Author Archives: momdude

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About momdude

Space cadet | Family dude | Photographer | Music lover | Traveler | Science fiction fan | Hugo Award nominee | Writer | 5x NASA Social participant | KC Chiefs fan | LA Kings fan | Senior Director of Finance & Administration for ALS Network | Member & former staff Finance Officer at the Commemorative Air Force SoCal Wing | Hard core left-wing liberal | Looking for whatever other shenanigans I can get into
November 27, 2019 · 23:30

Owl Sounds

The predicted storm has arrived and we’ve gotten about an inch of rain down here in the city, twice that or more up in the mountains, and above about 5,000′ there’s snow, which has made a mess of travel between LA and Northern California and LA and Las Vegas. Outside now it’s about 43° and raining steadily.

Over the sound of the rain and the furnace I can hear a couple of our owls. They’re close, but when I went out into the cold on the front porch I couldn’t see them.

They sound pretty much as they always do. Shouldn’t they sound different? Shouldn’t they sound pissed off and cold and wet and hungry? Or are owls endowed with a stoic reserve in our anthropomorphic pantheon, oblivious to the weather good or bad, just accepting what is as what is?

Unless it’s a drastic difference, I doubt I would be able to detect the difference between a bored owl, a horny owl, or a cold and wet and pissed off owl.

Instead all I hear is the same old hooting, haunting, echoing across the street and down the hill to the responses from the other owls. Who sound just as stoic.

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Filed under Critters

November 26, 2019 · 23:27

Here It Comes

The holidays?

Well, yes, alright. There’s that. I can use the time off. But in about six hours, we’re going to get hit with this:

(Image from NOAA Hi-Def Radar app)

That should make the morning commute just…beyond description.

At least we’re not trying to drive a long way or get on a plane this weekend. Given the multiple large storms hitting the West Coast, Denver, the upper Midwest, New England, it’s going to be a good weekend to shelter in place.

Be safe out there, folks!

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Filed under Weather

November 25, 2019 · 23:27

No Context For You – November 25th

That’s no moon…

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Filed under Astronomy, Paul, Photography

November 24, 2019 · 22:38

Venus & Jupiter

As we saw about a week ago, we have a couple of bright planets in our western sky at sunset. Jupiter’s motion is taking it toward the sun from our viewpoint, so it will be heading toward the morning sky in early 2020. But Venus’s motion has it going the other way, heading toward greatest elongation on March 25, 2020. Tonight as their paths converged was their conjunction, or closest approach.

See them there in the sunset, below the wires and above the trees across the street? (Plus Saturn above the wires to their upper left – see comments below about where it’s going.)

They stand out to the eye at sunset, both very bright. Venus is in the lower left, Jupiter in the upper right.

You might have to move around a bit to get a good view between any buildings, trees, or other obstacles on your horizon. If you can get a pair of binoculars, they’ll be amazing looking and you should easily be able to see some of the Galilean moons around Jupiter.

Through the telephoto lens you can lose the perspective with the ground, but you might be able to see Venus as a crescent and detail on Jupiter.

As for those aforementioned Galilean moons, if you take the picture above and click on it to see it full sized, you can see a hint of them being captured. In a line on about a 45° angle, a couple of pixels to the upper left, one on the lower right…

Here’s what it looks like on my monitor.

Here’s the big thing that I’m always repeating at events like these, especially since so much coverage comes from pathetic click-bait run websites – THIS WASN’T AN EVENT THAT ONLY HAPPENED SUNDAY NIGHT!

If you didn’t get to see Jupiter and Venus tonight, go look tomorrow night, or any time the rest of the month, or even into early December! The two planets will be moving further apart from one another from our perspective, but Jupiter will be clearly visible (moving closer and closer to the horizon every day after sunset) until at least December 5th or 7th or even later if you have a clear horizon and dark skies.

Even after that, Venus will be getting higher in the sky every night after sunset until March 25th, and will still be visible through the end of May! Plus, Saturn!

Look at that first picture in this post, the wide angle one – see that dot way up above the phone wires, over to the left a bit from Jupiter and Venus, sort of above the TV antenna on the neighbor’s house? That’s Saturn, trailing behind Jupiter on its way toward our morning sky. It will be passing Venus the week of December 9th, in about two weeks. So watch for a repeat of this sort of spectacle in your evening sky.

Get out there, folks!

These are not things that *BANG!!*, happen, and they’re gone. To be clear, some astronomical events are – eclipses, for example, or occultations where a star, planet, comet, or asteroid disappears behind the moon, planet, or asteroid. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

Events related to the planets moving around in the sky drag out over WEEKS! Today might be the closest – but they were close yesterday and they’ll be close tomorrow.

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Space

November 23, 2019 · 23:28

Skylight Moon

One thing about having a big, fancy, east-west aligned skylight in the kitchen is that, when the geometry is right, you can watch the full moon rise through it.

Straight up the slot!!

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Filed under Astronomy, Castle Willett, Photography

November 22, 2019 · 23:56

Things I Learned On My Morning Commute

If I’m fooled by the fact that it was relatively easy to get on the freeway… (Going past several schools and into a TERRIBLE intersection that gridlocks in a heartbeat means that a normal 6-7 minute drive to the freeway normally takes 12-15 on a good day and has taken as much as 25 minutes.)

And then I’m disappointed by the fact that the freeway was clogged and jammed and slow… (Once I get ON the freeway in the morning, it’s almost always been wide open, “maximum freeway speed” all the way to the office.)

And my head is distracted by a dozen different things… (There’s a lot going on!)

And the route to the new office is the same one as to the CAF hangars… (The old job was to the east, where the new job is to the west out on the 101 Freeway, just about half as far as Camarillo is.)

If I’m not paying attention it’s very easy to be sitting in the #1 lane, cruising along at 75 mph (“maximum freeway speed”, as opposed to the 65 mph speed limit) as I suddenly realize that the overpass I just went under was my exit to the office.

Oops!

Fortunately, there are exits every mile and I know the area well, having run it all repeatedly when training for the 2011 LA Marathon with a Road Runners group. Take the next exit, double back, five minutes wasted, a lesson learned.

That should have been the biggest problem I had today!!

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Filed under ALSA Golden West, CAF, Distracted Driving, Freakin' Idiots!, Los Angeles

November 21, 2019 · 23:40

Owls, Coyotes, And Meteors

There was supposed to be a decent chance of a “meteor storm” tonight for an hour or so. It sounded like a click-bait headline, but I had seen a few legit sources talking about it, so I went out to take a look.

The odds were against me. The radiant, the point in the sky where the meteors seem to be coming from, was low near the eastern horizon from the US West Coast. Viewing was to be much better on the East Coast and in Europe, where the radiant would be high in the sky. Plus, there’s always all of LA’s light pollution. And right now we’re just clearing out after our first rain of the season, so there was a lot of haze and a few scattered clouds.

I went out anyway.

It was cold, at least, “LA cold.” The temperature was about 54°, which is balmy by Midwest standards for November, but chilly by wimpy LA standards.

The owls were hooting. I heard them for the first time in weeks last night, but when I got home from the office there were at least three of them, maybe four, in the trees just a few houses down. By the time it was “at least potentially maybe meteor storm” time they had moved off a block or two, but were still easy to hear. That hooting can be heard for miles, the sound really carries.

The coyotes were howling. There’s a pack of them that lives down at the bottom of the hill – at least, that’s where I always hear them. There’s a fairly large flood control basin down there that’s all filled with brush and the creek channel leads right up into the wilderness area around Castle Peak (you saw it burning about this time last year), so it would be ideal for them. I don’t know who or what they were chasing tonight, but they were loud.

To my surprise and delight, there were also a couple of meteors. No “storm” where they were expecting as many as 20 to 30 meteors a minute (from a dark sky, on the East Coast, with no clouds, etc) but I did see two long, bright ones and three or four dimmer trails.

Did anyone else see any of them?

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Filed under Astronomy, Castle Willett, Critters

November 20, 2019 · 22:54

No Implied Context For You – The Day After November 19th

So, last night it was late and I was doing a quickie “No Context” post which usually means I go through my iPhone photos and find something vague and/or blurry and/or bizarre and then write a few paragraphs of free association with it.

It’s not supposed to be deep, it’s just supposed to be quick. (Deep would be gravy, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for it.)

With an image that was various shades of brown and tan and had a bright spot in the upper corner (done, if I recall, by noticing that with the camera on but the camera face down on the desk it made different various gradients and lights depending on the overhead shadows and lighting) my first thought was that I was underwater in a very muddy place with the ray of sunlight to swim up toward to escape. Then, of course, it occurred to me that it might not be muddy water but something more fecal, and that in general was in tune with what’s going on in the world today, particularly in Washington and London, and I went with it.

This might have worried some folks.

It was a metaphor, or possibly a simile or an analogy, or even an allegory. Probably not a similitude.

I’m fine. While there might be days when I’m figuratively drowning in shit (who among us doesn’t in these interesting times?) I am not in any real sense literally drowning in shit.

So, here’s that same image, sprinkled with a few seconds of Photoshop magic, to be much more happier and much more upbeat. (Which is an anthropomorphication which is just as much BS as portraying last night’s as sad and downbeat, but hey, “whetevs” as the kids say. [The kids do not say this.])

Now it’s an algae-filled tank I’m swimming in, but it’s that special new bioengineered algae that’s going to give us unlimited, CO2 free energy while simultaneously sucking the excess CO2 from the atmosphere, pushing the CO2 levels back down below 300 ppm and saving us from climate change. That salvation would be the electronically enhanced, bigger, and brighter future in the upper right.

(DAMN, that’s smarmy!)

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Filed under Art, Paul, Photography

November 19, 2019 · 23:40

No Context For You – November 19th

Yep. Some days the world is like this.

We recognize that color. We know where it comes from and what it smells like. We’re pretty sure the world looks like this because we’re over our head in it.

But there’s that little bit of light up there. Maybe we’ll move that way and hope that it’s someplace better.

Tomorrow.

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Filed under Deep Thoughts, Photography

November 18, 2019 · 22:36

LOOK!!

Tonight on Twitter, someone wrote:

https://twitter.com/beckisaid/status/1196602892037316611

…which prompted a response from someone I follow…

…to which I said…

But seriously, folks! Why does everyone on the plane shut the window shade throughout the whole flight these days??!!

Being at 5,000, or 25,000, or 45,000 feet gives us a viewpoint on the world that was flat out impossible only 100 years ago, and was still highly unusual to the average person 60 or 70 years ago. Even today, despite how commonplace air travel has begun, for 90%+ of us it’s something we might see once or twice a year. For probably half of the US population or more it’s something they experience only every few years.

The world is a different place seen from above. The clouds come in myriad shapes and forms, flowing over vast distances, breaking up into puffy cotton balls, building into monstrous thunderheads. Sunrise from high altitude is the closest most of us will come to seeing an orbital sunrise, while sunset lingers and elongates time as the sky darkens and the stars come out.

You’ll always know where I’m sitting on the plane if I get a window seat. It doesn’t matter if it’s night – there might be aurora or stars. It doesn’t matter if it’s cloudy – I love looking at the clouds. It doesn’t matter if it’s a ten-hour flight over open water – I’ll watch for ships or islands or whales or mermaids.

I’ve seen full double rainbows while dodging thunderstorms on final into DFW. I’ve seen the Grand Canyon as a gash in the earth, while the Rockies covered with snow even in April and May look like the Earth’s ragged teeth. Rivers meandering, from the Mississippi to the Rio Grande and Potomac, tributaries branching off like poster children for fractal math.

Whole cities can be laid out before you. The Las Vegas Strip at night with enough neon to scare away the stars themselves. Washington DC laid out like a model, monuments and tourist sites elbow to elbow. New York City with Central Park beckoning and a lady standing in her harbor, Seattle with Mt. Rainier on guard, the Golden Gate and Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco to its neighbors, Chicago and Lake Michigan spreading out like the spokes of a wheel. And for me, the American City of Lights, Los Angeles, lit up like a jewel for 100 miles in every direction, freeways like ribbons of light, the Hollywood sign off to the north, and the fireworks from Disneyland in Anaheim to the south.

Yet on almost flight I’ve taken in the past couple of years, by the time we’ve taxied out and are taking off, 90% of the shades are down. People have logged onto the plane’s wifi and they’re doing the exact same damn things they were doing on the ground. They’re answering boring emails, watching idiot videos, or playing mindless games. While outside, just a few inches away, are wonders and fantastic sights.

We’re jaded. We’ve lost our sense of wonder.

We’ve lost our minds.

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Filed under Flying, Travel