On the one hand – YOLO!
On the other hand – you’re HOW old? That first drop is HOW high? There are HOW many loops?
Those cars do WHAT? You spin HOW MANY TIMES?
Yes, you did this a lot when you were forty years younger. You’re no longer forty years younger.
Please, for the love of god, use some common sense!
Yeah, right. Have we actually ever met?
Suffice it to say, poor life choices were made.
Filed under Family, Photography, Travel
Unseasonably warm, bright lights, nice crowds, ill-advised life decisions that made perfect sense forty years ago…
Fun times!
Filed under Christmas Lights, Panorama, Photography
I found these on the window today.
We don’t get much ice in Los Angeles, but this window was at 37,000 feet, which helps.
Filed under Flying, Photography
The house across the street from us will be getting new occupants soon (details unknown, mainly because it’s none of my business) and whoever’s in charge now is doing some massive amounts of cleanup and landscaping work. Yesterday morning I woke up to chain saws and trucks and chipper-shredders.
It was a bad day for the neighborhood bunnies – that heavy brush is home to dozens as far as I can tell. At least, that’s where they run when I spook them out of my yard. Of more interest to me was the fate of that giant pine tree.
It’s a gorgeous old tree and I like trees. It’s also home to hundreds of birds, and you may have noticed that I like birds. But it’s not my house and not my tree.
Also, let’s face it, if you’re looking toward Vandenberg to see a launch, the rockets rise RIGHT SQUARE BEHIND that tree. Take a look at many of the ISS pass photos over the last four years from here and you’ll see that tree blocking some part of the flyover most nights. So if it were to be gone, it wouldn’t all be bad…
Presto chango! Or maybe presto chainsaw-o! There’s now a LOT of open sky to my west.
Let’s see when the next ISS pass is. Or the next launch out of Vandenberg.
Filed under Castle Willett
Big goings on in the heavens tonight as the Moon moved in front of Mars and hid it for about an hour, and event known as an “occultation.”
(Was Mars hiding, or was the Moon blocking it? Who’s to blame? What was happening on Mars during that hour that the Martians didn’t want us to know about from Curiosity? Inquiring minds…)
I didn’t have the time to spare to pull out the big telescope and get it set up, but that didn’t stop me from taking time to watch and pull my camera and a video camera and a couple of tripods out. There are some truly spectacular pictures and videos out there from some of the big observatories (see Griffith Observatory, for example), but these are my “fast & dirty” results.
Before we get into the sequences, a note about basic physics and optics. The short version: the full Moon is 3.75 gazillion times brighter than Mars. So trying to take pictures that show the Moon, you need a very short exposure, in this case, 1/4000 second, the shortest exposure my 17-year-old Canon DSLR can do.
But then you can just barely see Mars. To show Mars clearly, you need a much longer exposure (1/160 second) which leaves the Moon as a white, featureless blob, looking more like the Sun.
Somewhere in the middle, if you’re lucky, there is a picture that gives you some bright, washed out detail on the Moon while also still showing the planet 50,000,000 miles away.
First, screen captures from the video camera. It has a great 20x optical zoom, but the resolution is quite a bit less than the DVR or any commercial quality video camera. Still, given five minutes of setup, these aren’t bad. These are small, low-resolution files, but they make a nice progression.
Prior to the occultation, with Mars to the lower left of the Moon, at about the “seven o’clock position”:
I was having some real problems with the tripod malfunctioning, so I’m amazed that I caught this at all! These captures are all about 30 seconds apart.
About an hour later, coming back out at about the “two o’clock position”:
These photos are about a minute apart.
Secondly, with the big camera, I didn’t get much worth sharing when Mars disappeared, but when it was reappearing I did much better (remember to click on the photos to see them full sized!):
Meanwhile, through binoculars, this was an amazing sight! I hope you got a chance to see it for yourself!
Filed under Astronomy, Photography
Another busy, busy, busy day. Another quick stroll outside to catch some air and another of those little moments that are just wonderful if you let yourself observe and not be too jaded or blase.
The atmosphere’s still a little unstable a couple of days after a cold front brought in three days of light rain. Granted, again, as always, a multi-year drought has us grateful for the rain. But now it’s a bit cool and damp with a small chance of scattered showers for the rest of the week.
Good.
It leads to some nice cloud buildups in the late afternoon after we get some convective activity. At sunset there were a lot of larger cloud cells off toward Ventura and the ocean, so most of the clouds here were dark and grey. But this one little finger of clouds stuck out into the last pink rays of the setting sun. Just to remind us that it was there.
Sweet!
Filed under Photography, Sunsets
Busy, busy, busy day – went out for a quick stretch this evening and found the 13 day old, 97% illuminated moon rising through scattered clouds to the east behind the house.
To absolutely no one’s surprise – I took a picture!
I hope you enjoy it.
Filed under Astronomy, Christmas Lights, Photography
A lot of what we see at the Ahmanson and Pantages here in LA are musicals and wildly popular plays. “Hamilton.” “Wicked.” “1776.” “Oklahoma!” “Evan Hanson.”
If you get a chance, I would recommend that you go see “2:22 A Ghost Story.”
It’s not perfect, but I enjoyed it a lot. It’s not a musical, it’s not a classic, it’s not perfect. It’s a ghost story. (It’s right there in the title.)
The run at the Ahmanson is the first US presentation after runs at several theaters in London, where it’s won awards and been very popular. The staging in interesting, as is the story.
And beyond that I’ll be quiet since, as the writer says in his notes in the program, all ghost stories are also mysteries.
Filed under Entertainment, Los Angeles, Photography
It’s time to start the next season of plays at the Ahmamson Theatre in Los Angeles. The Music Center is all gussied up for the holidays.
That’s the side of the Mark Taper Forum on the left with the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion off in the distance on the other side of the Plaza where the Christmas tree is.
Tonight we’re seeing “2:22 A Ghost Story.” I don’t think there will be a lot of singing or dancing…
Filed under Entertainment, Los Angeles, Photography
On Wednesday I tried to do some weird timelapse motion-blurred Christmas lights with my iPhone 13 Pro Max and was disappointed with the results because the “smart” phone kept trying to “fix” or “correct” what was obviously an error on my part in how I was using the camera and thus giving something that was weird and motion-blurred.
Who in their right mind would want that?!
I mentioned then that I had some still functional older iPhones that might not be so “smart” and in turn might simply record what I was pointing at when I opened the shutter. My old iPhone 6 plus not only has a headphone jack (more on that some other time) but sure enough, it’s old enough and “stupid” enough to not mess with my photographic tomfoolery!
The lights on the roses next to the driveway on the iPhone 6, compared to Wednesday’s iPhone 13:
And another:
Inducing a bit of wiggle in that 1/4 second exposure is tougher than it looks.
On the other hand, you can just swing the camera side to side as fast as you can while shooting pictures.
You can get up close.
You can step back and get a big chunk of the yard.
One very odd effect on some ornaments shows off the “rolling shutter” on the iPhone. (I think – Destin at Smarter Every Day might prove me wrong.) There aren’t four candy canes at each of those spots, just one.
A mix of the big bright lights with the tiny fairy lights.
A bit of wiggle, but I like the way the trails at the top & bottom aren’t parallel, but converging in an arc.
Again, take a look at the LED “icicle” lights hanging down. I think they show up with nine or ten images where the candy canes have four has to do with the frequency that the LEDs are firing, but that’s just a W.A.G. (Wild Ass Guess)
The biggest takeaway of the night might be more related to the neighborhood. A rental house across the street from us has come vacant and there were folks over there today, presumably looking at it as potential new neighbors. Now they’re seeing this lunatic running around our yard in the rain with an eight year old iPhone, waving his arms around like I was having a seizure or had a spider down the back of my shirt.
If they decide not to move in, I’ll understand.
Filed under Christmas Lights, Photography
 | Tiffany Tasting Food on Chinese Proverb |
 | Ronnie Willett on Fine Feathered Friends –… |
 | berich56 on Wispy With A Chance Of Straigh… |
 | Jemima Pett on War Board Review |
 | momdude on Above Average Sunset & Cre… |
 | Frederic Paulussen on Above Average Sunset & Cre… |
| Jemima Pett on Proof Of Life – Febrary… |
 | karen bear on iPhone 17 Moonrise |
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 