It’s been a long, long day to end a long, long week, leaving me wondering about one of the great questions of the universe:
Do margaritas go well with cookies & cream ice cream?
Inquiring minds want to know. For those of you without margaritas or cookies & cream ice cream, here are some calming, soothing photos of clouds.
Namaste.
Filed under Photography, Travel, Weather
We don’t always get clouds in LA and that whole “drought”-thing isn’t helping. But occasionally, if we get a “storm” moving in (we’re expecting torrential drizzle tomorrow morning) we can get a nice sunset. Tonight was one of those nights.
I was inside and had no idea it was going on, until I happened to look outside and see it looking like we were inside of a pink neon tube. Sure enough!
Now if we could just get something more than an inundating mist tomorrow – we could really use the water!
Filed under Photography, Weather
This evening our planet with its rotational axis offset from the plane of its orbit around the primary star passed through the point where the number of hours of sunlight is the same as the number of hours of darkness. In the northern hemisphere, the days have been getting shorter and the nights getting longer since the summer solstice. Now they’re even. From here, we’ll keep having shorter days and longer nights until we get to the winter solstice, at which point the cycle will reverse. On and on, ad infinitum.
Around these parts, if you’re really lucky (or rich), one of the better spots to watch the sunrise is Malibu. While one normally thinks of the sun setting over the ocean in the west on this coast, the alignment of the coast is such that in the fall and winter months, when the sun is rising in the southeast instead of due east, you can see the sun coming up from over the LA Basin or even the ocean if you’re far enough up toward Point Conception.
These photos were not taken today, I am rarely a morning person who’s up early enough to see the sunrise, I am not rich, and I do not live in Malibu — but I got my MBA from Pepperdine University which is in Malibu, and for whatever reason one morning when we were on campus I saw this. The coastal low clouds and fog lies just a mile or so offshore, the sun rises through them, and it all looks wonderful.
One final note — while today was the equinox and no doubt a holiday for all of the pagans and druids out there, much more importantly, today was National Ice Cream Cone day, celebrating the 211th birthday of the ice cream cone. Now that’s something to celebrate!
We celebrated with Dryer’s Cookies & Cream and Keebler chocolate coated cones — your personal rituals were no doubt different but no less sacred. If you missed today’s celebration, you might have to celebrate twice tomorrow to atone for your lapse in faith. If you celebrated today, you get to celebrate twice tomorrow as a reward for your faith.
As religions go, it’s got a lot of good things going for it.
Filed under Astronomy, Los Angeles, Photography, Weather
Crepuscular is a $5 word that describes rays of sunshine that appear when the sun shines through gaps in the clouds and the rays stand out against a background of darker clouds. They’re also known as “sun rays” or “Jacob’s Ladder.” I prefer the big word, although I probably can’t pronounce it without exposing myself as a poser.
Regardless, with moisture being sucked up into California, Arizona, and New Mexico from the remnants of Hurricane Odile, last night was a good night for seeing them, even if you can’t pronounce it.
Despite that big, threatening cloud directly overhead, no, we never got a drop of rain, no matter how desperately we need it. Just a pretty sunset, clouds, shadows, and crepuscular rays.
Filed under Photography, Weather
I had the pleasure this evening of seeing John Scalzi talk at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. Mr. Scalzi is on his four-week long national tour for his new novel, “Lock In.”
It was a great turnout, standing room only, and (as always) the readings, questions, and snappy banter was very well received.
Mr. Scalzi gives good book tour. I’ve seen him before on tour (and at conventions) and I’ve always enjoyed his in-person presentations just as much as I enjoy his writing. And it’s not just his novels that I admire (and I’m a pretty huge fan of those) but also his “Whatever” website. Would that someday I can write a fraction as well as he does.
This is how physicists talk also, i.e., with their hands. (My apologies for the blurry pictures, but in a setting like this I never want to be “that guy”, the one who’s rudely getting in everyone’s way and then firing off a flash that’s annoying to everyone in the room. Sometimes ambient light means that you just have to live with some blur. As with astrophotos, shoot a lot of frames, one or two should come out.)
The short version is simple — if you have a chance to catch Mr. Scalzi on this tour, at a convention, or on some other future tour, I highly recommend that you make time to go see him speak. It’s well worth it. (I’m looking at you, people of San Diego, Iowa City, Gurnee, Lexington, Troy, Brookline, Concord, Saratoga Springs, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Chicago.)
On the way home from Pasadena, there were some great clouds to be seen as thunderheads built up over the mountains and high deserts. Hurricane Norbert is a Category Three storm off of Baja California, and it’s pumping moisture into the area, which is highly unusual for this time of year.
The great part about moisture and clouds are the great sunsets they create. We don’t get that many of them here in Southern California.
Way too often it’s “clear and a million,” which is great for the Chamber of Commerce postcards, but not good for colorful sunsets. That’s why the great sunset pictures come from tropical islands and beaches at jungle locales.
So let’s go find a tropical island with a beach next to a jungle! For the sunsets, and science, and art, of course.
We are often afraid of the storms in life, or we find them an annoyance at best, but our universe exists as a balance between polar opposites in every dimension. Without suffering, there can be no joy. Without darkness, there can be no light. Without rain, there can be no rainbows.
Endure the suffering, embrace the darkness (for there live the stars), and learn to dance in the rain.
Filed under Photography, Weather
‘Cause I’m going to watch the Home Run Derby, that’s why.
Remember, “I’ve only got two speeds and if you don’t like this one, you’re going to hate the other!”
Filed under Astronomy, Distracted Driving, Entertainment, Juicy Chunks, Los Angeles, Space, Weather
After gushing qualifiers and spewing cautionary modifiers all over everyone’s parade yesterday, it looks like last night’s “Best Meteor Shower Of 2014!” was almost a complete bust, not just for me but for most people.
I was mildly surprised to see that the pictures didn’t 100% suck. You can in the 11:26 PM Tweet that I was expecting a total failure on the photos, but a few actually are usable. (Remember what I said about taking a LOT of pictures and bracketing your exposure times from way way low to way way high?)
This grey-white hazy look is pretty close to what I was seeing with the naked eye, although the picture shows about four times as many stars as I could see without using the binoculars. The Big Dipper is right in the center to center top of the photo, “facing” right. This was an unguided 45 second exposure with the lens set at 18 mm. With that combination there’s very little trailing to be seen.
For contrast, here’s a picture taken March 12, 2013 from a very dark sky location in Arizona. This is an unguided 30-second exposure, also with the lens set at 18mm. Orion can be seen at the upper center, the Orion Nebula in the “sword” clearly visible. (Remember, you can click on the picture to get a full-sized version.) Not only can you see a couple of orders of magnitude more stars in an exposure that’s only 2/3 as long,you also see an almost completely flat black background.
Final count on the night was:
On the good side, it was quiet and peaceful (except for the bunnies or racoons or coyotes or feral cats or skunks or opossums in the bushes near where I was sitting) and the mockingbirds sounded wonderful!
Allow me to be the 3,279th person to use some variant on that “heads up” headline for tonight’s meteor shower.
This one’s been getting a lot of press, which is often a bad sign given the mainstream media’s track record of being clueless, hyperbolic, and totally inaccurate when it comes to science in general and astronomy in particular. If you’re in North America, you’ll probably see something in the paper today, on the local news tonight, or online about “This Year’s Best Meteor Shower!!”
Maybe.
First, the buzzkill, with lots of qualifiers emphasized.
There is a meteor shower predicted to peak tonight, and the timing’s good for most North American observers. If you want to stay up a bit (or get up early) and have a clear sky, you might get a show.
The thing is, meteor showers are almost as bad as comets when it comes to predicting how they’ll manifest. On top of that you’ve got the media’s obsession with blowing everything out of proportion. On top of that you’ve got the general misunderstanding by the public of what they should expect to see.
So the amateur astronomical community puts out the word that this may be the best shower of the year. It may be, but that’s mainly because most of the other big, bright, and predictable meteor showers will be occurring at or near the full moon, so you’ll see only the very brightest of the meteors. Everything else will be washed out by the bright moonlight. The astronomical observing community knows that it’s a crap shoot to begin with and “best” is relative. It’s possible that someone in a clear, dark sky could see close to 100 meteors an hour. But it will probably be less than that, and if you’re in a city where the dim meteors are washed out by streetlights, you might see only ten or fifteen an hour. Maybe.
Then the local news gets the story, doesn’t read the astronomical news bulletins completely, doesn’t understand the qualifiers, and doesn’t pay any attention to the actual facts or details. The headlines for folks in New York or Miami or Los Angeles ends up being something along the lines of “Go Outside After Dark, Look North, And See 100 Meteors An Hour, It Will Be Spectacular!”
Then the general public, many of whom have never seen a meteor but most of whom have seen lots of movies (remember the endings of “Independence Day”, “Deep Impact,” and “Gravity?”) go out with bad information and worse expectations. And one more time, the opinion of Joe and Jane Public is that scientists don’t really have a clue and they’ve cried wolf one more time.
Now for what I hope is an upbeat and accurate description of what we know for tonight.
This meteor shower is a fairly unknown one and comes from a periodic comet first discovered in 2004. Earth’s orbit only is in the right position to intersect the estimated position of the orbiting dust cloud that trails along behind the comet every few years. The dust clouds we’ll be passing through tonight were left behind in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, but we don’t know how big they are or exactly where they are or how dense they are.
If the estimates are correct, there could be a shower of from 100 to 400 meteors an hour, if you’re someplace with a clear, dark sky. If you’re in a city or if it’s hazy, you might see a fraction of that.
The best news is that, like a total lunar eclipse, you don’t need any equipment at all to see the show. Get a lawn chair or a comfy spot on a blanket, face due north, give it a few minutes to let your eyes become dark adapted, relax and see how many meteors you see.
The prime viewing time is estimated to be between 2 AM and 4 AM in the Eastern time zone, 11 PM to 1 AM in the Pacific time zone. You could see meteors before that, you might see them after that, but that’s an estimate for when the peak will be.
If you want to try to take pictures, get a camera that can be set on “Bulb” to stay open as long as you hold the shutter open, and mount it on a tripod. Set the lens for as wide a field as you can, open up the lens to its lowest f-stop, turn the autofocus off, and set the focus to infinity. Point it north and if you start seeing meteors, start taking pictures. If you’re in a dark, clear sky you can probably go for exposures of three or four minutes. If you’re in the city, maybe two minutes tops. With longer exposures in the city, the light pollution will start to “fog” the image. Even in a dark sky, longer digital exposures will start to get corrupted by “noise” unless you’re cooling the camera. (That’s waaaaaay beyond the level of this discussion — some other time.)
Of course, what have we learned over and over with digital photography? Digital is cheap, take LOTS of pictures! So, as you did with the lunar eclipse and comets, take a lot of pictures and bracket your exposures. Start at maybe five or ten seconds, build up to twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, a minute, and so on. It’s going to be a game of chance no matter what you do, so play the game as many times as you can to increase your odds.
If it works and you get some pictures, please feel free to share them here, I would love to post them for you.
Unless it’s cloudy, think about going out and taking a peek for at least a half-hour or so, even if it’s not during those “peak” hours. With luck it’s a nice night, you can find a comfy spot, put on some bug spray, and just chill for a bit watching the skies. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the show will be spectacular (but don’t bet the house on it) and you’ll get to say that you saw it.
Clear skies and good luck!
We’ve finally got a change in the weather coming in, an expected forty degree (F) drop between last Wednesday and next Wednesday. There’s a cut-off low headed down the coast from the northwest to bring us this change. At its forefront at sunset tonight there were layers of high, wispy, icy clouds.
With all of the fires south of here, which are fortunately dying down and getting under control with the cooler weather and calmer winds, there are health warnings all over SoCal about air quality hazards. One of the few good things from these fires is that we can get some spectacular sunsets, caused by the smoke and particulates in the atmosphere.
Between the wispy clouds and the smoke, I was hoping for a spectacular sunset.
Didn’t happen.
The smoke is generally blowing out to sea to the west of San Diego, while from our house we’re watching the sun set way over Ventura and Santa Barbara, 200 miles to the north of where the bulk of the smoke is. So, no joy on the pinks and oranges and reds. I hope the folks in Sandy Ago got a colorful sunset, even if I didn’t.
But while I was waiting, I could see that conditions above 30,000 feet must have been cold and calm, perfect for the formation of contrails from jets at cruising altitude. That part of the sky is a regular jetway for the jumbo jets heading from the Pacific Northwest down to Mexico and South America.
Several contrails looked hours old, having spread out quite a bit, but still keeping their straight line forms, almost parallel but not quite. Others were much thinner, just ten or fifteen minutes old. And like beads on a string, separated by five minutes and fifty miles or so, jets just passing by now were drawing new, razor sharp lines. All on a background of lacy, wispy swirls of clouds in a darkening sky.
It was lovely.
Filed under Flying, Los Angeles, Photography, Weather
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We Love The Stars Too Fondly 