One more day at the Grand Canyon

After breakfast with the ravens, I went out on Desert View Drive in search of a new spot for a movie. I ended up at Moran Point. I got my camera set up at 8:20 and had it click away until 10:30. I was alone for much of the first hour and the car was parked right by the camera. I was able to sit on something more comfortable than a rock, stump or wall now and then.

A couple from Michigan asked about my automatically clicking camera. I explained what was going on and dragged out my laptop and made them see a movie I had shot the day before. They were politely impressed and took off.

Later, I was sitting on the wall near the camera and I heard a voice behind me saying something like "Well, here's Charles!" I turned around and there was John from Encinitas.

John has a print hanging in his living room of the painting that Thomas Moran made from Moran Point. I had no knowledge of who the point had been named for. I think he said that the print was produced by Moran himself and isn't a modern, mass-produced reproduction.

I showed John the movie I was making when we visited the day before. He was more impressed with the result than the Michigan couple.

Now you have the opportunity to be impressed with watching two hours of the view from Moran Point in just over one minute. (Remember, you can press buttons on the player to show it in HD and full screen. I recommend both!)



Later, as I was turning onto the road to Lipan Point, there was John from Encinitas at the stop sign leaving the point. I didn't make a movie there. I had run out of patience for standing around for long periods. Besides, the camera's batteries were running low and it takes a long time being plugged in to get them recharged.

More clouds

I left Grandview Point and continued east. The last viewpoint on the rim (or first if you start at the east entrance) is Desert View. This has the Desert View Watchtower.

Watchtower (undergoing renovations)

The inside of the watchtower has murals on the ceiling.

Watchtower ceiling

And murals on the walls.

Watchtower wall

And views of the canyon.

Desert View view

I made a short video here. It was shot in only half an hour starting around 2:15, October 23, 2010. It was getting very cold and windy and I was getting discouraged with all the thick clouds. I wanted scattered, puffy clouds but had to deal with thick ones. You might be able to see the landscape shaking from all the wind. I need a sturdier tripod. And I need to check that the camera is horizontal.

Oh, What a Beautiful Day!

I left Yavapai Point where I had recorded the three hours of thick, morning clouds and headed east. I stopped at Grandview Point.

The clouds were finally breaking up so sunshine reached the canyon floor. This time we see not only clouds moving but their shadows as well.

This video captured the canyon and clouds from 11:20 till 1:00 Saturday, October 23, 2010.

Oh, What a Beautiful Gray Morning!

I set up an alarm on my iPod to wake me up at 6:00 Saturday morning with the hopes that the clouds might disappear overnight. I wanted to have a glorious sunrise to record.

I didn't get the greatest quality sleep that night because there was rain that beat on the tent and the pad wasn't fully inflated. But I was sound asleep when a very loud phone rang. It was the iPod doing what I had asked. It must have roused everyone in the campground who weren't already awake. I turned off the alarm and lay there for a while. The iPod rang again. I guess I just hit the snooze button.

I dragged myself out of the sleeping bag into the cold, damp world. The clouds were still there, thicker than before. A beautiful sunrise was not to be seen.

I took a little Sterno-burning "stove" to heat water for portable Starbucks coffee. But this first morning I didn't have time to heat water. Even though there were thick clouds I wanted to get to the rim and be set up for the time the sun was rising. So I just poured a packet of the coffee into cold water and drank it.

That's not the best way to prepare Starbucks Via. It didn't dissolve. But I figured that the clumps of coffee powder would digest and I'd get my caffeine dose. I ate my bagel with Jif peanut butter (if you can call it that).

How can a product that has more than just fresh peanuts taste "more like fresh peanuts" than peanut butter that's just peanuts and salt? Anyway, it doesn't need refrigeration. I suppose I could have taken a natural product and just stirred it well but it would have been a bit messier than Jif.

I went back to Yavapai Point where I had filmed the rain moving through the canyon the evening before.

There were a lot of low clouds. There was no sunrise to be seen that morning. But clouds breaking up and the sun coming out is a good subject for a time-lapse movie. And there's the Grand Canyon behind all those clouds!

So I set up the camera right at the edge of the canyon. There was a 300-foot drop just a couple of feet beyond the camera. The camera was pointed over the edge so I thought that there was going to be no chance that anyone would get between the camera and the canyon. But I was wrong. There are two frames with a Japanese tourist getting a picture of the canyon from the very edge of the canyon. If you blink, you'll miss her.

While I was standing there (I couldn't just wander around and leave the camera unattended), someone asked about what I was doing. We discussed our photography hobbies. He had just started taking landscape pictures. He has a very sturdy looking tripod. I need to get one myself. We introduced ourselves. John is from Encinitas. (Hey, the REI where I got the camping gear is in Encinitas...what a small world.)

I stood there from 7:00 to 10:00. The sun made only a few, very brief, appearances.

Here is what clouds moving through the Grand Canyon the morning of October 23, 2010, looked like. The three hours are reduced to a minute and 11 seconds. It starts out slow with just clouds visible. But the canyon eventually makes an appearance. Give it time to develop.

It was a Grand time

Jerry and a friend of his made their annual trip to Phoenix last weekend. I thought that since I was going to be alone for four days that I might as well get out of town myself. Ever since I got my time-lapse movie gadget, I had been thinking that clouds and shadows in the Grand Canyon might be interesting subjects for time-lapse movies.

I checked the lodges in the Grand Canyon Village but they were all completely booked for that weekend.

Then I checked the hotels in Tusayan, the smallest incorporated town in Arizona, that is just to the south of the park. There were some rooms available but I didn't really want have to travel all that distance every day.

I looked into other alternatives.

Home away from home

I thought that camping might be the way to go. I figured that I might be able to spend what I'd have had to spend for a hotel room on camping gear and end up with accommodations for future outings. Jerry and I headed over to REI to see what this gear would cost.

It turns out that they rent gear. What a deal, for less than what it costs to spend a night in a hotel room 20 miles from the canyon I could rent a tent, a sleeping bag and a pad for three nights! I could see if I enjoy camping before making the full investment. I reserved the gear and a campsite.

I went camping for the first time since the road trip from hell. (Actually, I think I never spent a night in the tent on that trip. I think I always slept on the coffin at the back of the Carryall.)

We went over to REI Thursday evening to pick up the equipment.

The week before my trip the weather here at home turned wintry. Lots of rain and gloominess. That weather headed to northern Arizona.  I drove up to the Grand Canyon on Friday and for much of the drive there was rain but it quit when I left I-40 at Williams. There was hope that the weekend would be dry!

I got to the campground at around 4:00pm. I pitched the tent between the channel that drains the campground and a shallower channel that looked like rain had recently run through. I then drove to Yavapai Point with my camera.

I got my camera and intervalometer set up around 5:20. Sunset was around 5:40 but there was no sun shining. The thick clouds hid it and were dropping rain in the canyon. But there was enough light for the camera. I had it take pictures of the canyon and the rain for a half hour.

Over the weekend I made several time-lapse movies. Mostly of the heavy cloud cover. There wasn't a lot of sunshine.

Here is the movie I shot that first evening. It shows a rain shower moving through the canyon.

I didn't have the best night's sleep the first night at the campground. I think that I didn't give the self-inflating pad enough time to puff up so it wasn't the softest possible bed. And it rained. The tent kept the water out but the rain beating on the tent was a noise I wasn't used to so it kept me awake much of the time. The sleeping bag kept me warm.

Camping might be a fun way to experience nature. At least in warmer and drier weather.

Time stands still

Here it is again, the solstice. That can only mean more solorgraphs.

Not much has changed from the other two times I tried this.

These first pictures are from the paint cans on the chimney. For my first try at solorgraphy, I had the cans attached to the chimney vertically and had the pinholes centered on the cans' sides. This let me see a lot of the foreground but it chopped off much of the sun's paths towards summer.  The second time, I put little blocks on the bottoms of the cans so they were pointed a bit higher in the sky. This made it so that there was nothing captured on the roof but got more of the sun's higher passes.

This time I pointed the cans straight ahead again but I moved the pinholes higher on the cans. This got more of the sun's paths than the first try and some of the foreground that was missing from my second attempt.

The tops of the sun's paths are still missing.

See the first post for the views taken with a normal camera.

Here's the view from the Guinness can I had on the weather station's tripod. I moved the pinhole higher on the can so it got all of the sun's travels across the sky. But the beer can doesn't seem to want to capture anything but the sun and a few trees' silhouettes.

I guess this picture shows our weather pretty well. We had a very warm January. This picture shows that we had a long period of sunny weather in the early part of the year (near the bottom of the sun's travels). Then it shows we had our normal May Gray and June Gloom as the sun climbs higher.

We're finishing up our June Gloom. Now we're heading into hot weather.

One day in March I found some 3-pound coffee cans at work. I thought that if a little quart paint can got more detail than a Guinness can, maybe a big coffee can could show even more detail.

It does.

But it doesn't manage to get much height.

I have 8 by 10 inch photo paper. That doesn't wrap very far around the inside of a coffee can. So I made 7 by 17 inch sheets by stapling two overlapped sheets together and trimming the height.

Here are my pictures from coffee cans that were strapped to the weather station's tripod below the Guinness can. In the bottom picture you can see the chimney where the paint cans were hung with care. These two pictures are looking in the same directions as the first two pictures above.  They're just 15-20 feet to the north of the chimney's pictures.

The black things on the bottom corners are little magnets I used to keep the paper in place.

I might try the coffee cans one more time. If I move the pinholes I suppose I can get a little more of the sun's paths. But I'd lose the stuff on the roof and not really get much more of the sun. But I have a lot of photo paper left so there's not a lot to lose. Unless I fall off the roof. 

Summer Solstice to Winter Solstice, 2009

Six months have passed since we saw my first stab at solarography.  I took down the cameras at sunset the evening before the summer solstice, reloaded them with paper and put them back up in time to start recording some solstice-to-solstice pictures.

I made two cameras out of Guinness beer cans and two out of quart paint cans. The beer cans weren't terribly successful. The paper in both of them curled up and stopped taking their pictures. At least they got some of the sun's progress recorded.

This first picture is from a beer can that was strapped to the old clothesline pole. It isn't the full six months because I looked at it some time into the exposure and noticed that the paper had shifted over the pinhole. So I took it down and put up a second one in its place.

Here is June 20 through sometime before August 2 from the clothesline pole.

Here is a shot from the clothesline pole from August 3 till the paper curled and blocked the pinhole.

Here is the view from the weather station on the roof. Its paper curled so it didn't record much of the sun's progress. I'm really confused about how it got some of the sun early in the exposure then conked out completely for a long time then kicked in every now and then some time later. This is a mysterious picture.

I was amazed at the amount of detail that was seen in the foreground of the spring-summer pictures but was disappointed that the top part of the sun's path was cut off. When I put the cameras back on the roof for these pictures, I put the pinholes higher on the cans so they would record higher in the sky. That worked but now I have none of the roof showing. Oh, well.

Here is the view from the paint can that is facing southeast. It kind of looks like June Gloom persisted into July by the fuzzy trails in the higher passes of the sun in the mornings (on the left) but my weather station seems to say that we were gloomy only until about July 1. Maybe it's just that the edges of the pictures just don't record all that well.

And here is the view from the paint can that is facing southwest. The tree on the left is the tree on the right in the above picture.

(In case you happened to notice, I got some of my pictures' names wrong. The got the beer cans mixed up so their names are swapped.)

Four months in the can

Can almost four months have already passed? Can it be the solstice? Can you remember when this all began? Can it, Chuckbert! Can we just get to the story?

Happy Summer Solstice, 2009!

Way back on February 28, I posted a little teaser where I showed pictures of some cans I put on the roof but didn't say what they were doing there. Izzy's guess about what was going on was pretty much correct. (Maybe it wasn't a guess. Maybe she knew but left it vague so not to spoil the surprise.)

The cans were pinhole cameras. Each had some Ilford photographic paper in it and a hole in its side. After I took the pictures of the cans I removed the tape covering their pinholes and just left them. Today I went up there, put some tape over their pinholes and brought them in to "process."

The processing is very simple. I just put the paper on my scanner's glass and scanned. No chemicals! No Costco 1-hour photo! Just scanning and tweaking with image editing software.

The whole point of this exercise was to watch the sun's progress through the months. We get to see the sun rise higher in the sky as the days go by. At least when there are no clouds. We get to see May Gray and June Gloom very well.

Here is the scene that the paint can strapped to south side of the chimney screen saw:
The sun was behind clouds where there are gaps in the white stripes.

I put the holes in the middles of the cans. That ended up getting a lot of the foreground but cut off the top of the sun's arcs. In this picture you can see the new solar powered attic fan and Solatube we had installed last year.

It's interesting how the sun shows through gaps between leaves of the ash tree even when it has fully leafed out. (The bottom trails of the sun go through the tree before it got all of its leaves.)

Here's a normal camera's view of that direction (though not nearly as wide angle):

This next picture is from the can on the east side of the chimney. The sun goes through an ash tree on the left and over another ash on the right. That's the same tree on the left side of the first picture above. You can see the Solatube on the roof of the garage.

This is the normal view showing the garage roof and the left hand ash tree from above.

This is the picture taken by the Guinness can strapped to the tripod of the weather station. This picture shows our May Gray and June Gloom pretty well. The sun's trails at the top of the arc got pretty sparse. We've had a very gloomy couple of months. The sun didn't make an appearance all day today.

This picture is from a Guinness can on an angled leg of the weather station's tripod. I set it up a few weeks after the others on the Spring Equinox. It's looking higher in the sky and a bit to the west of the other Guinness can. I'm not sure why there aren't many trails in the morning side of the picture. Maybe the paper inside the can wasn't right up against the can and shaded the sun.

This is the view from the tripod. That's the ash that the sun goes over.

I've put the paint cans and a Guinness can back up there. I am taking pictures from the Summer Solstice to the Winter Solstice. That's the longest exposure that you would want to take. You don't want to have a solstice in the middle of an exposure since you'd just get the sun retracing its path as it changes direction.

These new cameras have their pinholes higher so that they'll get more of the sky and less of the ground. The sky's the point of these pictures after all. But the foreground does make them more interesting. I wonder why the Guinness cans don't show any detail on the ground. Maybe they need bigger pinholes.

I made up four other Guinness cans. I'll have to figure out where to put them.

I learned about this technique from an Astronomy Picture of the Day. It's got links to sites that explain how you, too, can make solargraphs!

Birthday Trip to Palm Desert

Today started with a shave with a razor that Jerry got for me a few weeks ago as an early birthday present. (It's taking me a while to get the hang of it. I'm down to just one nick per shave.)

Then Jerry took us to Palm Desert to do more celebrating of my birthday. That's always a fun thing to do.

On the way there we made a side trip to Idyllwild where we shopped for tchotchkes. You'll have to wait till some future Tuesday to see pictures of what we got there. We had lunch then headed to the desert floor.

We parked behind Adagio Galleries where we got the masks by Dave Sisk the last time we went up there. Julie greeted us as we came in the door and said that we were early, that the reception for Dave Sisk was at 4:00. "Oh, was that today?" I asked. We had gotten their card announcing the show but, since we don't usually make it to galleries' openings, we didn't plan the trip around the show. What luck, huh?

We went up and down El Paseo. Jerry got me some balloons at Coda Gallery to go with the one I got him (see his in the sidebar of his blog). These will go on the wall with the first one and will make that wall very festive. We haven't had the chance to put them up so you'll have to wait for pictures.

We've seen some lazy Susans at one of the shops and have always hemmed and hawed about whether to get one. This time I decided finally to do it. Here's our new lazy Susan. It's glass with copper in it.
It will make assembling our tostadas on tostada night a lot less messy. And prettier!

We went back to Adagio Galleries and had a nice visit with Dave Sisk.

We had supper at Sammy's Woodfired Pizza (mac and cheese will have to wait) then came home.

The newspaper said that Palm Desert was going to reach 105° today. According to a weather station near Indio they were spot on. It was hot.

Keep your eyes on this spot for pictures of balloons and other tchotchkes!

The saddest day

While I was searching for a souvenir for a recent post, I ran across several treasures in my souvenir boxes from my youth that, like it or not, I'm going to share with all of you.

For our first stroll down that memory lane, here is a letter to the editor of The Lookout, the Los Alamos High School newspaper, that I signed that Brian Lanter and Colleen wrote. I thought that I was going to get to help write it but they apparently didn't need (want?) my help. (They needed to use big words, some of which I still don't know, so I guess I couldn't have effectively contributed to the letter.) I don't remember whether it got printed.

The newspaper had printed a story about a recent snowfall that made the local skiers and their Snow God very happy. Colleen, Brian and I were not fond of snow and took umbrage (how's that for a good word, Colleen?) at their promotion of one (false) god over another.

So, on this saddest day of the year, the day the sun leaves our hemisphere for six painful months, here's our letter to the editor.


OK, here's a quibble. "Spalpeen" seems to be only a noun but was used as an adjective in the letter. And "morrhuol" doesn't show up in any dictionary I've found (either on my computer or on the Internet), though it is defined in the Google results. Somebody liked to show off his or her vast vocabulary.

---

Hey, did you notice the use of "there" where "their" should have been used? Boy, I'm glad I didn't have a hand in that letter!

---

Just because I had a few spare minutes, here's the letter for search engines to index (typos and all):

Dear Editor,

Actually you're not all that dear, and this is not going to be a nice letter (no, not at all nice). We, the disciples of the Sun Cult, are incensed! Why? You ask why, after what you've done to us? As an established religious cult, we stand adamantly behind our constitutional rights to equality. We therefore resent, sir, the blatant bigotry and callous treatment that have been our lot at the hands of your unworthy rag. You spalpeen miscreants, you fatuous hypocrits, have you no sense of social propriety, have you no vestige of civilized decency, have you no cognitive faculty, have you no rubber galoshes?

Three issues previous, in this moribund mouthpiece of corrupt winter promoters, you deemed it appropriate to glorify the snow god, while failing utterly to extend the Sun God those aggrandizements and encomia due so august and resplendent a diety.

What insensate gawks you must be, to allow the tramontane vagaries of vehement vituperators to violate the vestal virginity of verisimilar verbalization. Only the willing pawn of the basiliskine juggernaut of unbridled press would have refused to publish our supplicatory epistle, in which we requested equal representation.

Therefore stand warned that our glorious leader has revealed unto us his divine design for the demise of the snow god and the subjugation of his followers. Those who have slighted the Sun God to curry favor with the snow god shall be hoisted by there own petard. Resistors will be calcined by his refulgent wrath as they writhe in the mucilaginous morrhuol of moral decay.

Be it also know that the last true snow melted before the presence of our lord on Sunday, March 4. Any subsequent appearance of “snow” is but an illusion, drawn up by the ignoble snow god to tempt the followers of the True Lord.

For as it is written in the Book of Truth: “WE LIKE TO EAT (Oh yes, we do), BUT MOSTLY WE LIKE TO GET VENGEANCE!”

Yours Truly,

It was a dark and stormy night

We had a mostly uneventful trip home. We packed up the car and stopped at the Coffee Booth on our way out of town for our morning fix. We saw a white car in Otowi Station's parking lot but it wasn't Sophie so we didn't stop. We drank our coffee and, as a result, had to stop at the McDonald's in Bernalillo. We filled up with gas in Albuquerque, ate lunch at Taco Bell in Grants, stopped at various rest areas, filled up with gas in Flagstaff and continued west.

The monsoon season apparently officially started June 15. It had been quiet so far according to this story (that you might have to register to read...besides you who live in monsoon region probably already knew that). I'd say it came roaring to life yesterday. We drove through some rain after we left Flagstaff and it was clearing up as we approached Kingman. There was some interesting looking weather to the north of town when we arrived. I thought it might be foggieness coming from rain evaporating from the desert. It turned out to be dust.

We had to get our afternoon coffee so we drove through town and found a Starbucks. While we were waiting for our coffees, the wind started blowing. Hard. The mat inside the door was flapping in the wind even though the door was closed. The door sang a mournful tune.

Then the rain came. They got an inch and a quarter in this storm and most of that probably fell (rather blew by...it was horizontal) while we drank our coffee. When it let up a bit we drove a few blocks and had sandwiches at a Subway.

The rain had ended by the time we finished eating. So we got back in the car and kept going.

The rain came back. It was extremely heavy for hours. We had to stop at a rest area because we needed to rest and get fresh air. We got quite wet running for the shelter. We waited for the rain to let up again then continued our journey.

We stopped at another rest area because the rain was so heavy we could hardly see. But that time we didn't take advantage of the services. We would have been completely drenched in about three seconds.

The rain continued, very heavy much of the time and sometimes it was a normal pitter-patter, almost all the way to Barstow.

The most amazing part of this storm wasn't the rain. It was the lightning. We had never seen so much lightning. It was constant, close, and was everywhere from horizon to horizon. We could see the scenery even though the sun had set long before. Who needs headlights when you have so much lightning?

We made it to Barstow and trusty Motel 6 had left a light on. They were down to smoking rooms. And it turned out that their air conditioning wasn't working. I slept fine but poor Jerry didn't.

We hit the road at 6:00 and got home by 10:00 after a stop at Tom's Farms and the post office. I got a jury summons!

It's a dry heat

We're moving out of our June Gloom and it's getting hot. Really hot. Yesterday, my weather station reported that we got up to 106.2°F/41.2°C. At least the humidity was down to 10% so we could get some cooling effect from our sweat evaporating.

The forecast for today says that it will be a bit cooler than yesterday. One degree cooler. And how often do they get that right?

If we're lucky, you can keep track of the weather here with the Weather Underground "sticker" of my weather station that I have put back on my sidebar.

Lately the sticker has been disabled now and then. It's been showing "NaN" or no value for the information. This is apparently because my Davis Vantage Pro Plus weather station has been sending bad data. The humidity sensor has gone wacko on me. Its measurements have been very erratic (though through this heat it has settled down and looks good). Bad data gets your station removed from their web site. I've ordered a new humidity sensor so I hope the station is no longer banned. I hope it gets here on Monday. If my sticker goes dead you can always check the map of the area to see what's going on. (You might have to zoom in to see my station on the map. If it hasn't been banned.)

Tangentially related to weather, here is a picture of our coral tree.

I'm not sure what species of coral tree it is. It's a miniature variety. It is supposed to be pruned to be kept small but we don't have to do any pruning. Except to cut off the dead stuff. Each year it freezes and dies down to the ground. So it gets severely pruned by the weather each year. But it grows back and blooms.

We're going down to San Diego today. It's much cooler closer to the coast so we might not swelter until we get home.

Good grief! It's already 91° and it's only 9:15.

---

Update: At 1:02PM it was 107.7°. I'm glad we missed it.

Baby, it's cold outside!

I had to replace the water in the birds' ice skating rink this morning.



I'm sure most of you won't sympathize with me but this is Southern California. It's not supposed to get this cold.