Final houses of Ithaca

I am actually in Minneapolis for the weekend, but have decided that I need to finish at least one location in the backlog before I post anything new. So here are a few more pictures from Ithaca, of various buildings that caught my eye.

Astronomy Tuesday

That's Saturn of course, in the foreground, in another wonderful image taken by the Cassini probe in 2014.

But if you look closely at the background, you'll see a tiny blue dot in the upper left corner. That's Uranus, which was approximately 28.6 astronomical units away from Cassini and Saturn when this picture was taken. One astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the Sun, or 93,000,000 miles, so if I'm doing the calculation correctly, Uranus was billions of miles away and it's miraculous that we can see it here at all.

The only thing that amazes me as much as this universe is the human ingenuity that allows us to see so much of it.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Sunday bird blogging

Here's a pine warbler, who was passing through town in April.

Saturday reflections

The Scientology Headquarters on West 46th Street, taken from a cab.

Even a cab ride still feels midly daring, so I am definitely a little anxious about my second post-pandemic plane trip, for a long weekend in Minneapolis, starting this coming Friday.

Flagstones in the Katharine Hepburn Garden

Urban poetry

This is the Katharine Hepburn Garden, a narrow strip of greenery along East 47th Street, a few blocks from the Turtle Bay apartment where she lived for more than 60 years.

You wouldn't think such a small park could feel like an oasis with the city bustle only a few feet away, but it does.

Taughannock Falls State Park

Two last pictures of the stream below the falls.

Astronomy Tuesday

These glowing clouds are the emission nebula NGC 6188. (You can see another emission nebula, NGC 6164, in the bottom right corner.)

Image Credit and Copyright: Shaun Robertson

Taughannock Falls

I have better pictures of the namesake falls in this park, but I picked this one because there's a teeny tiny human visible in the lower right-hand corner, which gives some useful scale to the photograph.

The falls is actually 33 feet taller than Niagara Falls, and is reportedly the tallest single-drop falls east of the Rockies, but for some reason waterfalls just never look that impressive in photographs. (Except maybe Victoria Falls. You really couldn't take a bad picture of that one.)

Cayuga Lake

Going back to some of the backlog—here are two pictures of Cayuga Lake in Taughannock Falls State Park outside Ithaca in April.

Sunday bird blogging

One more reminder that you never know what to expect in Central Park. Like, for example, this Solitary Sandpiper wading in the Pool, just chilling, as though sandpipers often appear in the middle of Manhattan.

Saturday reflections

A sunny day in late spring in New York City, reflected by a parked car in a dark garage.

Spring semester is over, and summer term has begun (gee, that break went quickly.) The main work for the summer class will be two and a half weeks in Costa Rica next month, and the workload is pretty easy until then, but I can't help thinking, Wait, wasn't this supposed to be my time off?