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
March 16, 2024 · 23:27

First Rose Of 2024

I had noticed this bud starting to grow over the last week, but when I went out today to get the mail I found that it had finally “popped!”

Classic form, perfect structure, beautiful color.

The only spot of color in a long row of roses that got cut back for the winter around the first of the year. Give it a couple of weeks, there will be roses of a half dozen different colors up and down the row. (When we find the “forever home,” I need to plant roses like this all along the driveway or by the front porch.)

Not noticed until I was going through the pictures for this post – a little friend hiding in the petals! Click on the image to blow it up to full-sized – can you find them?

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Filed under Flowers, Photography

March 15, 2024 · 23:07

Night Clouds Redux

In the middle of watching the hockey game tonight (it was good, Kings 5-0 over the Blackhawks) we got a blaring warning emergency alert, followed by the robot voice synthesizer from the National Weather Service warning about severe weather, up to and including hail, thunderstorms, and a possible tornado. WTAF?!

We didn’t get more than a few drops here, most of the action was east of Downtown LA and in the San Gabriel Valley, all thirty to fifty miles to our east. (Southern California’s a big place.)

By late tonight, the leftover remnants were over us, and with the quarter moon (that bright spot in the lower right) lighting them up from above and the light pollution from the city lighting them up from below, they looked pretty cool!

The big takeaway lesson for the evening, however, was that it’s so much harder to get down on the ground and then back up to my feet than I remember it being when I was younger. This sucks! (For the record, I was laying down on my back on the patio to try to stabalize my arms when holding my phone to take these 10 second exposures, rather than just walking inside the house to get one of the dozen or so tripods I have… Okay, so, the true takeaway is that I’m an idiot, but that’s not exactly news now, is it?)

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Filed under Los Angeles, Photography, Uncategorized, Weather

March 14, 2024 · 23:50

Eclipse Minus 24 Days

Simple messages:

1) Be careful to watch the partial phases of the eclipse carefully and protect your eyes!
2) If you don’t already have safe eclipse glasses and you’re going to watch the eclipse, get them now! They’ll sell out quickly.

Never look at the Sun without protection except for when it’s 100% fully eclipsed. For those 4:24 you’re going to see one of the most amazing sights in the entire Universe and you can whip those glasses off and see it in all of its naked eye glory. But for the partial phases for a couple hours before totality and for a couple of hours after totality, you MUST have protection for your eyes.

And NEVER look at the uneclipsed Sun with binoculars or any kind of magnification without special solar filters designed specifically for that instrument. You can cause permanent vision damage or loss in just seconds.

When shopping for eclipse glasses, make sure you only buy from reputable sources and manufacturers. There are reports already of many sellers on Amazon and elsewhere that are are pushing knock off glasses that don’t meet the proper standards for protecting your vision. I got mine from 2024eclipse.org. (For a package of ten I paid $27, including tax and shipping, so that should give you a good baseline for how much you should be paying.)

At the end of the day, if you can’t get certified eclipse glasses and April 8th comes and you still need a way to look at the partial phases of the eclipse, there are other options that don’t involve looking directly at the Sun. We’ll get to those another time.

Order now, be safe!

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Space

March 13, 2024 · 22:15

Flaming Sunset – March 13th

I had another post and pictures all set up and ready to go. Then the sun set.

Holy freakin’ guacamole, Batman!

If you’re lucky you might get one or two sunsets a year in this part of the world that are this colorful, saturated, vibrant, and amazing.

Tonight was that night. Complete with a thin, fingernail of a three-day old crescent moon in the upper left.

Neighbors were driving by and stopping to stare with us. And why not? If you see this going on and you don’t notice or don’t care, please check for a pulse!

This spectacular display went on for over ten minutes. I even had time to shoot some panoramas.

While the purples started to fade to black up high, the reds and oranges near the horizon just got brighter and more vibrant.

All things are transient, none so much as a sunset. The planet’s just going to keep on spinning, which in the big picture is probably a good thing.

One last gasp, then the stars started popping out. Jupiter came out just above the wires, over at the left edge of the picture. Orion is high up to the left, the easiest constellation to pick out. The Plieades cluster is close to the Moon. Somewhere out there is that comet I talked about yesterday.

Spectacular!

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Filed under Panorama, Photography, Sunsets

March 12, 2024 · 23:29

Eclipse Minus 26 Days

Oh, look what popped up in the sunset skies, two days past new moon!

Just a thumbnail, hanging up there with the lit sliver pointing the way toward the Sun.

 

After it got a little bit darker, Jupiter’s bright off to the left. There’s a new comet that might be visible after dark over to the right, about where the top of that tall tree is. But you’ll need a dark sky to see it, and binoculars will help.

I went out before it all set, had my good binoculars, but struck out on the comet. I found the guide stars that the finder chart used to point out its location and it should have been right there – but I couldn’t see a thing. The surface brightness of the comet is probably much lower than the background illumination of all of LA’s light pollution combined with Ventura County’s coastal haze.

But in twenty-six days? By that time, assuming the comet hasn’t faded out of sight, it will have moved over to the other side of Jupiter and during that 4:24 of eclipse, it should be clearly visible, along with Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, and the eclipsed Sun. Will I actually be able to see it?

In 26 days, 9 hours, and 13 minutes we’ll find out!

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Filed under Space, Sunsets

March 11, 2024 · 23:31

Spring Growth Against A Blue & White Sky

The tree next door has exploded with buds and baby leaves.

I took the opportunity to play with my DSLR camera, what is now a eighteen-year-old Canon that’s shot a LOT of pictures, all over the world. These days I’m noticing that the auto-focus function doesn’t work all that well, so I’m trying to use it more with manual focus.

Yes, I can (usually) do a better job of getting a picture in sharp focus, but I get one really good picture out of ten where the autofocus gets ten pictures that are about 98% in focus.

And in the process of going out to test, I got out of my office for ten minutes and looked at trees, sky, clouds, hawks, and hummingbirds. I call that a win.

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Filed under Photography

March 10, 2024 · 23:38

SpaceX Falcon9 Starlink Launch From Vandenberg – March 10th

I’m going to have to start putting the date into the titles on these posts. What used to be a “once or twice a year” and then became “once every couple of months” is now a “once a week or so” cadence and that’s expected to nearly double again in 2025.

The Falcon9 has just gone supersonic and through MaxQ (the point of maximum aerodynamic pressure) when it climbs over the hill from my viewpoint, 115 miles to the southeast of the launch site.

As it climbs and the air pressure drops off, the exhaust trail lengthens.

As the atmosphere gets even more thin and the plume gets longer and cooler through expansion, the colors start to change.

Just before the nine first stage main engines cut off and the first stage drops away (to land on a ship off of Baja California) the plume is a rainbow of color.

MECO! Main Engine Cut Off.

The second stage engine lights and the top part of the rocket starts accelerating toward 17,000 mph. From this far away for a night launch, the naked eye can see an orange dot moving along quickly. Binoculars or a telephoto lens will clearly show the second stage exhaust plume, a V-shaped cone stretching out behind the vehicle. Here you can see it (click on the image to see it full sized!) traveling just below the bright star Sirius.

Again, click on the image to see it full sized – the second state is passing Sirius.

And leaving Sirius behind, headed down toward the southern horizon where I lose it behind the Santa Monica Mountains.

I really need a somewhat bigger lens (this is a 70-300mm zoom, I would love to have a 600mm telephoto) and a better tripod. The good news is that with weekly launches and the cadence speeding up even more, there should be lots of opportunities for practice!

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Filed under Photography, Space

March 9, 2024 · 23:44

The Race Is On!

It’s going to be a marathon and an adventure. It might be stressful at times but I intend to make it glorious, not exhausting.

It’s a four-dimensional finish line to this race – space and time. The space – Kerrville, TX. The time, 13:32:07 on April 8th, 2024.

(Image: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio)

Kerrville is expecting somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 visitors for the day of the eclipse. It’s going to be a madhouse.

To get a room there a four-day minimum was required, non-refundable, and at somewhere between three and five times the normal hotel rates. Ye olde “supply & demand” at work!

I’ll be driving out from Los Angeles, about twenty hours of driving, but over three days. That should give me sufficient slack to allow for any unexpected issues or detours.

I didn’t even think about flying out and getting a rental car – those reservations were pretty much booked and overbooked months ago.

In order to take that time off of work I’m going like a banshee now to try to not only keep up with my current workload but to get ahead and stay ahead for when I leave. (No good deed…)

So, a marathon, to have my butt and hopefully a trunk full of camera gear in a sunny spot in central Texas in the early afternoon twenty-seven days from now.

It WILL be glorious!

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Filed under Astronomy, Space, Travel

March 8, 2024 · 23:46

Clear & A Gazillion

See that Sun? We’re only one day away from the new moon, so somewhere in this view is also that Moon, even if you can’t see it. (It’s probably about where the tops of those palm trees are, about 15º-ish west of the sun.)

You can’t see the Moon because it’s being seriously backlit by a freakin’ bright star, but it’s still there, creeping in its orbit closer and closer to an alignment which is perfect… But this month, they’ll miss. No part of the Sun will be blocked by the Moon from our viewpoint, and conversely, no part of the Moon’s shadow will touch the Earth.

Next month, on the other hand…

In 28 days, on April 8th, the alignment will be absolutely perfect and the shadow of the moon will swing in an arc from the Pacific Ocean toward the northeast across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, before heading out over the Canadian maritime provinces.

A map of the contiguous U.S. shows the path of the 2024 total solar eclipse stretching on a narrow band from Texas to Maine. (Map from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio)

Yes, I’ll be there. With my son living in San Antonio, I’ll be headed to Kerrville, TX as my base, sitting right on the centerline of the path of totality with 4:24 of totality.

Yes, you’ll be hearing about it here. Probably just about every day once we get into April.

If anyone has questions, feel free to drop them into the comments. I’ll try to answer them all.

Clear skies!!!

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Space

March 7, 2024 · 23:35

Ominous

Yet another one of those days when the forecast did not include rain. And yet…

Those are not puffy, happy, “fair weather” clouds. If those are in the Midwest, there are tornado warning sirens going off.

And it stretched across a good stretch of the sky. 30 seconds later it was raining pretty hard.

Not nearly as hard as it was raining to the east of us where that BIG storm was.

And when it was over…

It wasn’t a full rainbow. Over to the right it was black as night as that thunderstorm had moved a bit south. But to the north, for a minute…

Yeah. It’s that whole “hope” thing.

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Filed under Panorama, Photography, Weather