Astronomy Tuesday

I don't think I'd ever seen this before: the Jellyfish Nebula. It's another supernova remnant, in Gemini (the bright star on the right is Eta Geminorum, part of the constellation.)

Image Credit and Copyright: César Blanco González

Sunday bird blogging

The darkest evening of the year

Winter solstice this evening, so the long crawl back to daylight has started, even though I know we still have months of nasty weather to look forward to.

It's been overcast and gloomy every weekend so I haven't been taking many pictures, and there's rarely been sufficient light for bird photographs. So here's yet another Galapagos souvenir, a juvenile swallowtail gull on Genovesa.

Geometries

Agriculture for the 21st century: your basic cube farm.

Urban poetry

Graffiti is almost too easy, but I couldn't resist these.

Astronomy Tuesday

Just because, obviously, there can never be too many galaxies, here's a Hubble image of the one our friend M. Messier designated as number 83, also known as the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy.

It's been the site of at least six recorded supernovae. Oh, and it's pretty.

Saturday reflections

Taillight.

I love how something so mundane has such complexities when you look at it closely, the textures of the glass, the distortions of the reflections.

This was a difficult week for many reasons -- I'm still really anemic and have come far too close to fainting a couple of times -- and though I've tried to filter out the toxic responses of the apologists to the damning torture report -- enough seeped through to sicken me more.

I wish I believed in hell, because it would be an enormous comfort to think of Dick Cheney there.

Street photography

Literally.

Another iPhone shot from the cab Wednesday night. I'm starting to like the way the iPhone does night shots -- the lack of detail doesn't matter as much and there's a dreamy, abstract quality I love.

Urban poetry

A glimpse of Grand Central, taken with my phone through the back window of a cab on my way home from dinner with Geraldine last night.

First snow yesterday, thin but persistent, coming down through the afternoon and into the night. It melted as soon as it landed, so it was more like a light rain, not unpleasant to walk in bare-headed.

Sunday bird blogging

A seabird swooping over the icy waters of Prince William Sound.

I love the colors on the wings and body against the steely blue of the water. The crew on our boat fished out some of the glacial ice floating in the sound and made margaritas from it. I didn't have one, but after a weekend spent alternating between moving heavy furniture around, and looking bleary-eyed at the ensuing chaos and wondering just how I managed to acquire so much stuff, I could definitely use one now.

Geometries

I spent much of today emptying out a desk and two storage units I'm having carted away tomorrow, and now I'm trying to soothe myself towards sleep and away from thoughts of being smothered by all the stuff that's now sitting in piles everywhere.

This nice depiction of the fluorescent hell that is the modern cube farm at least has the virtue of looking nothing like my cramped and cluttered apartment.

Urban poetry

Another overlooked shot from Seattle.

I thought I had seldom seen a less promising venue for the creation and/or consumption of quality beer, but I looked at the website, and it is much more charming when it's open for business.

What qualifies it as true urban poetry though is this:

At Peddler, we strive to be a gathering place for beer lovers and support bicycling as an awesome way to get around our beautiful city.

Beer and bicycling!

Astronomy Tuesday

The Galileo spacecraft spent eight years exploring Jupiter beginning in 1995, and the images have now been remastered.

This is a new look at Europa, calibrated to approximate what the human eye would see. There may be a liquid ocean under that icy surface, and if so, it's the most likely location for extraterrestrial life in our solar system.

Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, SETI Institute, Cynthia Phillips, Marty Valenti