April 3, 2020 · 23:43

No Context For You – April 03rd

Not art, just something really odd that came out of the camera just like this. I’m not sure if the physical mechanism of the shutter in the camera failed (this is from my Canon Rebel XTi, not my phone) or if it’s something glitchy in the logic that combined bits and pieces of two frames.

Having reached yet another Friday evening, it is an appropriate representation of our world right now. Both right and not right, fractured, bits and pieces recognizable but not fitting together the way they are supposed to.

So I guess there was some context.

My bad.

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April 2, 2020 · 21:25

Venus & Pleiades

I mentioned a few days ago while sharing pictures of the Moon and Venus that the Pleiades (an open cluster of bright, blue stars, easily visible to the naked eye) were nearby and Venus would be getting closer to them.

It’s happening over the next few nights and tonight’s clear (-ish) here so I decided to see what I could see with the big lens.

(As always, I urge you ignore the sensational headlines online no matter how tempting it might be to distract yourselves from news of the virus and the panic and our governmental ineptitude and the growing body count. This conjunction of Venus & the Pleiades is not a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – it happens about every eight years. And it’s not something you have to see TONIGHT or you’ll miss it – it will take place over the next week or two, so relax if it’s cloudy tonight and you missed it.)

With the telephoto lens and a tripod mounted camera, you tend to start getting “trailing” in longer exposures. This is caused by the Earth moving (and no, not in the “good” way!) and the camera not. So even at the widest field of view, after about a four second exposure you’ll get trails. But it’s easy to see the extremely bright Venus and the core of “The Seven Sisters.”

(As always, click on the images to see them full screen sized, they’ll look much better and you’ll see more detail.)

If you let the exposure go to out to twenty-five seconds you’ll see a LOT of stars – but they’re moving and trailing. And that’s some random satellite crossing the upper right quarter of the field.

Zoom in about half way and the trailing gets worse, so anything over two seconds starts to show trails

And if you go out to twenty-five seconds, Venus starts to look like a really bright comet as it smears across the image.

Finally, zoom all the way out to 300 mm and crop the image to get a nice shot of the core.

Let’s see what I can play with tomorrow night or Saturday if it’s clear! (And Los Angeles folks, there are some fantastic ISS passes coming up on the weekend!)

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April 1, 2020 · 23:01

The Best I’ve Got Today

I wrote this earlier tonight on Twitter and I don’t think I’m going to write anything better tonight, so here it is…

I don’t know if I’ve ever written here about my teenage brain’s issues with the concept of Hell (and I’m too tired right now to go check). In short, in my high school naivete I thought that you couldn’t be tortured forever because at a certain point you would just become insensitive to it. Pain or torture or whatever would become the norm. At worst you would just give up and/or go insane. Something like that – it made sense at the time.

I’ve since learned that you can put up with a lot more suffering than I would have imagined back then, whether that suffering be physical, mental, or both. You deal with it, you move on, you keep going.

I understand there are folks whose psyche just goes bye bye and they literally just lose it all. I’m NOT in any way, shape, or form saying those folks are any worse or weaker or in any way less than people who keep going. Don’t go there.

But I keep going. Somehow. So far.

That’s really being tested.

Another thing I’ve always believed is that we’re all much stronger than we think we are. We all hate pain and try to avoid it (which is smart, by the way) and it leads to us not truly being tested to our limits. Which, I repeat, is smart because if it’s a “limit” and you go past it you can “break“! Which is generally not good.

Yet I’ve also found (one of those marathon running lessons) that the limits often aren’t where we think they are. Even the ones that are “soft” or in the “gray areas” can be pushed and exceeded. This is true both physically and mentally.

Pushing your physical boundaries by training for a marathon or a mountain climb or some other event can be good. Pushing your physical boundaries by having the zombie apocalypse chasing you is probably bad.

Pushing your mental and endurance boundaries by getting an MBA in your fifties while also working full time can be good. Pushing your mental and endurance boundaries by living through a pandemic crisis is probably bad.

But you can make it through. Most of us will, although few of us will be the same on the other side.

So I’ll finish with another Tweet, not one of mine, but from someone who I greatly admire. She’s better, smarter, and stronger than I’ll ever dream of and she’s used that to do things that I can only fantasize about. She’s learned a few things through those experiences. We should listen to her.

Wash your hands. Don’t touch your face. And STAY HOME!!!

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March 31, 2020 · 23:30

Watch Zoey

This may seem an odd post, but I’m doing it because I’m selfish.

Also because if you’re reading this site you’re wonderful and you deserve to know about the greatest show on TV that you might not have heard of.

NBC has a show called “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist” this year – I want you to watch it so that the ratings are good enough for it to get picked up for a second season.

It’s hard to describe. I guess it’s a fantasy in that something has happened to Zoey so that she randomly sees people around her singing to her, often accompanied by elaborate dance routines – but these are songs and dances that no one else sees. And the nature of the songs tell her people’s innermost feelings, their anxieties, their loves, their terrors. Given that insight, she has to help them.

Chaos often ensues.

That’s a lousy explanation since the show is so much more. Jane Levy plays Zoey and she is just amazing and spectacular. The entire cast is almost perfect. Skylar Astin, Alex Newell, Mary Steenburgen, Peter Gallagher, Lauren Graham. All wonderful.

The writing and story is creative and bizarre, yet after having bought into the basic premise, I’ve never once thought that they’ve wandered off the rails. It fits one of my personal tests for what truly makes a show great – in any one episode I can at one minute be delighted and laughing and in the next minute be reaching for the tissues. (Yeah, more likely than not you’ll need tissues.)

It’s WONDERFUL!

But shows I like, especially because they’re quirky or intelligent or complex, never make it out of the first season. (Did you ever hear of a 2012 TV show called “Awake” with Jason Isaacs? Spectacular! They didn’t even show all thirteen episodes they shot, pulled it off the air early…) “Zoey” is doing so-so in a really lousy Sunday night slot, but getting some traction online and in streaming via Hulu and on demand services.

So while you’re sitting in your COVID-19 home physical distancing isolation and you’re looking for something to stream next, go over to NBC or Hulu or online or wherever and find “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist.” Watch an episode or two – you’ll want to watch the rest. Then you can join us on Sunday night for the last handful of shows (there are eight episodes already shown) through April. Tell your friends, get them to watch.

Then the show will be picked up for another year and it will be a GOOD thing to happen in April. (We’re gonna need it!)

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March 30, 2020 · 22:38

Meditation Might Be Worthless

Hear me out on this one…

I’ve never been much of a meditation sort of guy. Too much of a class clown. Not a big believer in the “woo-woo” side of life.

But I’ve mellowed with age. I’m long, LONG past the stage where I thought I knew everything and I’m now deep, DEEP into the stage where I’m not convinced I know anything. You know – mid-life crisis and all of that. (Anyone makes a crack about how I’m too old to be having a “mid”-life crisis gets shown the far side of the airlock door.)

(And yes, that is the class clown trying to come out and go all Hawkeye Pierce on the situation to distract from the actual crisis. I’m recognizing it – I just can’t stop it, so that’s progress. See?! There we go again…)

Anyway, where I work now we have Wednesday afternoon meditation sessions. Just ten minutes, but I’ll take the break. It’s actually quite relaxing and pleasant. I look forward to it. At last, I did until we went and had to shut down the office due to the COVID-19 crisis.

But here’s the thing.

On a day like today, because of this, and THAT, and then the day I had, and then… And god forbid you should actually read the news. And then we got word (which shouldn’t have been a surprise, but I still had hope) that the Ahmanson’s production of “1776” this summer is being cancelled. You have no idea how much I was looking forward to that.

And that in turn brought up the overwhelming likelihood that “Hamilton” will also be cancelled. It will be. It should be. The world is shit and millions are going to be dying.

And then one of the little escapes that I was truly enjoying (we’ve been binging “The Good Place”) hit the end of the 3rd season (which was an absolute gut punch) and I was desperate to move on to the 4th season to see how it’s resolved. But it’s not out there yet and probably won’t be until fucking AUGUST!!!

And I shouldn’t be starting every sentence with “and,” but I am.

I fully realize (especially writing this out) how privileged and highly ridiculous my particular whine is, given the magnitude of the crisis facing us all. I’ll own that. For better or for worse, this is where the camel’s back got broken for me today.

And as I’m teetering on the abyss, my brain spinning in circles like a rabid squirrel hopped up on meth, grasping at straws, it occurred to me. “Meditation.” Isn’t that what this is for? Isn’t that a much better solution than tearing off your clothes, covering yourself in raspberry preserves, and running screaming through the streets of Los Angeles at night?

Except…

Meditation is slow. It’s methodical. It’s pastoral.

It’s glacial.

I needed something RIGHT FUCKING NOW!!!

So it occurs to me that when the chips are down, when you’re facing your particular existential crisis, unless it’s a slow, methodical, pastoral, glacial sort of crisis, meditation might be worthless. Sort of like having a really good, really accurate single-shot long rifle when you’re suddenly attacked by a thousand rabid squirrels armed with machine guns.

And I now realize that my outlet, my solution, my therapy, my way to release Hawkeye Pierce, is to write.

I think there are about five, maybe six people who actually read this site. I don’t know if this outlet for my Day ‘O Shit would be better or worse if that was five or six hundred thousand.

Maybe that will be tomorrow’s existential crisis.

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Filed under CoronaVirus, Deep Thoughts, Entertainment, Writing

March 29, 2020 · 23:15

Altostratus Undulatus Or Gravity Wave Clouds?

Yesterday afternoon, from horizon to horizon, the high level clouds were lined up like rows.

I’ve seen this before, but there are two types of clouds that can form this way – altostratus undulatus clouds or gravity wave clouds.

“Gravity wave” clouds sound just absolutely bitchin’ and when I first heard the term I was hoping it was a manifest, macro-scale effect in our atmosphere from the sort of gravity waves that are just now being detected from colliding black holes. I wanted an unbelievably huge release of energy a hundred thousand years ago and a hundred thousand light years away to making patterns in our sky.

It doesn’t.

Instead, “gravity wave” clouds are formed the same way that the wind whipping over the ocean forms ocean waves. It’s a matter of buoyancy differences in a fluid in motion causing oscillations in the fluid flow. Still cool, but not black-hole-collision-drawing-patterns-in-our-sky cool.

This could also be (and most likely are) altostratus undulatus clouds, which are wispy clouds of ice, high in the atmosphere, which forms bands like this as they flow over mountains or coastlines which disrupt the smooth flow of a weather front. We had a a front moving in, there’s a coastline over to our west, and these are wispy clouds of ice, high in the atmosphere.

My money’s on altostratus undulatus.

Either way – cool looking clouds.

And if you click on them and blow them up to full-sized, can you see the tiny sliver of the crescent moon in the upper left corner of one?

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March 28, 2020 · 20:29

You Know Who Else Doesn’t Care About COVID-19?

I’ve pointed out that the birds, bees, bunnies, and blossoms don’t really give a rat’s ass about COVID-19, no matter how much we’re stressing. (And believe me, we’re stressing, but still feeling okay here, hope that you’re doing the same!)

You know who else doesn’t care? If you need something beautiful and some perspective, go out tonight (if you’re on the West Coast and it’s early enough) or tomorrow or the next day and look for the crescent Moon and Venus and the Pleiades and Orion and Taurus and all of the other spectacular objects in the evening sky.

These were taken about twenty-five minutes ago:

Four day old Moon and Venus. This is a 1/400 sec exposure and you can see a bit of detail on the Moon. Longer exposures show Venus better, but the Moon’s details wash out pretty quickly from overexposure.

Another 1/400 second exposure, zoomed in all the way with the 300mm lens. Again, some detail on the moon.

But if we take a much longer exposure, 4 seconds, thinking to bring out the palm trees across the street, we get something special:

Click on the image to see it full-sized. Look in the upper right. Those are the Pleiades, M45, an open cluster of young, hot, blue stars.

If you’ve got a clear sky in the next couple of weeks, go out and take a look. The Moon will be moving, but the Pleiades (and Orion off to the left, and Taurus up higher above the Pleiades) will all be clearly visible to the naked eye. If you’ve got a pair of binoculars, they’ll all be spectacular!

Keep your physical distancing. It’s helping to slow down the inevitable spread of the virus.

Wash your hands. It’s a HUGE help to improve your odds of not getting the virus.

And go look up at the wonders above us. It will remind you of why you want to come out the other side from this crisis.

This too shall pass.

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Filed under Astronomy, CoronaVirus, Photography, Space

March 27, 2020 · 23:00

No Context For You – March 27th

If you ever wanted to be an astronaut, they’re taking applications again. The application period is through the end of the month so you need to get on it. Maybe something to do as you’re staying at home and away from all other human beings this weekend.

I don’t qualify – you need a degree in a technical, scientific, or engineering field (I have a BS in Physics) and a Master’s degree (I have an MBA), but what they really mean is you need a Master’s degree in a technical or scientific or engineering field.

Curses.

Foiled again.

One of the big disadvantages to living in the city as opposed to living out in the middle of nowhere is that city neighbors will hear you when you scream at the cosmos while staring into the void, and they generally get upset after the first hour or so of screaming. They get upset out in the country as well, but if you’re two miles from your nearest neighbor, they’re probably not going to hear you (at least, not over their own screaming) so they won’t give a damn.

Perhaps as part of the social changes we’re all undergoing, screaming in public will become more acceptable.

Or I guess I could just stop reading Twitter and Facebook and watching the news.

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Filed under CoronaVirus, Social Media

March 26, 2020 · 21:55

Prey

Yesterday’s pictures were a gorgeous red tailed hawk. As I was taking pictures, she dove and just as she was going behind the house I saw the legs extending and the claws coming out.

Some relative of this guy, no doubt.

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Filed under Critters, Photography

March 25, 2020 · 22:58

Hawk

One of the advantages to working at home is that, when you take a break to stretch your legs and get some air in the back yard, if you see a red-tail hawk pinwheeling around the thermal rising above your hill, you can rush back into the house and grab your camera.

She was magnificent. (I don’t know for sure if it was a male or female, and what I find online is “females are generally bigger,” which is spectacularly useless when you only have one with nothing to compare it to.)

And then, in a heartbeat…

…she spotted something, wheeled around…

…tucked her wings…

…and dove. Incredibly fast.

I can’t help but think that tucked like that, her silhouette reminds me of nothing so much as an SR-70, which was designed to go Mach 3+.

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