Category: Life

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Tumbleweeds tend to collect along roadsides and fences in Orange County, dropping their seeds for the next year. This can lead to some spectacular clusters of car-sized puffballs of plant.

6 or more large, green tumbleweeds by the side of a freeway ramp.
SR-55 off-ramp at Edinger

In a few weeks*, these will dry out, turn brown, and get picked up by the Santa Ana winds. They’ll roll along the road until they hit a fence, or perhaps fetch up against another cluster, and the cycle will start all over again.

* Or possibly already — I took this photo about 3 weeks ago, and with this past week’s heat wave, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

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One of the problems with photographing clouds is that you can’t run and grab a better camera. You have to shoot with what you have, or they’ll change configuration and quite possibly look completely different by the time you get back.

As I left for a late lunch today, I saw a set of half-discs stacked together, with a long trail stretching off to the left. We don’t see lenticular clouds that often in this area, so I stopped the car, grabbed my cell phone and aimed it out the window.

Lenticular cloud, stretched out

The Santa Ana Mountains are hidden behind the office buildings, and are probably the cause of the cloud formation.

Unfortunately, the detail isn’t that great. I tried to enhance the image a bit, but it looks like the brightest parts of the cloud overwhelmed the sensor. This is at the camera’s native resolution:

Close-up of cloud

Update: Spotted some more interesting cloud formations later in the afternoon. Continue reading →

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I decided to go for it, and set my alarm for 2:30 AM (ick) to see the eclipse. The moon was nearing totality at that point, with a too-shallow crescent near the bottom and the rest in slightly reddish shadow. My original plan was to lie down on the balcony and watch, but it turned out there was a tree in the way, but if I went over to the other end, by the patio table, I was able to see it.

I watched as the crescent shrank to a sliver, and finally the moon was shaded dark red to dull red to light red to a much dimmer white than usual. The deeper reds slowly spread across its face, edging out the brighter colors near the edge of the Earth’s shadow.

I brought my cheesy little digital camera, and took some photos. It promptly started warning me the battery was low, and I had to dig around in the dark to find the spare. I think this is the best of the pictures, as far as showing the eclipsed moon itself goes:

Moon in eclipse
Eclipsed Moon, 3:13 AM

Earlier in the evening I was testing different shutter settings. I thought this photo from the floor of the balcony turned out interesting:

Balcony lit by full moon

Yes, that’s lit by moonlight (in a long exposure).

OK, I’m going out to take one last look at the moon (I think I heard the downstairs neighbors’ door open a few minutes ago, so at least I’m not the only one up for this) and then go back to bed. I’ll look through my photos again tomorrow and post anything else that looks good.

Update: Here’s a shot from deeper in totality, just after the mid-point of the eclipse:

Lunar Eclipse - orange moon
Eclipsed Moon, 3:40 AM

PleiadesAnd here’s the Pleiades, which I spotted when I turned around and looked up. A far cry from this, but hey, I figured I was doing pretty well to be getting photos of stars with this type of camera in the first place.

I think the last time I saw the Pleiades, Hyades, Taurus and Orion in August, I was something like 14 and on a trip with my scout troop to do whitewater rafting. We slept out under the stars and I just happened to wake up at 3 in the morning.

OK, sleep is calling to me. Signing off…

Update 2: After I went to bed, I realized that I shouldn’t have dismissed my idea of scrounging up some film and pulling my manual SLR camera out of the closet. Between the better optics, more shutter control, and an actual telephoto lens, I probably would have gotten considerably better pictures. I just don’t think we have any rolls of film lying around that haven’t expired, and I didn’t want to run out at 11:00 to get some. Ah, well. Something to think about for next time.

Also, I realized that these blurry pictures look kind of like a Moon-sized version of Mars. Hmm, that might confuse some people. 😉

Update 3: You have to check out Thursday’s APOD: an incredible telescopic image of the moon taken during totality.

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I’m still trying to decide whether I should set an alarm to wake myself up at ski-o’clock in the morning to see tonight’s/tomorrow’s lunar eclipse. I mean, I skipped the Perseid meteor shower a few weeks ago, but that would have required not only getting up in the wee hours of the night, but driving somewhere with less light pollution.

I mean, I should be able to walk outside and look out at a blood-red moon… at 3:00 in the morning.

*grrr*

(links via Bad Astronomy)

Update: Ah, the wonders of text search and delayed indexing. It seems that lots of people are searching for the phrase, “eclipse tomorrow,” leading to a spike in hits to this entry from last March… even though today’s post would be a more appropriate destination.

Update 2: I went for it. Here’s my write-up.

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In early August, we went up to Santa Monica to visit my brother and his colleagues as they returned to Florida from Wikimania 2007 in Taipei… with a 10-hour layover at LAX.

We carpooled with my parents, and arrived while the group was still stuck in customs. So we wandered around the Santa Monica Promenade and pier for a bit. Not surprisingly, there were some strange things about, like this turtle-themed drinking fountain.

Turtle and drinking fountain

Then there was this sign, on the Johannes van Tilburg Building, which I couldn’t quite decide how to take. “Free Will?” “Free Willy?”

Frey Wille

The most disturbing was probably this mash-up of two movies on one of the many theaters on the promenade:

Marquee: Knocked Up, Bratz

Is the American public ready for that film?

There are topiaries sculpted into the forms of dinosaurs scattered along the promenade. This stegosaurus came out the best:

Stegosaurus topiary

As I mentioned, we did wander out to the Santa Monica Pier after a bit. Nothing terribly odd, just a couple of photos to set the scene:

The pier viewed from the cliffs

Santa Monica beach and cliffs, seen from the end of the pier

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Last summer we bought a fuchsia to hang above our balcony. It bloomed for months, then seemed to die over the winter. Living in southern California, the idea of a plant that actually goes dormant in winter is a bit of a foreign concept, but we figured, well, just in case, let’s keep watering it.

It started to grow new leaves in spring, and the first hints of new buds appeared as summer arrived. It finally started blooming in earnest in mid-July, when I took this photo:

Fuchsia flowers (closeup)

Update: I’ve posted a larger version of the photo on Flickr.

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