It's been a very long time since my last installment of picture torture. That edition ended with the beginning (6:10-6:18 am) of our Christmas, 1967, festivities. Now, at last!, we get to see the next ten minutes of the fun!
Next, we enjoy a visit with Nene, Jackie, Dan and Steve. There are 41 pictures of us sitting on the couch and a child's folding chair. Well, a few at the end are of us standing in a line and looking (blurrily) at the camera. Not a lot is going on here.
We find out that the fruit trees in the back yard were planted in the Spring of 1968.
We celebrate all the May events, birthdays and Mother's Day, on May 12. We waited till 7:00 to dig into our festively wrapped presents. Poss got some luggage. There was luggage at Christmas, too. Was some message being sent? Whose writing is on the big box (our misspelled last name)? I thought it was Jack's but he wouldn't spell his own name wrong, would he? There's the nice touch of having our artificial Christmas tree set up (but not decorated).
Why do Karen and Grandma get presents? I suppose it would have been rude to leave them out but they got more in November (and I didn't). It looks like Peggy wasn't left out, either. There's her typewriter with the marshmallow keys.
Peggy gets dressed up to graduate from high school.
Merry Christmas! I hope your day has been full of wonderful surprises!
Ours started out with a nice sunrise.
We got an email last month from Karla Winterowd of Winterowd Fine Art, Santa Fe, suggesting that Jerry and I could do all of our gift shopping at once by giving each other a piece of art that we knew each other would love. We had gotten our Destiny Allison piece from them and had been admiring their glass pieces by Alex Gabriel Bernstein.
So we took her suggestion.
This is what we got.
Red Flash Muse
Alex Gabriel Bernstein
It's very nice. It's being backlit by a little, battery-powered spotlight.
Another (a last?) set of solargraphs taken from my roof. The cans were put on the roof just after the Summer Solstice and I took them down today, a couple of days after the Winter Solstice. I couldn't do it earlier because of the rain. Besides, I get home after dark and I don't want to be scrambling around on the roof when it's dark.
I used two sheets of photo paper in a big coffee can. This time I tried something new to get the full height of the sun's progress by laying the cans on their sides. The pinholes were were aimed about 45 degrees above horizontal. This gave me a larger vertical range of the sun's travels but less horizontally than my other solargraphs.
The cans were attached to the spark screen on the chimney. One faced southeast and the other faced southwest. These pictures don't show as much detail of the roof as the earlier pictures taken with the coffee cans. I wonder why.
And none of the pictures I've taken show as much detail in the landscapes as in other solargraphs I've seen. I think the type of paper I'm using just isn't the best for this project.
Here are the pictures taken from June to December, 2010.
Looking southeast
Looking southwest
This set of pictures finally lets me see the same details in both the southeast and southwest pictures. During the gloomy part of October (where you see a wide band with few tracks of the sun) the same patterns of the sun peeking out of the clouds show up above the ash tree to the south. Next project: figuring out how to merge the two pictures to get the whole scene in one image. I don't think Photoshop has a lens correction filter for a pinhole camera especially for film that isn't flat.
The S-shaped tracks of the sun took me by surprise but that's one of the things that makes this interesting.
I think I'm finished with this phase of the project. I need to find places other than the roof to put cameras.
I spent much of last night watching another meteor shower. This time it was the Geminids. I went to my usual spot and set up shop. This time I managed to turn off the interior light of the car so it wouldn't light up to greet me as I went to its rolled-down window to get supplies. (A lot of good that did...many of the people who came to that view point thought nothing of leaving their headlights on for many minutes while they got their chairs and whatnot set up.)
I set the camera to look up into the sky rather than include the horizon as I did for the Persieds. I set the camera to take 16 second exposures and my intervalometer to take a picture every 17 seconds. I made a movie from these pictures (imagine!).
Along the way I caught a fair number of meteors in these pictures. There was a period of about six minutes when I got six meteors in the camera's field of view. So, if six showed up in this part of the sky, imagine how many were visible in the rest of the sky! It was a good night for meteors. Till the clouds moved in.
I used Photoshop to merge the six pictures from this period into one image. You get to see how the meteors do appear to stream out of Gemini. The twins' shoulders are near the top of the image and their feet are above the image.
Six Geminid meteors
December 14, 2010, 12:40-12:
46am
The bright meteor going off the right side of the image doesn't really split along the way. It seems to be a result of Photoshop's rotating the image to align it with the other images that have moved because of the Earth's rotation. I'll learn more about Photoshop to fix that...my attempts were an utter failure.
There were a lot of bright meteors visible before midnight while the quarter moon was still shining.
I'm getting too old for staying up past my bedtime. I got comfortable on my portable reclining chair with my heavy wool blanket and kept coming close to falling asleep. So I spent much of the time standing so I wouldn't sleep. But that is a pain in the neck.
Then the wispy clouds moved in. For a while there was just the area around Orion and Canis Major that didn't have clouds. Bright meteors could be seen through the clouds but I was getting discouraged and decided that I'd just go home. So I packed up and left at 2:30.
It turns out that the clouds weren't all that noticeable to my camera. We get to see the clouds near the end and we can see the stars clearly through them. I should have stayed an let the camera get more of the stars, meteors and clouds. The motion of the stars against the motion of the clouds is fascinating and at was just getting underway when I stopped the show.
I had the camera focused better this time. In August I think I didn't have anything bright to focus on and I just cranked the lens to its extreme distance setting. Well, it can focus to infinity and beyond. So the stars in my Perseid movie are somewhat fuzzy. This time they're sharper.
There are airplanes again but not as many as in August. There was a strange searchlight or something shining through the sky. Its range and focus amaze me. I want to know what it is. It shows up at around 0:50.
