Astronomy Tuesday

Sometimes I have to really hunt around to find a picture I want to post on Tuesdays. Not today -- this is NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day from yesterday, and I loved it immediately.

It's a composite of over 100 photographs taken of Mars by Viking orbiters in the 1970's (notice a few chunks missing at the bottom), showing Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in our solar system. It's almost four times longer, and more than four times deeper, than the Grand Canyon, but the numbers don't interest me nearly as much as the beautiful colors and patterns.  It looks both old and delicate, like the painted flowers and fine cracks in a very old china teacup anyone might have sitting on a shelf.


Image credit: Viking Project, USGS, NASA

Welcome to the working week

Another from Alan Taylor's remarkable series of photographs from the First World War at The Atlantic. This photo, from the Library of Congress collection, shows women welders at the Lincoln Motor Car company in Detroit in 1918.

It's worth clicking on the photo to enlarge. And clicking on the link to look at the rest.

Unexpected visitors

Bonus bird blogging.

I don't usually post pictures of this low quality anymore, even of the ever elusive warblers, but this magnolia warbler is a special case. He wasn't in Central Park, he was in my backyard, and the picture is not great because it was taken through a screened window. 

I'm still a little under the weather, and decided against going up to the park this morning. It's Mother's Day, and it's the middle of spring migration, and I do sometimes get cranky when there are thirty people standing around looking at every single bird. 

Apparently word got out, and the warblers came to me. I've never seen anything but the most common birds -- mourning doves, cardinals, starlings, sparrows -- in my trees. Sometimes I've seen a flash of color and thought maybe a warbler had just zoomed past, but I've never seen a warbler actually in these trees before today. And now I've seen two, as an American redstart came by not long after the magnolia flew away. (There was a house finch as well -- not a warbler, and not a migrant, but another bird I've never seen in my yard.)

Maybe they come every spring and I've just never seen them. I know I've written before about how taking up photography made me finally pay attention to the things around me, after a lifetime of walking around with my brain settings defaulted to "daydream." I see, I notice, so much more now.

But it's not just a matter of paying attention -- it's also luck. And timing. And opportunity. Which means I'm going to see more birds if I drag my ass up to Central Park instead of spending spring looking out my window hoping that the birds will come to me.

Sunday bird blogging

A male brown-headed cowbird.

Cowbirds are brood parasites; the females lay their eggs in the nests of other species. Since they got their name because they follow cattle or other herd animals to feed on the insects they stir up, it makes biological sense for them to leave their eggs with babysitters.

It does not work out so well for the caregivers, however. It's not just the presence of another mouth to feed; having loud cowbird babies makes nests more vulnerable to predators. Some species are smart enough to recognize and get rid of the cowbird eggs, but that doesn't always solve the problem. Cowbirds will actually retaliate, sometimes even destroying the nest so the hosts are forced to build a new one. Which the cowbirds then lay more eggs in.

Yeah, it's a jungle out there.

Saturday reflections

It's not just the reflections, it's those great lamps that make this photo. On West 50th Street.

Sentences

The dregs of a slight spring cold have ignited into a full-blown sinus infection, so I am home, trying to sleep away the sensation that my face is being pressed, with great enthusiasm, into a concrete wall. 

This was the perfect thing to leaf through when I was awake -- a list at The American Scholar of the ten best sentences. (Via) Of the sentences they picked, I liked the bonus eleventh the best:

Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.
—Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

The real treasures are in the comments though.

The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.
—John Updike

That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.
—Stephen Crane, The Open Boat

Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
—Samuel Beckett, Murphy

Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire.
—Cormac McCarthy, The Road

The shorter ones are appealing to me today, but there are many treasures at the link.

Urban poetry

I'm not sure what this is -- some kind of cable stretching over one of the ramps leading to the Lincoln Tunnel. 

I'm sure it's not merely decorative, but it doesn't seem to be supporting anything and I don't have a clue as to the function of those metal circles. But with the Empire State Building (and pigeons perched on a lamppost) in the background, it makes a nice stanza of urban poetry.

Astronomy Tuesday

(Image credit: Alan Friedman (Averted Imagination))

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day today featured one of Alan Friedman's brilliant portraits of our sun. The texture in these photos always astonishes me; I know those patterns are made by roiling, boiling plumes of gas thousands of miles long, but in the photograph they look so small and innocent, almost dainty, like a faded flower pattern on an old dress, or peach fuzz.

Or the orangey hide of a Texas longhorn.

Awkward poses

Bonus bird blogging.

Here's one for the avian version of Awkward Family Photos. This oriole couldn't possibly look less graceful, and as the star of many awkward photos myself I can sympathize.

If I were a bird, I suspect that all of my pictures would look like this.

Sunday bird blogging

This beautiful creature is a Northern Flicker, a woodpecker relative more commonly seen foraging on the ground than way up in the trees like this guy. I love the way he's got his tail fanned out -- showing off for the ladies, maybe?

Saturday reflections

The lights hanging outside that new hotel on West 50th, reflected in the glass and mirrored by other lights inside.

In Flanders Fields

If you can bear it, The Atlantic has a stunning set of photographs from World War I, the first in what will be a series of ten weekly photo essays for the upcoming 100th anniversary of the start of that awful war.

This muddy hellhole is Flanders, in 1918, from the Library of Congress collection. I memorized the poem In Flanders Fields in grammar school, and still know it by heart.

     Take up our quarrel with the foe:
     To you, from failing hands we throw
     the torch...

I could do quite an impressive performance of those lines when I was 11 years old, but I'd like to think we've learned something in the last hundred years and wouldn't fall for that recruiting poster jargon again. I sure would like to think so.