Sunday bird blogging

Still cleaning out the year's leftovers before I head back to Canada on Tuesday and start taking more pictures. Here are some deceptively attractive Canada geese in Jasper National Park.

Saturday reflections

Another treasure from the In Progress folder -- the Bow Building in Calgary (location of this interesting sculpture). The curved front reflects multiple images of the In Progress building across the street.

Astronomy Tuesday

I love gravity.

I could never see Earth all at once in its entirety, but I can sit here and quite literally feel the whole of its presence as an invisible force.

Our home planet isn’t just a place.

It’s a physical sensation.

-- The CryptoNaturalist

(The CryptoNaturalist is a recent discovery, and I highly recommend the Twitter feed and podcasts.)

This image of a crescent Earth and crescent moon was taken by Voyager 1 in 1977. Not as detailed as the images we've become used to, but a striking juxtaposition.

Image credit: NASA/JPL

Sunday bird blogging

I found a folder of unfinished pictures from the July Rockies trip. Here's a loon swimming in Lake Beauvert in Jasper National Park.

Saturday reflections

Here's a little color, in that soft December light that I want to hoard like a miser against the long dark days ahead.

Urban poetry

And when I say urban, I do mean New York -- specifically, the Bronx. I took this picture while waiting at a bus stop a couple of weeks ago. It had to be black and white.

Toronto evening

I meant to post this earlier but somehow this week got away from me -- one last look at Toronto.

I'm going to Quebec City for Christmas, rounding out my Year of Seeing Canada. Next year, if all goes well, I will be crossing an ocean or two again.

Astronomy Tuesday

I didn't post any astronomy pictures for the first several years I did this blog, and I didn't start regular Astronomy Tuesdays until 2013. Still, that's hundreds of pictures and I don't remember most of them, so the first thing I do when selecting images now is to check if I've run anything similar before. (Not that anyone is likely to notice if I did, but still....)

The first two pictures that caught my eye for today turned out to be repeats.  Then I saw this one, and I knew immediately that it was new, that in fact I'd never seen anything quite like it before.

So may I present: Hoag's Object! This ring galaxy is unusual for the large gap between the old red stars at the core and the new blue stars in the outer ring. Astronomers aren't sure how it originated -- maybe a collision between galaxies, or maybe this was a barred galaxy that somehow lost its bars. And of course, I always love seeing more galaxies in the background; in this image there's even another ring galaxy visible in that dark gap at about seven o'clock.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing: Benoit Blanco

Sunday bird blogging

It's rainy -- mixed with a little snow -- here in New York today, so the bright colors of a cardinal are more than usually welcome.

Random things I saw in Toronto

More random than usual -- just some streetscapes from a chilly city.

Saturday reflections

It's been a long time since I posted a Geometries shot, but I think these stairs reflected in the square windows on Dundas Street in Toronto would qualify.

Urban poetry

The Hockey Hall of Fame (or, in French, Le Temple de la renommée du hockey) in downtown Toronto. This building doesn't exactly scream “hockey” to me -- the building used to be the Bank of Montreal -- but it definitely looks like a temple.