Mike,
Here is a short clip of some brave tuba players making warm music in a cold snowstorm. My battery ran out, so there is only one pan across the band. The film ends at a point where a repeat might sound OK. Maybe you can put it into a loop?
–rakkity
This gallery starts out with one of the most amazing NIGHT time exposures. There’s a blue sky with stars, and spectacular clouds over and around an active volcano. The subsequent shots aren’t too shabby either.–rakkity
Michael,
The day before yesterday we finally got some snow around here. About a foot of lovely powder fell on Boulder county early Sunday morning. So Katie and I decided to take advantage of it before it disappeared in a chinook or one of those dratted warm spells. The County’s Open Space has a nice preserve 5 miles west of town at about 8000′. It has 3 or 4 miles of walking/jogging/skiing trails, and that’s where we headed. A few other snow lovers were out hiking, snowshoeing and XC skiing there, but the trails were remarkably untracked. One of the benches near the trailhead had a foot of fresh powder on it, so I tried pressing my hand into it, and got the snow to compress about 8 inches. As usual, the fresh powder was impossible to make snowballs out of (it’s only fault!)
I enclose 2 pictures of us on our skis.
–rakkity
Michael,
The day before yesterday we finally got some snow around here. About a foot of lovely powder fell on Boulder county early Sunday morning. So Katie and I decided to take advantage of it before it disappeared in a chinook or one of those dratted warm spells. The County’s Open Space has a nice preserve 5 miles west of town at about 8000′. It has 3 or 4 miles of walking/jogging/skiing trails, and that’s where we headed. A few other snow lovers were out hiking, snowshoeing and XC skiing there, but the trails were remarkably untracked. One of the benches near the trailhead had a foot of fresh powder on it, so I tried pressing my hand into it, and got the snow to compress about 8 inches. As usual, the fresh powder was impossible to make snowballs out of (it’s only fault!)
I enclose 2 pictures of us on our skis.
–rakkity
Mike,
Here‘s an unusual movie of one of our favorite celestial objects.
The black curve is the edge of the Sun–the top of the photosphere that you see by eye. Above it is the roiling, boiling chromosphere as seen by Hinode’s ultraviolet telescope.
–rakkity
Mike,
With Katie and Patrick here in Boulder at Thanksgiving, we couldn’t pass up a chance to reprise our 3-way racketball games, especially since Patrick brought 2 rackets in his luggage. So off to the north gym we went, and played 2 3-way games, giving KT a 5 point handicap. (For those who always want numbers, the scores were 15-12-11 and 12-15-11, Rakkity-Patrick-KT). And just for fun we made movies (with sound) of a few volleys. What a blast!
–rakkity
Michael,
Although you love intense color, you might consider these uncolorful photographs by Melford. Many of the shots are sepia, but they could as well be black and white. With few exceptions the subject, Death Valley, needs only one dimension in colorspace.
While you’re at it, get out your 40-inch screen a view Victoria Crater, the largest martian crater visited so far.
–rakkity
Michael,
Easterners, with a few exceptions, don’t worry about wildfires too much. But Californians and, to a lesser extent, Coloradans,take wildfires as an inescapable part of life. Much like Kansans and tornadoes, probably. Since two of the “Beartoothers”, members of the Fogy Fivesome hiking crew, live in the San Diego area, and my sister & Dad live in Ventura County, I’ve been watching the news with trepidation as the fires spread towards their homes.
Phil, from Solana Beach, lives closest to the fires in that area, and what is more worrisome, downwind from the big one (see map).This weekend, Phil was planning to fly out here to Colorado and do some day-hikes with Chuck and me. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the day before yesterday he laconically wrote that he and Laurie were one of 300,000 from their area who were forced to evacuate. So, he said, maybe he wouldn’t be flying out to Colorado after all. He mentioned that Laurie had told him to go anyway, but Phil wanted (of course!) to stay with her.
I searched for a good Google map of the situation and saw the big red area with a western finger pointing toward Cardiff-by-the-Sea (Solana Beach is the town just to the south, under the green icon). If you click on the triangle near Cardiff-by-the-Sea, a balloon pops up telling you to evacuate if you live in the area).
On one of the Google News items, the firefighters were decrying the hot 80-mph Santa Ana easterlies which were making the fires uncontrollable. A firefighter said, “Those fires are going to be blown right down to the ocean, and we can’t do a thing about it.”
Then I took another look at the map, and saw that there was a fire just east of Fallbrook, where another long-time Beartoother lives–Joe Ajello, the famed mountain biker of the fogy crew. He has a little farm there in Fallbrook with avocado trees. He brings a box of avocados out to Boulder every time he visits.
If you click on the triangle next to Fallbrook, the balloon tells residents they should flee towards the west through Camp Pendleton. (I haven’t seen any of this on the tube or the web, but I have grapes-of-wrath pictures in my mind of people driving out of town with vehicles crammed with all their treasures, their labs or poodles in boxes on the cartops. Can this really be happening?)
The twist in this part of the story is that Joe and his wife Barb are on vacation in Morocco. Or maybe they’re furiously flying home right now? They have a caretaker for their orchard, but he has probably fled town with all the rest of the town’s residents.
Now for a positive turn of events–
My sister lives in Simi Valley in Ventura county, which has several raging fires of its own. None of them are moving towards Simi Valley fortunately, but the valley is full of smoke so thick that a reporter said daytime was like night. Anyway, my sister, a pilot, monitors the wind like a hawk (literally), and told me that the Santa Ana was diminishing in strength.
A few hours later I got another email from Phil. He said that the evacuation was lifted in his town, and he and Laurie could return home. However, he noted that the return to normal wind patterns (no Santa Ana) would make the fires less predictable.He said that he would make up his mind on Thursday whether he’d fly out to Colorado this weekend or some time later.
We’re all keeping our fingers and toes crossed for our California friends.Will Phil and Laurie be able to keep their home? Will Joe and Barb reach their avocado farm, only to find smoking stumps and a burnt-out home? We’re hoping for the best. More stories as events unfold in the next days.
–rakkity
Michael,
Boring clouds in Maryland, exciting clouds in Colorado. I’ve been collecting clouds since we arrived here. Here you will find my latest best dozen cloud shots. In the past months there were several phantasmagorical sky views I couldn’t shoot for various reasons, like driving 70 mph down a crowded road (not being a Miller), absent camera, or discharged battery (sob!). But eventually new cloud opportunities will come along. The weather here is always changing–mostly for the better!
–rakkity
***************
I think Rakkity and the rest of the blog would enjoy this.
Pesky Godson
Mike,
My old buddy Chuck is hobbling around with an undiagnosible knee problem. First his doc told him he had a torn meniscus in his left knee. Then the MRI showed nothing. So he’s going to physical therapy, and his therapist told him to go do a lot of biking. He called me up and said, “I know a great bike trail, want to come?” A couple of weeks ago I would have begged off, but I’m nearly all healed up from my surgery and so off we went. We rode about 10 miles on dirt trails through some pretty prairie country along South Boulder Creek. I liked it so much, I took Beth on the best parts the very next day.
The wildflowers are all gone, except Milkweed seed pods but the fall colors are very fine, particularly with the Boulder mountains hanging in the background under the usual cerulean skies.The prairie dogs are scampering through the buffalo grass, having long since stored up haystacks in their holes for the coming long winter. The red-winged blackbirds have all flown south, but 2 days ago when I was walking on part of the same trail, a barn owl glided noiselessly down to a stump next to the creek and eyed me curiously for several minutes. The rainbow trout in the creek are hiding in the riffles, but the fishermen, poor fellows, are all sitting indoors watching the Broncos.
–rakkity
Michael,
The Japanese satellite Kaguya, now in lunar orbit, as we speak is taking high-resolution shots of the earth (see attachment). The scuttlebutt is that Kaguya will proceed to take time-lapse pictures of Earth, showing its rotation and its phases from new to first quarter to full to 3rd quarter and back to new. Perhaps surprisingly, this has never been done before in all the years (38) since the Apollo program, and including the Apollo program!. So in a few weeks time we may be looking at movies of earth on Youtube.
-rakkity
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