Astronomy Tuesday

This gorgeous composite of Hubble images shows the Bubble Nebula, the result of stellar winds and radiation from a type O star like our sun, but 45 times more massive.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing and Copyright: Mehmet Hakan Özsaraç

Sunday bird blogging

I saw crows and cormorants and chickadees in California, but didn't photograph any of them. So here's a pretty junco in Central Park a few weeks ago.

One more tree

This cypress lost its fight with the sea winds, but I love how the broken trunk forms a (sort of) heart.

Trees at Land's End

Nothing evokes the Bay Area for me more than the smell of eucalyptus on a foggy day, but I've always loved cypresses as well. The weathered trunks and scrawny flat crowns are well suited for a life of being windblown.

Saturday reflections

It's obviously a stretch to call this a reflection picture—a few faint clouds and two silhouettes in the water do not really qualify. But I'm in the middle of a take-home midterm this weekend and don't have time to look for something better.

These are the ruins of Sutro Baths, by Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The baths burned down in the Sixties, but I remember visiting when we were having special occasion meals at the Cliff House next door. There was a skating rink, and for some reason a mummy in a glass case, which I found both fascinating and terrifying. I never even realized there were actual baths there until after it had burned down and the ruins of the pools were exposed. We used to climb all over the ruins and the hills above when I was in high school; like so much else in San Francisco they've now been cleaned up and there are beautiful trails over the hills where we used to skid around on the bare rocks.

Speaking of the Golden Gate Bridge

I saw this bridge on a daily basis when I was young. I've driven across it countless times, sailed under it, and walked across it more than once. It often shows up in my dreams. And yet, I had never noticed the Art Deco details on the towers before.

Obviously, when I was a kid I wouldn't have known what Art Deco was, but the adult me never noticed either until I looked at these pictures.

Urban poetry

A look at two bridges—the new span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate—taken through the sunroof of my friends' car.

My body is finally back on Eastern Daylight Time; I know what time it is, more or less, but I am still not entirely clear what day it is.

Astronomy Tuesday

I am back in New York after an all too brief visit to the Bay Area. I had to get up before 4 am yesterday to make a 6 am flight and that, plus the time change and the general disorientation of finding myself on the other side of the continent again, have left me with the firm belief that there is no such thing as enough coffee or too much sleep and that I have not had nearly enough of either.

So here's another alien landscape, where humans have now left their mark: tracks made by the Mars Rover, photographed by Perseverance in February.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Paul Byrne

Sunday bird blogging

I would have loved to get a closeup of this turkey hanging out by the freeway in Berkeley, but I was in a moving car and had to admire those wonderful tail feathers from a distance.

Saturday reflections

This is the wall of windows across from the benches in the previous picture.

Urban poetry

This is just a bench in one of the corporate pocket parks in Midtown, but I loved the arrangement of the trees and the benches.

I am actually in California; I will write more about that and post some pictures later. I had an airline credit that was about to expire, and Covid cases are low at the moment, so I took a few very deep breaths and went for it. It's a short visit because of my school schedule, but more than worth the jet lag.

Sunday bird blogging

Posting very late because Things Came Up, as they have a habit of doing.

Here's a white-throated sparrow enjoying the snow in Central Park a few weeks ago. Their colors are starting to change to the bright yellows and high-contrast head markings of mating season now, but this one was still relatively subdued.