Astronomy Tuesday

Here's an unusual solar eclipse: Mercury crossing the sun in 2006.

Image Credit & Copyright: David Cortner

Sunday bird blogging

A pair of laggard kittiwakes by Prince William Sound.

We missed the thousands of migrating kittiwakes that had been there only the week before. There were maybe only a hundred or so left, including these two, who don't appear to be in any hurry to set off on the next leg of their migration.

Saturday reflections

Now that it's officially autumn in the northern hemisphere, here's one of the sneak peeks of the season I got in Alaska: trees just starting to turn at Creamers Field in Fairbanks.

Urban poetry

This may have been the only recognizably "urban" thing in Fairbanks, but I do love this sign, and the way the vaguely metallic finish on the wall reflects the buildings across the street.

Astronomy Tuesday

Resuming astronomy Tuesdays with a somewhat different look at Alaska, courtesy of the European Space Agency. The light blue body of water on the left is the Cook Inlet, with Anchorage the lighter patch near the top, just above the horizontal indent of Turnagain Arm.

Prince William Sound is the blue, vaguely star-shaped bay in the center.

Photo copyright ESA

Sunday bird blogging

A closeup of Adonis and his eagle eyes.

Saturday reflections

Regular blogging is hereby resumed, although I will probably be mining the Alaska pictures for some time to come.

Here's another picture from my small plane adventure -- the mountain reflected in the wing of the plane.

Anchorage

Sunset over the Cook Inlet, taken from my hotel room tonight.

I'm staying in Anchorage tomorrow, but it's going to be raining, so I made myself walk around this afternoon, even though I was just wiped out. Unlike Fairbanks, there is a discernible "downtown" but what was odd was that there didn't seem to be any people.

At five o'clock on a weekday you would expect crowds of people leaving work, rush hour traffic, happy hours at local bars. But it was very quiet -- no crowds, no traffic.

Thank you

Our amazing team of Moffatt, Jason, Lynn and Julie have not only kept track of us, our schedules, and our luggage, driven the vans, recommended excursions, identified microscopic white dots as Dall sheep, pointed out bald eagles, offered badly needed coffee and cough drops -- they have also created beautiful picnics for us almost every day. Including orange bears.

So much depends upon a red barn

Just because I love the way the perspective makes the yellow tractor look enormous.

Obviously I'm haunted by these ghosts

Scars are souvenirs you never lose

The center is surrounded by mountains, capped by spectacular clouds today. And ghost trees everywhere.