Category Archives: Photography

July 8, 2024 · 22:57

Be Grateful

I stepped out this evening late and caught a beautiful sight, the three-day old crescent moon just disappearing behind the trees and Castle Peak.

Because of all of the smoke in the air from the brush fires everywhere, the moon was a vibrant orange color.

I wish I could get the iPhone images to show that off.

Why should you “be grateful?” Well, aside from all of the usual reasons (i.e., even with all of the normal day-in, day-out BS we deal with, it could be so, so much worse), there’s the fact that if I hadn’t seen this and taken a couple of quick pictures to share, I was going to share a goofy selfie that I took while in the endodontist’s chair today for the second of three root canals in a three week period. (Not fun, not feeling so good tonight. Growing old and being the mature, responsible adult character sucks.) Trust me, a beautiful, orange, crescent Moon is so much better to look at than a drooling idiot wearing a bib!

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography

July 7, 2024 · 22:39

What’s Missing?

Vermont has lots and lots of stone and it’s been used as a building material for a couple hundred years now. In Springfield, my old home town, you can find stone walls like this everywhere.

Look at all of those wonderful nooks and crannies! As you know if you’ve been reading this site for any length of time, around here anything like this would be filled with lizards! In Vermont, where it’s covered in snow and ice and sub-zero temperatures for big chunks of the year, there wasn’t a lizard to be seen.

But life will fill any ecosystem. I finally spotted an occupant – a chipmunk! Cuter than your average lizard I guess, especially since we humans do seem to be partial to mammals when judging “cute,” but I missed my little “Freds” and “Bubbas.”

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Filed under Critters, Photography

July 6, 2024 · 23:32

Two Honkin’ Huge Panoramas From Ascutney

Normally I post reduced sized files on this site, just because I’m paying for storage space, I’ve been posting for a long time, and I don’t want to use up all that I’m already paying for. But today, because I love these two images so much and want to share them with you so badly, I’m going to give you the full-sized files of the two panoramic views I took from the top of the observation tower on Mount Ascutney three weeks ago. Where normally I’ll post files between 1MB and 2MB in size, these are 16M and 17MB files. Click on them, blow them up, go looking at them in all of their glorious detail.

This covers about a 300º field of view. On the far left, the microwave towers are to the southwest of the observation tower. Moving to the right in the image, we’re looking toward the east, over the Connecticut River valley into southern and central New Hampshire. You can see all of the ski trails on Mt. Sunapee, and the small town is Claremont, NH. Moving to the right hand side, the Franconia Range of mountains is visible in the far, far distance beyond the foreground northern shoulder of Ascutney. On the far right side of the image we’re looking back to the west into Vermont.

Again, about a 300º field of view, so there’s a lot of overlap between this picture and the first one, with the view to the west on the far left of this image and the far right of the upper image, the microwave towers to the south in the middle of this image, and the view to the east into New Hampshire on the far right here.

I could have sat up there with a pair of binoculars and a backpack full of cameras all day long.

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Filed under Panorama, Photography, Travel

July 5, 2024 · 23:05

Golden

It’s been a couple of years since I last had grilled cheese sandwiches. Not for lack of desire, but all of those carbs don’t fit into my current diet, and I’m good at adulting, even when it sucks. Tonight there was a request.

It was good to see that I hadn’t lost my touch. The sandwiches were “Golden!!”

As I’ve stated at least once before, this is how family tradition dictates that grilled cheese sandwiches be served in the household. When I was a kid, my mother would usually burn one side of the sandwich, and I mean she would char it as if with nuclear hellfire, and then she would serve it with that side down on the plate and hidden. By the time I was a teen I had caught on to that attempted ruse and I would ask that the sandwich be presented on the spatula (as above) for inspection, then flipped over onto the plate for review of the other side (as below). The best sandwiches, thousands of which I made for my kids in their youth, were “golden!!” and full of gooey, cheesey wonderfulness.

I would occasionally char one, but at least I was honest about it. And to this day, even though my kids are grown, we’ll occasionally proudly pass around on the family group chat pictures of a particularly nicely done grilled cheese sandwich.

These traditions are important.

 

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Filed under Family, Photography

July 4, 2024 · 22:43

Are We Still Doing This?

Democracy, that is. We’re hip deep in fireworks, which is a good thing. Whereas democracy seems to be on shakier ground.

These are actually from an international competition in Montreal in August 2009, but “close enough for government work!”

 

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Filed under Fireworks, Photography, Politics

July 3, 2024 · 23:02

Firefly

I’ve gone off at length about the joy of seeing hundreds if not thousands of fireflies in the woods out behind the Hartness House every night when we were in Vermont. We don’t have fireflies in SoCal – except for one big one tonight.

Named more for the SF series and movie, this was the 5th launch of the Alpha launch vehicle from Firefly Aerospace. You can see the orangish trail coming up behind the palm trees on the right, lit by the Sun somewhere far over the western horizon, while above the telephone pole on the left you can see the second stage heading south to orbit (it got there successfully!) with the just separated first stage falling back behind it, venting excess fuel.

Up close, the “V”-shaped exhaust from the second stage is clearly seen as it heads uphill, while the first stage is at the center of that “butterfly” of gas behind it. One or both of the two small dots might be fairing halves that were jettosined to save weight after the rocket got out of the atmosphere.

Not perfectly seen here, but we got a decent “jellyfish” effect from the exhaust plume expanding and glowing in the sunlight in the dark sky after sunset.

This launch looked different from the SpaceX launches we see once a week or so now. The SpaceX Falcon 9 is a much bigger rocket with more engines and exhaust, but this was a nice launch to see, very pretty! Congratulations

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Filed under Photography, Space

July 2, 2024 · 23:11

Bunny Bunny

There are several of these little critters around. Normally they’re not out until it’s dark, but I surprised this guy just after sunset.

He froze at first and I tried to be conversational, but as soon as I moved he was off like a bat outta Hell, under the car, through the roses, and into the neighbor’s yard.

The joke’s on Bunny Bunny – they have astroturf. Good luck getting dinner over there!

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Filed under Critters, Photography

July 1, 2024 · 22:53

One Step Back

Thank goodness for the multiple steps forward in our lifetimes, because it feels like we took a HUGE step backwards today. It’s scary enough to see the damage, racism, incompetence, and outright treason being carried out for the last decade or so by one of the two major US political parties, which led to the deaths of over a million Americans from COVID in the last five years among other small details, but even with some of the evil, stupid, vile decisions that have come out of the increasingly illegitimate Supreme Court in the last few years, today’s tops them all. By a number of definitions, we are no longer a democracy. If the President is above the law, then we don’t have laws, and if we don’t have laws, we’re a failed society.

That’s on top of some of the personal angst going on, including the annoying pain and dental problems that don’t seem to be getting better.

It seems that my feeling of impending doom about July 2024 might have been justified. It’s not like we can’t expect the worst from the evil chucklefucks in the GOP and far-right white supremacists who want to take us back to the Fifties. (And that might be the 1850’s.)

So let’s stop doomscrolling and just breathe and calm ourselves. The Calm app helps, and here’s a picture of a peaceful, warm, beach and seagull, to help.

Tomorrow’s another day, I still (deep down) have faith that folks are good, and together we’ll get through this.

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Filed under Photography, Politics, Travel

June 30, 2024 · 23:19

Goodbye June 2024

While there was definitely “room for improvement,” (I’m looking at YOU, dental health!) I’m trying to accentuate the positive, so I went back through the month’s pictures. There were a few high points and things that didn’t suck.

(Photo: Ronnie Willett)

Mid-parade – tell me again why they start down at the bottom and walk uphill (it’s not THAT steep or that much of an elevation rise, maybe 50-75 feet or so over two miles) when they used to do it the more sensible other way around?

Never ignore the moon.

Always go out to a play, even if it turns out to be a bit on the “Meh!” side. (I was NOT the target audience.)

The stairwell where ten years ago I almost woke up the entire hotel in the middle of the night, wanting to scream and yell when the Kings won the Stanley Cup in double OT.

(Photo: VT park ranger Pat)

At the top of the observation tower on Ascutney, sweaty and probably smelling bad, but unbowed.

NEVER turn down a window seat and NEVER sit there for the whole flight with the window shade down.

I wish that I didn’t have such a feeling of impending doom about July.

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Filed under Photography, Travel

June 29, 2024 · 22:55

In Search Of A Coat Hangar

Technically, it’s an asterism, a collection of stars that are smaller than a constellation and look like something to our pattern-seeking monkey brains, in this case, a coat hanger. Officially it’s known as Brocchi’s Cluster and at this time of year it’s high overhead about 9:30 to 10:00. (Here‘s an excellent close-up of it.)

This is one of my full-resolution images from tonight, taken with the “light bucket” wide angle lens (16mm) that I love so much, using an 8 second exposure at F 2.80, looking from about the zenith down to the horizon in the west. Click on it for the full-sized image – can you spot the coat hangar (“upside down”) in the upper center?

I’m always surprised when I shoot these pictures. Given the coastal haze and light pollution from the city all around me (a 30-second exposure is completely white and washed out) that’s so bad that I could only see maybe a dozen of these stars with the naked eye, it’s amazing that the camera can pull out all of the detail it does. It’s all up there, it’s just so sad at times that we’ve shut ourselves away from it all.

Those brief few minutes under a dark, clear sky when we first got to Vermont two weeks ago will stick with me a long time. I need a lot more of that and a lot less of this.

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Space