I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks
Saturday, September 30, 2017
Thursday, September 28, 2017
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Astronomy Tuesday
Our beautiful sun in a bad mood on September 10.
This image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory shows an intense solar flare, which was followed by what astronomers whimsically refer to as a coronal mass ejection. It's the sun's version of blowing off steam, except instead of steam it's magnetic plasma. This is the stuff that can cause electrical havoc on Earth when it slams into our magnetosphere, causing blackouts (in 1989 power surges from solar flares melted power transformers in New Jersey) as well as knocking out satellite and GPS communications.
Image Credit: NASA, SDO, and the AIA, EVE, and HMI science teams
Sunday, September 24, 2017
Sunday bird blogging
It may officially be autumn now, but it was still warm and muggy in the park yesterday.
The birds didn't seem to mind -- I saw the first white-throated sparrows and juncos of the season, and a few warblers hiding in the foliage. And this winter wren, with that adorably stubby spotted tail at full salute. The light wasn't great so the picture isn't that sharp, but I so rarely see wrens that I'm thrilled with it anyway.
Saturday, September 23, 2017
Thursday, September 21, 2017
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
Monday, September 18, 2017
Domestic archaeology
I spent most of the weekend cleaning out closets -- or technically, distributing the contents of closets all over my living room in preparation for the tedious business of sorting, discarding, and re-closeting -- and buried in the bottom of a box of family papers and miscellaneous letters, I found a collection of t-shirts that I was apparently saving for the Apocalypse.
I moved into this apartment in 1999, and I'm assuming I packed them then, and immediately forgot about their existence. So if you see someone walking around New York in a practically pristine Clinton-Gore inauguration t-shirt from 1993, that would be me.
Sunday, September 17, 2017
Saturday, September 16, 2017
Thursday, September 14, 2017
Urban poetry
Continuing with the theme of interesting sidewalk seating, here are a couple of chairs (plus motorcycles) outside a walled garden in Jaipur last January. This was an access road, separated by a line of trees from a very busy street. So it was noisy there, but also cool and shady, which may be why the residents would choose to sit there instead of in the very pretty -- and sunny and hot -- garden.
Tuesday, September 12, 2017
Astronomy Tuesday
Here's one of the last looks at Saturn and its rings from a distance, captured by Cassini with a wide-angle lens last October, but released by NASA and JPL yesterday.
We'll probably get more pictures, as it takes time for NASA to process and release them, but the Cassini probe itself will die on Friday, when it ends its mission with a plunge beneath Saturn's clouds and into whatever lies beneath.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Monday, September 11, 2017
Sunday, September 10, 2017
Sunday bird blogging
The gritty city.
I took this picture earlier this summer, and since you don't get much more New York than this, it's an appropriate image for a week in which I sometimes floundered at finding myself back in a place that's the complete opposite of my mostly peaceful, mostly non-eventful vacation.
But I did spend the morning in Central Park, and that always reminds me that there are oases of tranquillity even in this mad city.
Sunday deer blogging
I forgot about this until I was going through pictures yesterday.
The night before the eclipse, there was a wedding party at Sunriver having cocktails on a lawn by the river. This mama deer (the fawn was hiding in the tall grass behind her) stood watching them through the grasses for a few minutes before running away along the riverbank.
Saturday, September 9, 2017
A tree lovely as a poem
I took more pictures of trees than of anything else, including the eclipse, on this trip. A lot of that was due to the quality of the trees around me, of course. They were just begging to be looked at closely, loved, and remembered.
Here's a mossy tree in the zen garden, and a hilltop dweller draped in fog.
Thursday, September 7, 2017
Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Monday, September 4, 2017
Sunday bird blogging
Posting was delayed because I had no wifi over the weekend, and I spent most of yesterday on a plane returning to New York (where it's surprisingly much cooler than it was in California -- makes it a little easier to face the end of vacation.)
But here's a phone picture of some odd residents at Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Those knobby red beaks made me think they were turkey vultures, but they are Muscovy ducks.
Labels:
bird blogging,
Golden Gate Park,
lakes,
parks,
San Francisco
Friday, September 1, 2017
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