Oktoberfest was hilarious!

I agree on the Dresden suggestion. It has a long history with very gothic architecture. I lived in Hamburg, but made a road trip with my cousin and his partner, from Hamburg to Prague. We stopped over to tour Dresden - a beautiful city on the Elbe. It was late September, so we went to Munich for Octoberfest when leaving Prague for return to Germany. You mentioned mid-October. . . you might catch the last few days of Octoberfest by taking a side trip to Munich - a crazy memorable event!

I have the iPad 10th generation, but won't be using Luminar on that because I prefer a much larger monitor. In my case, it's a 65" LG OLED attached to my M2 Pro MacMini.

I really like the silvery color of the trees in #1 - very nice!

Thanks for that info, because I use a pair of HGST HDDs to store all my digital RAW photos and noticed that Amazon mostly has renewed ones for sale when I was looking to acquire another pair. I'll give them a shot, since I can actually see and feel the higher quality of these HDDs. I use a dual bay drive dock by OWC to read and write to the HDDs on my MacMini M2 Pro.