Category Archives: Photography

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

March 6, 2024 · 23:24

Fine Feathered Friends – March 06th

What a pleasant surprise today! I was taking a quick break and grabbing a soda in the kitchen when I saw something large-ish going through the pine trees on the slope beyond the back yard. It wasn’t any mourning dove, much larger, some sort of raptor. I grabbed a camera and headed out into the rain.

I figured that it had just been passing through and I might see it circling over the canyon someplace. It was rainy and starting to close in so I didn’t see anything in the sky. Suddenly my pattern recognition kicked in and I realized that this guy was sitting right there, staring at me.

After I got a couple of pictures from the back yard, I decided to see if the hawk would sit still while I went down the stairs to the “lower level.” To my surprise and delight, it did! Although it was giving me some serious stink eye.

I was still maybe 20-25 feet away and about even with it, although if I had tried to go over to the tree it was in I would have been 30 feet below it. That hill is steep. I guess it decided that I was mostly harmless. (I am! Mostly…)

By this point the rain was coming down steadily and while the hawk was looking all over, it didn’t seem too happy about the meteorological conditions.

What kind of hawk is it? It’s a mystery, sort of. I ran four different pictures through the Merlin Bird ID app (from Cornell Lap, get it!) and all four said it might be a Cooper’s Hawk or a Red-shouldered Hawk. In either case it’s probably a juvenile, but that’s more likely if it’s a Red-shouldered Hawk. That’s my bet, simply because the Cooper’s Hawks that I’ve seen up close have solid brown or tan chests, where these patterns are more like the Red-shouldered Hawks. I could have positively ID it if it had sounded off, their calls are much different. But not a peep was heard.

I expected it to fly off any second, but it just sat there. After about fifteen minutes I was more wet than I really liked, and I had the option of going inside. I came back out an hour later and it was still sitting there, which I found really surprising. But it was gone a half-hour after that.

I shot a couple minutes of video while waiting and hoping it would either sound off, fly away, or both. No joy on all counts, but it’s a gorgeous creature!

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Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography, Video, Weather

March 4, 2024 · 23:48

Yet Another Picturesque SoCal Sunset

This one is actually from a week or so ago – today was clear and “boring” as colors and clouds go.

This one didn’t start with a lot of color, but the clouds and definition in the structures was exceptional.

As always, the silhouetted palm trees were splendid.

We finally got to see a little bit of color.

And more shadows of cloud on cloud. So freakin’ gorgeous. Tell me, how often do you look for something like this in your busy life? If it’s happening, how often do you spend ten minutes just watching? If the answer to either question is “never,” you might need to re-evaluate your life choices.

We’re looking hard a houses up in the high desert someplace. The sunsets and sunrises there can be even more spectacular (see these, for example), but I hope I can find a place with a couple of palm trees to add some character to that horizon while the sky’s doing tricks.

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Filed under Photography, Sunsets, Weather

March 2, 2024 · 22:00

Sunset – March 02nd

I was fortunate this evening to get a quick heads up from a good friend that the sunset going on outside at the moment was “epic.”

She wasn’t wrong! It had been vascillating between damp, showers, rain, and downpours all day, but being back in “damp” mode (it’s raining again now) meant that some sunlight was getting through.

Then, about two minutes later, these spectral vapors just materialized out of thin air.

The air was saturated with moisture, cool, and apparently right on the edge of condensation into clouds.

Some small eddy or disturbance, probably with a breeze coming up the canyon and getting some lift, cooling and spinning just a bit, caused these to puff into visibility.

A stray late sunset, pink and orange ray of sunlight found a hole and poked through like a spotlight, catching them against the dark background of the thicker, unlit clouds off in the distance.

Knowing what causes it doesn’t make it any less spectacular. (But all of those stupid wires!)

So I ran down the hill to the spot where I watch SpaceX launches out of Vandenberg, free from wires. Those couple of minutes cost me in terms of less color and sunlight, but the two wraiths were still lit.

Barely! Between the sunlight fading and the disturbance that had caused them dying out, they were vanishing, the visible moisture evaporating and being absorbed back into the air as equilibrium with the surrounding local atmosphere was reestablished.

And then it was gone. Almost – I caught just the slightest trace of color to the left of that palm tree crown. (And then I had to climb back up that hill to get home!)

EPIC! Indeed.

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Filed under Photography, Sunsets, Weather

March 1, 2024 · 22:57

Very Odd Clouds

I’m no meteorologist, but I look at clouds a lot and pay attention and I like to think I’ve got an above average grasp of the way things work, so when I see something new and different and odd I tend to pay attention. And take pictures.

I didn’t say I always take good pictures. But in this case I wasn’t sure how long the phenomenon would be stable and visible, so ignore the wires and the puffy clouds in the foreground, and look at the nine or ten horizontal, parallel (-ish) lines of clouds beyond, somewhere out over Ventura County.

Except for at airshows where there are multiple planes in formation burning smoke oil, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this.

I actually considered at first that it might be from aircraft flying in formation, but the smoke trails there are never this thick.

After a couple of minutes it looked like a burst of high altitude winds started to sweep across part of the lines on the right side, disbursing and scattering the lines.

It’s still linear on the left (and further to the right, but it was tough to see through the foreground clouds) but in this middle section everything was getting mixed and smeared out across the sky.

Going to research this online is an adventure. First of all, searching for “clouds that look like plantation shutters” will get a psychotic and psychedelic AI essay that made *NO* damn sense at all. Totally wacko, and not in a good way.

Secondly, searching for “clouds in horizontal, parallel lines” is a little bit more productive. These are apparently “altostratus undulatus” clouds. They don’t seem particularly uncommon. Something about them this day made them stand out and grab my attention.

And I had a camera nearby!

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Filed under Photography, Weather

February 29, 2024 · 23:04

Fractal In A Flash

The ash tree that had suddenly lost 90%+ of all of its leaves in the last week suddenly is exploding with new growth.

The brown, hard, barren branch endings now have soft green shoots…

…which have smaller shoots…

…which have smaller shoots and seed pods…

…which have smaller budding wannabe leaves.

It’s like a Mandelbrot set brought to life.

Or vice versa.

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Filed under Flowers, Photography

February 26, 2024 · 23:35

Clouds – February 26th

I didn’t think we were supposed to get more rain before next weekend – the forecast was for something like a 10% chance.

No one bothered to tell the rain that came through however.

Stupid, illiterate, uninformed rain! It was just as wet, however.

Time to reset the timers to keep the sprinklers off for another few days.

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Filed under Photography, Weather

February 25, 2024 · 23:02

Fine Feathered Friends – Red Tailed Hawks

It’s spring. Love is in the air. So were a half-dozen red tailed hawks!

Earlier in the day there had been four red shoulder hawks harassing the ravens and crows, so when I first saw these six later in the afternoon I though it might be them. They were pretty high up there.

But as they started to come down lower and pair off a bit it became clear that they were red tailed hawks.

They settled in, circling and soaring about 500-600 feet up.

Then all of a sudden this one buzzed me at about 50 feet. It was like the “sneak pass” at a Blue Angels or Thunderbird airshow.

I wasn’t complaining!

It gave me a great opportunity to get some much better pictures.

I was also looking for the notch missing from the wing of one red tailed hawk that we’ve seen for a couple of years. I didn’t see it.

I don’t know if that means that the bird that had the notch of feathers missing grew them back, if they just weren’t here today, or if they didn’t make it through the winter. These might be their offspring. I’ll keep looking, it was quite distinctive.

One one that had buzzed me climbed up with the others. I guess they figured that I was mostly harmless.

They were dancing and coming together in what I assume is a mating ritual. Every now and then a couple would seemingly lock claws and fall for a ways before releasing each other.

Mating? Fighting? Both? I don’t know. But they were going fast when they were doing it, so I got a LOT of blurry, unuseable photos!

They are magnificent animals and it’s spectacular to see them!

I hope that I get more chances to see them up close. And when we find “The Forever Home” I hope it’s someplace that has its own population of hawks and other raptors!

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Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography

February 24, 2024 · 20:48

Are You Going To Rain Or Not?

Ambivalent clouds.

Are you going to rain or not? The dark bottom part is raggedy and threatening, but the top isn’t so sure at all.

The top part wants to rise, go up to 10,000 or 20,000 feet, get icy and thin.

These guys over here already developed an altitude and they’re just blocking a touch of sun. (Eventually the lower, thicker clouds blew off toward Las Vegas and rained there.)

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Filed under Photography, Weather