Considering that they say we’re going to get a tiny bit (maybe 0.10″ at best) of rain (every drop is appreciated!) tonight and tomorrow morning, there sure wasn’t any sign of it this afternoon!
No processing, straight out of the iPhone 13, no filters.
Here’s to finding the joy in a (potentially) rainy Monday morning and a new week!
Filed under Photography, Weather
A busy, busy day at the hangar, but I wanted to at least snap a couple of pictures with the new phone.
Our F8F Bearcat is undergoing a major overhaul. The engine is off completely, along with a number of other chunks. Here’s the firewall, forward of the cockpit, to which the engine mount, engine, a half gazillion parts, the cowling, and pretty much the whole pointy end of the plane will be attached.
But that might be a few months away, maybe a year or more. We’ll see.
Filed under CAF, Photography
Again playing with the iPhone 13 Night Mode, this time with the wide-angle lens and the top of the mailbox as a crude tripod, or at least a steady surface.
(Click to make it bigger – it’s worth it!)
From left to right, that really bright light is the moon (coming up on full in a couple days), Jupiter (directly above the big tree on the left), Saturn (slightly dimmer, just to the left of that line of light in the center), and Venus (very bright, right over the neighbor’s roof on the right).
Blow up the picture and you see that there’s some trailing on the stars from the long exposure. But look at the top of the telephone pole right in the center – surrounding it is the “teapot” of Capricorn. And surrounding Venus is the “head” of Scorpius with Antares being the brightest star.
Not bad for the next step up from 100% handheld. I wonder what happens if I actually use a tripod? Maybe tomorrow night…
Oh, that “line of light in the center?” While often in my pictures that might be the ISS, not tonight. That’s SkyWest Airlines flight #5752 from LAX to Sacramento.
Filed under Astronomy, Photography
I continue to find time to “play” with some of the new camera features of the iPhone 13, not just to learn what it will do and how to do it, but to see if I can push those boundaries and find interesting or different ways to force it to do something unexpected. Thus the term “play.”
Tonight’s idea was to go someplace dark, really dark, and then figure out how it’s supposed to work to give you a really good picture in really low light (it’s pretty cool how it works and how well it works, letting some very smart processing deal with the digital image in real time) and then making the built-in functions keep telling me “Don’t do that!” and trying to drive that processing AI a bit mad.
The results can be spectral.
In short, in low light the camera is doing a long exposure and using digital magic to erase any motion that would blur the long image. I deliberately move the camera – up, down, left, right, sideways, spinning, tilting, closer, further away. And see what happens.
I particularly like this one – not sure where the bright purple spots came from, but they add another level of interesting objects to the image.
Cool “toy.” Fun “play.”
Filed under Photography
And yet that new iPhone 13 “night mode” camera takes a pretty decent photo without even a tripod…
Jupiter at top, just left of center, Saturn just a scooch above center to the left of the tree, the quarter moon setting between the tree and the house. Various other stars visible if you click on the image to blow the whole thing up to full sized.
No tripod, so this image shows a little blur and jiggle – but as I said, everything is in motion.
The Moon in its orbit around the Earth has now moved to be visible at this time of night. The Earth has rotated so that we’re in night. The trees are all blowing in 16 knot winds, gusting to 24 knots, so they’re waving about a bit. And I’m trying to hold the phone/camera as still as possible while standing in those winds as a faux tripod.
Yet – the picture is lovely.
Filed under Astronomy, Castle Willett, Photography
I got a new camera yesterday and got it set up. I’ve been taking some test pictures to start.
This camera has been talked about a lot recently as folks anticipated its availability – they weren’t kidding! I just saw these images from the full-sized files on my desktop monitors. STUNNING!
These were all taken with just the ambient light from inside the houses and a couple of street lights. The street light in our front yard that’s been the bane of my existence (when I’ve been taking pictures of ISS passes) is out. It’s dark out there.
Poking through the clouds up there is Jupiter. Mind you, I haven’t done anything yet to learn about all of the features and settings on this camera. If you think these are cool, wait until I actually learn how to use it! All I did for these was push the button and see what happens. I didn’t even use a tripod, so the fact that these aren’t blurry or jiggly is amazing to me.
Again, Jupiter’s the bright one, Saturn is the one closest to the right edge, and if you blow this up to full sized you’ll see all kinds of stars it captured. And all I did was hold it while standing in my back yard and push the button.
What’s even MORE amazing about this camera is that it’s got two more lenses. These were taken with the regular lens, but there’s also a telephoto and a wide angle lens built in. Fun times ahead playing with those!
Oh, yeah, and this camera also has a small supercomputer built in, as well as wi-fi, bluetooth, it shows me TV, movies, streaming video, has a whole slew of business apps, GPS and maps, connects to the internet, can keep a huge music library as well as hundreds if not thousands of books, health apps, and on and on and on.
Yeah, I got an iPhone Pro Max.
Cool!!
Filed under Astronomy, Computers, Paul, Photography
If you made the trek up the big hill, got to the top, saw our house, and thought, “I wonder what football team they root for?”
The old flag (middle) has seen a lot of miles, and I didn’t have one for my car, so a quick trip to the Chiefs’ online store solved THAT problem.
Glad that I cleared that up for you.
Filed under KC Chiefs, Photography
Prior to last night’s little episode with lightning & thunder (which almost blew me into next month), the approaching storm gave a fantastic display of mammatus clouds just before it got dark.
Usually seen at the bottom of a cumulonimbus cloud, they’re a sign of a huge amount of turbulence above as opposing updrafts and downdrafts in the clouds churn the air.
The name comes from their sack-like appearance, looking like breasts hanging down from the clouds. As a pilot, I would avoid flying underneath.
We don’t see these out in this part of the world often, so this was a treat. This particular storm cell was just starting to drop some light rain, and it had moved on and wasn’t responsible for the lighting and thunder later, but with this sort of activity building you can bet that it lit up the skies up over Ventura and Santa Barbara counties later.
What stood out in a wider view is the distinct difference in the cloud’s appearance across the bottom. On the right you see it smooth and fairly featureless where rain was starting to fall and obscure the mammatus formations above it.
But on the left you can still see up through a hole in the rain layer to the higher formation in the cloud. I was surprised to see that foundry so clearly defined.
Mammatus clouds – a good sign that meteorological mischief is afoot. And maybe a good time to get inside, or at least under the porch awning, and off of the golf course or lawn.
Filed under Photography, Weather
Sort of out of nowhere today the weather kicked up over the Catalina Channel to our south and a series of fairly good sized thunderstorm cells started drifting north over the Los Angeles basin. We don’t get that sort of weather often, maybe once every couple of years at best, and often even when we do, the storms tend to drift inland into Riverside and San Bernardino Counties and miss us over here at the far west end of Los Angeles County.
Not today.
It’s no secret that I absolutely ❤ LOVE ❤ rain and thunderstorms. So when they started coming in, I grabbed a whole slew of cameras and gear over the evening to take pictures of the clouds (some fantastic pictures of mammatus clouds right over head), to listen to the rain, wind, and thunder, and to try to catch lightning strikes on video.
Eventually about 20:30 there was a good sized cell sitting just to our south.
(Image from NOAA High-Def Weather Radar app)
Sitting out in the back yard, listening to the rain pounding on the back porch roof and the howling of the wind, seeing the flashes of lightning, this (long-ish, 4:31 total) clip ends (at 3:36) with a HUGE boomer. That was a good one!
A little later things had fired up again and a couple of big thunder boomers had rattled the house, so I took my iPhone out into the front. Another cell was coming in south of Calabasas, so I started recording. It was raining pretty hard, so I stayed on the porch, but then I couldn’t see the sky real well, so I decided to walk down to the garage door, figuring I could lean against the garage and stay pretty much out of the rain, but still have a good view of the sky. Just as I got there, at about 0:55 in this clip, and turned around… (I urge caution if you’re listening with headphones or earbuds or have the volume turned up!!)
BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!
How I managed to not clear out the deepest darkest corner of my obscenity directory, I’ll never know. How I managed to not come in with brown jeans when I went out with blue jeans, I’ll never know.
Curious, once I got my heart rate back down into double digits, while editing the video I checked a few figures on the timeline.
The frame where the bolt struck, at 1:02977 seconds.
The frame where the sound hit, at 1.04070 seconds.
That’s an elapsed time of 1.093 seconds. With the speed of sound being 1100 feet per second, that means that the bolt hit somewhere down the street 1,202 feet away.
That’s a really high “pucker factor.”
Furthermore, look at the soundtrack magnified way, way up:
About 1/20 second before the sound hit, there’s this.
An extremely vivid part of my memory of the event is that the incredibly bright flash hit, but in that 1.093 seconds between the strike and the sound I very distinctly heard a frying or sizzling noise, almost like someone on the roof right above me had a big sheet of cellophane and was crumbling it up into a ball. I think this is that sound. Why I would hear it separate from the “BOOOOOOM!” and every so slightly earlier, I don’t know.
Looking at the map shows more waves of showers building to the south and headed our way…
…with more behind that.
It could be a VERY long night!
Filed under Photography, Video, Weather
How much of what we see, or a better term might be “perceive,” is “real?”
In a historic context, we can travel to ancient lands and see ruins or magnificent architecture that’s 2,000+ years old, or we can go to Disneyland or Las Vegas and see something almost exactly like it, in many ways even more magnificent. “Real” or “fake?”
If you ever have any eye issues you’ll start to see just how personal that distinction can be. I’m dealing with a little issue with floaters and flashes of light, which I’m told is normal and harmless and it will go away on its own soon. How? How will it “go away?” Are they going to give me some pills, or do some sort of surgery, or should I put warm compresses or ice packs (or both) on my eyeballs? No, my brain will just learn to ignore them, they say.
So far all my brain is doing is screaming, “SPIDER!” or “FLY!” or “LIZARD!” or “LOOK OUT!!” about every fifteen seconds, which is not nearly as much fun as it sounds.
Many years ago as my vision started to deteriorate I had laser surgery on my eyes and ended up with “EAGLE VISION!” It was great! I went from being unable to read or see anything at a distance without glasses (“Bats use me as a role model,” to quote a line from a long forgotten 1986 Jeffrey Tambor sitcom that lasted only eleven episodes) to being able to read “Copyright (C) 2004 Acme Eye Chart Company” at the very, very bottom of the sign.
This is sort of the reverse of that and it sucks. Painless (fortunately, ’cause I’m a wussy boy) but annoying as all get out. And they aren’t kidding – “just be patient” is the #1 piece of advice, unless it gets so bad that they put you on the list for an eyeball transplant.
“Just be patient” – HAVE THEY EVER MET ME??!!
So, my eyes might be lying to me, just a bit. It’s like my very own, personal optical illusion, 24/7/365.
But then I start asking questions and trying to troubleshoot it. For example, the flashes of light… I get that I don’t really see them in normal lighting or daylight, but if I go wandering around the yard after dark to try to look at the stars (and boy, take a look around this site for the past several years and look at all of the astrophotography and astronomy and space related stuff there is and you’ll know just how PISSED I am that I’m having real problems with THAT manifestation of this issue!) I’m seeing flashes every time I blink or move my eyes. It’s dark there, the relatively dim flashes stand out. Uh-huh. So why when I close my eyes do I never see flashes. Or when I just cover my eyes with my hands? Only when my eyes are wide open and I’m in a dark location?
Or not when I lay down at night? Maybe it’s a horizontal-vs-vertical thing? Nope, go outside at night, lie down on the sidewalk (it’s okay, the neighbors already know I’m a little odd) and I still see them.
So I ask the nice eye doctor folks about it. And they just smile, and nod, and put notes in my file, AND NEVER ANSWER. Because they don’t know.
This further supports the theory (and just to be clear, I’m joking here, I don’t want this to be the accidental start of another bullshit theory for the anti-vaxxing, science-denying, conspiracy-theory whack jobs to run with) that medicine and science aren’t real at all and this eye thing is a personal punishment from God just to piss me off.
It’s working.
Filed under Health, Photography
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We Love The Stars Too Fondly 