Sunday bird blogging

This handsome fellow is the green-winged teal I went looking for yesterday. Remarkably, he was still exactly where everyone reported seeing him this week, and was actually the first bird I saw.

Saturday reflections

The Pool in Central Park this afternoon.

Many of the leaves have faded or fallen but the trees are still beautiful. I've been enjoying being lazy and mostly unproductive this holiday weekend, but I saw that a new (to me) duck had been hanging out in the Pool and I decided that trying to see it was worth the enormous effort of getting dressed and leaving the apartment. And this view was certainly worth it.

Astronomy Tuesday

This image is from Euclid, the new ESA space telescope launched in July. Its mission is to create a map of the large-scale structure of the universe, and explore the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

There are more than a thousand galaxies in the Perseus cluster pictured here, and more than 100,000 galaxies visible in the background.

Image Credit and License: ESA, Euclid, Euclid Consortium, NASA; Processing: Jean-Charles Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay) and Giovanni Anselmi; Text: Jean-Charles Cuillandre

Saturday reflections

November skies reflected in the Time Warner Center in Manhattan.

Tis the season

Allergy season, anyway. 

I haven't seen much of the fall colors this year. I did manage to walk home through Central Park after class yesterday, although an unpleasantly hot classroom had both me and my students in a torpor by late afternoon, but we're past peak color now.

I took this from my living room window last year. Although that particular view can't help but remind me of the awful locked-down days in 2020 and 2021, when it was basically all I saw for weeks at a time, I still love those colors.

Astronomy Tuesday

I remember reading a popular science book some years back that summarized the Second Law of Thermodynamics with something to the effect of, “In other words, in this world, things always get messier.”

There are always far more disorderly than orderly outcomes to any given situation. I'm still trying and mostly failing to reorder everything that went to entropy hell when I got hurt several weeks ago, so this Hubble image of the Arp 87 system seems appropriate. The two dueling galaxies will eventually merge together a few billion years from now; in the meantime the messy interaction reminds me of a cotton candy machine, with one galaxy pulling strands of gas from the other.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing: Harshwardhan Pathak

Reflections

I have been completely wiped out for the past several days. It feels like the dregs of Covid, but I'm negative, and I'm guessing that I'm just having a much worse than usual allergy season.

So here are some belated reflections, from the beautiful exhibit of Tiffany lamps at the New York Historical Society.